Saturday 9th

Life is strange. Seven weeks today I'll be attending the private view in Tokyo of my exhibition with Tamba potter, Motoyasu Hirayama. Right at the moment, the prospect is absolutely terrifying and I spend most of my time fretting and thinking it's completely impossible. There are moments in the day when I get a brief burst of self belief that enables me to keep going. I need a hundred pots. That may not seem like a lot, but I don't want to send a single bad piece, so I'll have to make and fire many more to provide a good body of work to select from.

I've been making bowls today, which in itself provides a challenge. Bowls and dishes, flat stuff with lots of inside area that needs decorating - eek. If only I could send just jugs, I'd be able to do this so much easier. It's a good thing I suppose, I've been talking about making a whole kiln load of bowls and dishes for ages, but always end up making jugs and more jugs, so this is stretching me and once I have a body of work made, I'll know enough about it, to fulfill what has until now been a shortfall in my range of production.

I don't often turn foot rings on pots, as the pots that I admire most, the ones made in the old English country potteries, didn't have foot rings. I've done a few on these dishes., but I don't want to get in to too much of that, so I'm going to try and design my range in a much more 'English' manner.

Another bowl and more, smaller, shallow dishes.

This sight will send a good few people crazy. This is the way I like my wheel. I want to be in there, in the mud, none of that clean plastic, yuck, gimme the mud every time, all the time, yeah yeah yeah.

I've been playing around a bit today with working in to the clay when wet. These notches will make a bit more sense when the slip is over them. After all that time spent recently, sticking little bits of clay on to my pots, this body of work is going to be decorated by contrast, in a much sloppier, slippier and spontaneous manner. No doubt  I'll end up with some dodgy pots, as it's impossible to get the slip or the marks in the right place every time, so there's a lot of getting it wrong before getting it right, but hopefully there will be enough good ones to select from by the time I've done them all - and there will probably be a good seconds sale too at some stage in the future.

Notches.

I'm still making pots for the UK market as well as the pieces for Japan. I have to try to keep money coming in. There's a huge amount of outlay required for the Japan show, goodness knows what it'll cost to send. This is a 7lb jug which will be getting the dribbly slip treatment tomorrow. It's too big to send, so will go to a gallery back home if it comes out well. I also want to make some more work for saleroom on my website .

I keep getting myself in a right old stress with all this, but in the few moments of the day when I can see sense, I can recognize that I have pots at every stage of production and that means that I must have a busy and creative workshop. However, in the main, I see empty shelves and a huge task ahead. I need to keep the pressure on and keep my head engaged even though it wants to stray off into la la land all the time.

Tomorrow I'll be starting work at 7.30 am. Marky Mark's coming to join me and we'll put in a good day's graft and I'll try and get some of these pots finished and decorated.

Happy weekend all.