Cloth and Clay

Coming back into fashion

2012-01-24T09:14:00.000Z

Don't hold your breath. In the grand scheme of things I don't move quickly, but I'm coming back into fashion.

It all began nearly forty years ago at college. I won't write about how I got there just now but I should say that for the first three years our main subject was called "Dress and Textiles" with the emphasis on Dress. It took me about 18 months to cotton on to what was required. I thought I just had to demonstrate good dressmaking skills whereas what was really needed was innovation.

The top designers of the day were people like... er ..oh yes, Bill Gibb and ... er .... oh dear. I really can't remember any more. Because I only really noticed Zandra Rhodes. And when I suddenly understood that each design brief was an invitation to do exactly as we wanted, I took off.

This assignment was to design and make an outfit based on an ethnic source. I printed the design (based on old Chinese landscape paintings) on satin and the top had a chinese-style jacket openening with rouleau loops and covered buttons, all heavily influenced by Zandra Rhodes.

Here's another, possibly my favourite and I think perhaps the first one I designed after realising you could make what was in your head, no matter whether anyone had seen anything like it before.

In case you're wondering, the idea came from a photograph of a green and salmon-pink conch shell, a little like this one, only with bottle green on the widest parts of the shell:

See? No? Oh, well, turn the shell 90 degrees anti-clockwise. There you have it. The salmon-pink border is the muslin underdress, plain salmon-pink. The cheesecloth tabard is made of one huge piece of fabric, (well, two, one back and one front) printed and then smocked over the whole bodice to create those little lines you see on the shell.

I should mention that when I say printed, what I actually did was make card masks which I pinned to the plain white fabric. I then hung the lengths on the wall in the print room, mixed my dyes and applied to yards and yards (well, they were all yards then, not a metre in sight) using only a spray diffuser. Luckily I was a clarinet player and knew about breathing. It was impressive, none the less.

So there we were, immersed in fashion for two or three years. When I say fashion, I do of course mean the sort of things worn on catwalks and shown in Vogue, not what the woman-in-the-street was wearing. I did wear my outfits, though, at parties. I'm sure many of the others on my course continued to be influenced by and to some extent work in the world of fashion. By the time we had to specialise in our fourth (degree) year, though, I had become more interested in our 'second' subject of textiles: construction, dyeing and embellishment, and I drifted away from fashion completely.

Now, I'm coming back into fashion. Where the development of my work and business is concerned, though, I do play a very long game indeed. And I'm talking very small scale.

I'm not known as the Purple Potter for nothing - I do wear a lot of purple, with red, pink and couple of other colours thrown in for variety. There are many colours I don't wear and some I really can't as anything remotely green tinged does hideous things to my skin. I do love all colours, though, and enjoy seeing other people wearing them, so I'm going to make silk painted scarves. I bought some scarves to try about three years ago, last summer I decided to get on with it and last week I made my first scarf. I'll do a second and possibly a third this week, just to establish what I want to do and what materials I might need to order and then I'll be putting the project aside until later in the year. As I said, the long game.

There are other ideas bubbling away in there, though. Earrings and brooches to go with the scarves. Friendly plastic. I'll say no more for the moment, but watch this space. Eventually.

Magazine prescriptions

2012-01-17T16:39:00.002Z

I've not been quite well. Most of my general malaise has been caused by antibiotics, which I finished yesterday. This afternoon I've been womanfully resisting going to bed for a sleep because I Must Be Better. Well, I am, enough.

So yesterday and today I finished my filing. Some of this filing goes back about 9 months because last time I did it there remained a few categories unfiled which went back into the filing tray. But now it's finished.

So far today I have been fairly productive: a useful Team Viewer session with Dad, helping him create some labels, researching suppliers of silk dupion for my next batch of textile canvasses, and one or two other desk jobs. However, steam having more or less run out, I didn't feel well enough to do anything else remotely demanding so I thought I might take on the Magazine Mountain.

Some months ago I resolved to reduce the pile of magazines waiting to be read by trying to read one per day until the mountain became a foothill. (I have other piles of magazines - those needing filing in order, those needing culling for recipes or pictures, etc. This pile is magazines I receive on subscription and is the Magazine Mountain.) My resolve didn't last, though and the Mountain has achieved new heights.

Mum buys me Country Living on subscription. I've been getting this magazine one way or another since it first came out, which I think must have been in the early eighties. It used to be much more about the sort of life I led or would have liked to. These days not so much but it still has the sort of recipes and food articles I like and pictures of homes I'd like to live in if someone would like to give me the million pounds or so required to buy one. I enjoy the magazine, though. As much as anything, I enjoy the way the various section editors use colour and often harvest photos of things just to remind myself of colour combinations. There are interesting bits and pieces to read, too. I keep some of the back copies so that if my parents come and visit there are some for Mum to read, but as they don't visit as often as they used to there is less need for this.

Country Living is issued monthly and I probably read most issues before the next one arrives. They then go in the pile, for Mum to read when she visits or, if older, for cannibalisation by me before recycling.

I've written about Crafts magazine on this blog before. In brief (well I'll try, but you know me) - I've subscribed to Crafts almost since its beginning. I'm missing about 5 issues from the first 18 months but other than that have every issue published. It's rarely about anything resembling the sort of work I do and yet I still find it occasionally inspirational and always at least pleasing to look through. Back copies are now stored under and behind a table in my attic studio. They're still available if I crawl under the table. There's a general principle of moving copies to "back copies" status at the end of a calendar year or sooner if I've finished reading them.

Crafts is published bi-monthly. I rarely read it straight away and it became something of a casualty during the Pear-shaped Year.

Ceramic Review is also a bi-monthly magazine. I probably find it less inspirational than Crafts because my ceramics work is slow to change and progress. Making, as I do, primarily tableware for everyday use, for the most part I'm content to maintain (or during and after the Pear-shaped Year try to catch up with) stock levels of the things that people always want while occasionally doing something a little different just for variety. Some of the articles in Ceramic Review are very informative, though, because even if they are about processes or materials or styles not relevant to my work, some of the information or ideas are transferrable.

A year or so ago I contemplated going through all the back issues of Ceramic review, removing and filing all the articles I thought would be of future interest and recycling the rest. This idea was met with such horror by John West of Lansdown Pottery, that I just couldn't go through with it. So back copies of Ceramic Review are filed on a shelf in the study, behind the table (so you have to pull the table out to access them, but not exactly underneath.) The problem with this is that they have filled up the available space and are now being stacked flat on top of the row. Not ideal and eventually, (soon?) this space, too, will be filled. And what will I do then?

The Magazine Mountain lives just underneath the calendar on my desk. Well, that's where it started out. As the Pear-shaped Year and it's only slightly less busy following friend progressed, the MM grew so that this morning I noticed it completely covered the calendar, which has therefore to be taken down to be consulted. This Will Not Do.

I enjoy using the malapropism of magazines on prescription anyway, but allofasudden it struck me - is that what these magazines have become, a prescription? Something that is good for me so I order it, pay for it and bring it in to my home with the best of intentions but rather less conviction. Do I get Crafts and Ceramic Review because they're professionally Good For Me or because I really want them?

I'll fess up. I dismantled the MM and distributed it into the piles of three publications. There were 11 copies of Country Living, all at least partially read and most just waiting to have pics cut out. It's less than a year's worth, anyway. Remember, Crafts and Ceramic Review are bi-monthly. Of each of these, there were 18 copies, that's THREE YEARS' worth! And, (my name is Jane and I'm a magazine non-reader) there were 16 publications that had not even been taken out of their polythene wrappings.

So - what to do? Catch up with my reading, file and promise to read all magazines on receipt? Cancel one or more subscriptions? Continue, but start marmelising the back issues into lever arch files so the rest can be recycled? (Sorry, John.)

Suggestions on a postcard.

Ruby Thomas' Lemonade

2012-01-02T17:00:00.000Z

It's been a while since I wrote a foodie post for this blog, so it's overdue.

I like to make jams, pickles etc as Christmas presents but for one reason or another it wasn't a jam-making sort of year so I was looking for some substitutes. I made a rather tasty grapefruit marmelade (not nearly enough left for us so I may have to make some more. I also decided to make a batch of Ruby Thomas' Lemonade. I used to make this often but had completely lost my copy of the recipe. I had to seek help from The Oracle (also known as my mother) and fortunately she still had the original.

Ruby Thomas was a friend of my maternal grandmother's when she was out in India. My grandfather (well, both of them, actually) was in the army and they came back to the UK on leave for a few months only to be prevented from returning by the outbreak of war, so this recipe dates back to the 1930s. Now, we think of lemonade as a fizzy drink but this is in the old tradition of home-made lemonade that you see people in old movies drinking in hot weather (or indeed permanently hot places like the southern states of America), so it's more of a cordial. I've found it very good made with hot water if you want a winter pick-me-up. I daresay you could put honey in it or something stronger if you wanted it for a cold remedy.

As I said, I haven't made this for many years; I think I stopped because it's made from sugar. I haven't ever changed my eating habits much but I do drink sugar-free when I can. I wasn't sure I could even get the ingredients any more but the Epsom Salts were available from Boots and the acids from our local wine-making shop. A word of warning - when I read the Epsom Salts tub I found that they should not be consumed by pregnant women. It says breastfeeding women too but we checked with the maternity hospital who said there was no problem after the birth.

Ruby Thomas' Lemonade

INGREDIENTS:

6 lemons
3 lbs granulated sugar
2 oz Epsom Salts
2 oz citric acid
1 oz tartaric acid

A large mixing bowl. If you are fortunate like I am, your mother will have offered you one of her two Mason Cash bowls when she downsized. If not, improvise. Use more than one bowl if necessary.

METHOD:

In a large mixing bowl, mix sugar, grated lemon rinds, acids and salts.

Add the juice of the lemons and stir.

Pour in 4-5 pints boiling water, depending on how much you can fit in your mixing bowl!

Stir and leave to cool. Strain if necessary then pour into bottles, preferably sterilised as you would sterilise jars for jam.

Should make about 5 large bottles. The lemonade will keep a month or two in the bottles but once opened, keep in the fridge where it should keep for a couple of weeks.

To use, dilute with water to taste, probably 1 part lemonade to 4 or 5 parts water.

Pretty things

2011-12-08T15:15:00.001Z

I'm not usually aiming for pretty, but it just seems the right word for my newest pottery designs, using a variety of coloured and precious metal lustres. These red and amber lizards are my favourites. They're just how I hoped they would look. I've made some wallhangings in these sorts of colours but they're never fast to sell so possibly other people don't go for these colours in the same way, but for me the whole red/pink/orange spectrum is delicious when you add gold.

I also tried a variety of designs on mugs. As well as the different coloured lustres I've started using, there were some underglaze colours I experimented with.

Some were more successful than others. The reddish spots and stars are bluish in some lights, so not quite as bizarre as they may look at first.

And finally, I do also very much like this combination, which uses copper lustre rather than gold or platinum.

There's much more time spent painting these so they'll be more expensive than others of the same size, but I hope people will think they're worth it. I'm really looking forward to doing some more next year.

Everybody liked this lizard

2011-11-20T11:30:00.000Z

... and yesterday someone decided to buy him. He'd been attracting admirers for a couple of months. At every market he would be the pot that most people stopped at. My "beastly dishes" are not for everyone: they're quite expensive because of the work of sculpting the lizard then painting in slip before firing and finally painting the lustres and the extra cost of another firing. Also, I think people feel afraid to use them, although I always stress that they are made to be used.

By coincidence, yesterday I also unpacked a lustre firing in which were some new items inspired by this chap. I love the carmine lustre which I used for the spots and they just made such a hit with the other colours. It was the first time I'd used it, so it was a bit of a gamble, but it paid off. Inspired by the beastly pot and the attention he'd attracted, therefore, I decided to use the same theme to decorate some other pots and just as the first chap went to a new home, I unpacked the first examples of the new "range". I say range in inverted commas because I'm not planning to make lots of the same things in this design. I'll make some as I feel like it but I also plan to experiment with different combinations of lustres and designs within the same sort of theme. But here are the first:

New venture

2011-10-23T12:16:00.002+01:00

A long time ago I promised to write about the new venture I'd been busy creating and the image above (which is now reproduced as postcards amongst other things) explains all.

Well, perhaps not all.

When Gloucestershire Arts and Crafts Centre moved from its first location to a new shop, I decided not to move with it. This was a business decision: Gloucester isn't and never has been a place where people buy a lot of domestic pottery. When there was a Made In Gloucestershire shop in Westgate St. potters who were used to selling elsewhere in Gloucestershire found that their sales were much less frequent in Gloucester. For me Made In Gloucestershire worked quite well because I sold a lot of greetings cards there. At Gloucestershire Arts and Crafts Centre this didn't happen because we had a large number of very good card makers. One in particular, whose beautiful cards I would have bought all the time if I didn't make my own, sold cards daily and the remainder of greetings card sales were shared out between the rest of us. Pot sales happened, but not frequently enough and the sales I made were uneconomic when set against the time spent working in the shop and other conditions of membership. So I said goodbye.

In spite of this being a good business decision and a good life decision to be able to spend more time on making work, I was very sad about leaving GACC. I really enjoyed being part of a large group of like-minded souls and I particularly enjoyed creating and maintaining the website. The new shop is much smaller and I wasn't alone in deciding not to continue so that meant a large number of us no longer in the network.

So Crafts In Gloucestershire was born. I had the idea way back in the summer and started setting it up at the beginning of September. The website has been live for about a month and I've sent out two newsletters. Membership is growing slowly; a large part of this is that arty types are notorious for not getting round to admin work and although I write the web pages, makers need to write their own text and sort out which pictures they'd like to use and this is another task falling just when most of us are busy making extra stock to have plenty for Christmas sales. So, it will grow slowly but, I think, surely.

Crafts In Gloucestershire is an online directory. It lists makers, teachers and events which fall into the arts and crafts category. It's also a network, which means that event organisers can send us notice of craft fairs and the like, which will be passed on to all the members. Members can contact each other, perhaps to suggest a group exhibition, or to ask for support and ideas. I hope when there are enough of us we might have the odd social get-together.

As well as a page with pictures and info, makers also may have their products or events included in an occasional newsletter or mentioned on Twitter or Facebook.

I'm really rather pleased with the whole project. I've really enjoyed designing the logos, website and publicity documents and I think I've created something which is really good value for the members.

Well, it wasn't supposed to be a sales pitch, though I suppose it might have turned out that way. I wanted to write about it, though, because I do see it as part of my work and as such it had been occupying my mind for a while. Setting up the website was quite time-consuming but now it's done, adding entries is not. So far I've enjoyed planning and creating the newsletters and I must admit to being a bit of a Twitter and Facebook fan so posting there is no hardship either.

You'll have noticed the web address above, but here's a link to make it easy:

Crafts In Gloucestershire

and while you're at it, would you like to receive the newsletter? Just email email craftsinglos@gmail.com and ask for a newsletter and it will soon be winging its way to your inbox.

New season

2011-10-19T17:35:00.002+01:00

Even though I haven't done any school-based teaching for about four years now, Essence of Autumn Term still hovers around my life and I view September/October time as an opportunity for a new start. At the market I often have a half-price sale in September, which although I don't advertise it as such, always figures in my mind as an end-of-season sale. I'm not sure they have those any more. It may be that the end of season sale is a thing of ancient history. I'm not sixty yet, but I've already begun to notice that I know about things that actually are history to a couple of generations of people. I suspect, though, that some of my readers are of the same generation as I am and will relate to the concept of the end of season sale.

Last week, though, was the start of the new season as far as my market appearances go, and at last the much heralded banner had its first outing, together with a new tablecloth and stall layout. I'm very pleased with the result.

The only minor problem is with the banner. It's perfect for a market stall, but for an indoor event it will be too tall. The tables tend to be much nearer the ground than the market stalls. I was also wondering how I would manage to attach the thing to a table. Solution: I'm going to get a smaller banner made, which will attach to my tablecloths with velcro.

Actually, I'd better get a move on. I need this all ready for 29th October.

Book Review - "Room"

2011-09-18T21:12:00.000+01:00

I thought I had better redress the balance after my review of The Gargoyle and give an example of a book which is packed with feeling from start to finish and luckily the very next book I read was such a book.

I confess that after The Gargoyle my faith in my own ability to choose a good book had been rather damaged, so it was with a little trepidation that I began Room by Emma Donoghue. I needn't have worried. I read about forty pages in bed one night and then consumed the rest of the book the following day. This is what books should be like, in my view. I want the book to become more important than the rest of my life so that I can do nothing else until it is finished.

The first time I remember this happening very clearly was during my "A" level year, when I started reading Lord Of The Rings. I got to a certain point in the book and realised that it was probably more productive to just abandon my studies completely until I had finished reading it than snatch hours here or there and spend the rest of the time between worrying that I wasn't studying enough and missing the book. Since then it's been the benchmark of a really good book that it can grab me that way.

So, back to Room. This may not be in my top ten all time books, but it's up pretty high. I remember choosing it because from the blurb, I thought it was a great "what if" plot. I 've always been fascinated by human psychology and was looking forward to exploring the effects of an extremely unusual situation on the development of the central character, a five-year-old child. What I wasn't expecting was to experience so much of what his mother feels as well, the more powerfully because those feelings are never described. Through Jack's account of events we are also in touch with Ma's experience of them. Without being over-sentimental, the story was nevertheless very moving.

* * * * * *

I may not write any more book reviews here. (Feedback on whether I should would be appreciated.) As I think I've indicated, I enjoy most books I read and as I found it much, much more difficult to write about this enjoyable book than I did about the one I hated, the omens are not good.

Book Review - "The Gargoyle"

2011-09-12T12:56:00.000+01:00

I haven't written about books here before but I've been prompted to start because of The Gargoyle.

I don't know why I bought this book. A couple of months ago I was buying something else on Amazon and decided to treat myself to a couple of novels. I was thinking ahead to having some holiday time and had just paid some cheques into my account and I decided I could probably afford it so long as I got on with it and spent the money on books before I noticed it was needed for something else. The book may have been recommended to me by a friend but I'm beginning to doubt that. Perhaps I just liked the sound of it and it was part of a "Buy all three for a knock-down price" package.

I've been gradually getting back into reading this year. Finding the odd time to pick up a book again. It's part of getting back a life but it's something I've found difficulty finding time for in the last six or seven years, to be honest. As always, reading has been more concentrated into holiday time than any other time but I've mentioned that holiday time has been rather sparse round here so reading has more or less fallen by the wayside for some years.

So then The Gargoyle by Andrew Davidson fell into my lap.

The blurb on the back uses words like "engrossing, spectacularly imaginative, extraordinary, romance". "The pages almost turn themselves." (What?!) I think it's supposed, amongst other things, to be about the ultimate quality of love. Or possibly the quality of ultimate love.

The descriptions are thorough. Emotions of many kinds are described at great length, with detail, embellished by all the sorts of things you expect in magical realism, which should have been a warning to me as I'm not really a fan.

I've spent the morning, the first of my holiday, finishing the book. I always want to get to the end, to find out what's going to happen and in that respect this book was no different. I like to tie up loose ends. Follow the threads that start early on in the book and find out where they lead. Well, I did that.

But I really, really disliked the book. And this is very rare for me. I'll read all kinds of rubbish just to find out what happens to people.

Over the past few weeks I've been wondering what it was that I was disliking but this morning it has become clear. I didn't care about anything or anyone in the book. I felt nothing except boredom. All that excessive description but nothing moved me. Passion was written about but seemed to me to be entirely absent in itself. It really felt more like an academic exercise, proof that it could be done. I think a book should make me feel something, anything. Writing is an art form and what's the point of any art form if it raises no reaction in the viewer?

It reminds me of a painter I knew. He was well thought of. Well, he was certainly well thought of by himself. Had been to art college, studied properly and poured scorn on anyone calling themselves an artist who hadn't had that proper training. He could execute a picture very well, no doubt about that. When I looked at his pictures, though, I always thought, "Why?" "What did you feel that prompted you to paint this picture?" or even "What am I supposed to feel when I look at this picture?"

The Gargoyle is rather the same. Yes, it's possibly clever, ties in all kinds of different layers of things which have been well researched. It may even be well written.

But why?

So, what's next?

2011-09-11T18:05:00.000+01:00

What's next? I'm just embarking on two weeks' holiday. I'm not going anywhere. I'm just not going to be working. I don't think I've had a holiday for at least two years.

I would say that I can't believe we're approaching the middle of September, but of course I can. I know some of the things I did during the summer and even during the last six weeks or so since I last wrote here.An example of which is shown above. The vegetable plot has been a success so far this year. This particular day (Wednesday last week) was the best crop of beans ever but there have been many good days. If bored with beans we can eat courgettes (can't everyone!) or swede. We had carrots when they needed thinning but I'm letting them get a bit bigger now. Spinach looks as if it will get going soon. Sprouts and purple sprouting plants are beginning to look established. And finally, only a few months late, I planted out my leeks. I've no idea if the leek moth still considers it to be summer and is therefore still on the prowl for leeks but I'm not taking chances and have covered the whole bed in agricultural fleece. It's said to be the only way to keep the buggers off, so we'll see if it works. I do miss a good crop of home-grown leeks.

So, that's some of what I've been doing. I've also been making pots, getting back into dog-walking (sometimes) and better quality cooking, and working at and for Gloucestershire Arts and Crafts Centre, of which I've written previously.

The centre has now closed at its previous location. It's moving to a smaller and more manageable premises in a better spot for footfall, hopefully, but I am not moving with it. Gloucester has never been a great place to sell pottery and if I'd had my sensible head on at all I wouldn't have let myself be persuaded to join the centre at all, let alone have ended up doing as much work for it as I did. Don't get me wrong - it was a great place and we achieved a remarkable amount there, and I'm proud to have been part of the team that did that. But it wasn't good for me personally. Too much work for very little reward in terms of sales.

The best thing about being involved at the centre, though, was getting to know a whole bunch of arty people that I didn't know already. There were some people I did know from previous connections but over the eighteen months but I also met many new friends and really enjoyed being part of a group. I'll miss that, and that has prompted me to start a new venture .... no, I think I'll save that for another time.

So what's next is that with the extra time I'll be gaining by not working at and for the centre, I'm determined to catch up with the backlog of pottery production. I've also got ideas for new embroidered canvasses. I want to start a new silk-painting project, again that will have to wait for another time before I disclose the secret. When I've time, I've got some great ideas for a small range of table linen to complement my pottery, too.

What's that you say? Holiday? Not working? Ah yes. It's an odd feeling.

I think I'm going to like it, though.

A tomato conundrum

2011-07-27T15:50:00.000+01:00

Anyone kind enough to follow this blog may be forgiven for wondering whether, after all that, I actually grew anything in my fabulous new greenhouse. Well, yes. I've started. I don't expect to use it to its full potential until retirement or at least semi-retirement but once we knew we were staying here for the summer, I set about sowing my usual quantities of tomatoes.

I usually grow three varieties:

Sungold is a cherry tomato that ripens to a glowing orange colour and is the sweetest tomato I have ever tasted. As such, I suppose it might not be to everyone's taste, but we both love them and can happily eat them like sweets. The plants grow like stink (how nice to be able to use that possibly antiquated but punchy little phrase) so I plant them at the front of the tomato area where the roof is of course higher. In the old greenhouse they grew further and I used to have them trained along the cross-pieces but this greenhouse has a higher roof so I don't know if they'll grow quite so tall.

I then grow two other varieties, a standard tomato and a plum tomato. These I choose from the wondrous variety offered by Franchi (Seeds of Italy) whose seeds, I may have mentioned before, are always of excellent quality and arrive in plenteous quantities too. I can't remember which two varieties I have this year. It's not relevant to the conundrum.

So, I have 26 tomato plants arranged in two rows of thirteen. Starting one variety from the back left and Sungold from the front left and then the third variety filling up the end section front and back. There are eight of the back row plants and ten Sungold in front.

The plants were all potted up in one session. I started with a stack of pots and an open bag of compost. When the bag ran out (halfway through potting up one variety) I opened another. After they were all potted up in three little groups I arranged the plants as described above. Patience, patience, there is a point to these tedious details.

For a few weeks I got on with watering with a watering can. When I remembered to water I watered the whole lot, starting at one end and doing front/back, front/back until the watering can was empty and then refilling and continuing. Usually two cans full did it, occasionally the last two plants had to start a third.

So you see, the way the plants have been raised and treated (identically), there seems to be no logical explanation why the eight on the left (some of variety A and some of variety B) are dark green and healthy looking and the eighteen on the right (some each of varieties A, B and C) pale and slightly sickly looking. The only difference is that the eight on the left are standing between the legs of a new staging frame while those on the right are between the legs of the old staging frame.

I'm flummoxed.

Explanations and, even more so, suggestions about a remedy if one is available and would be beneficial, gratefully received.

Branding - part 3

2011-07-14T17:07:00.000+01:00

And here we have rather more of the finished product. Cloth and Clay with the irises (from part of my large Irises canvas) plus now my tagline and some photos of pots.

I can't remember exactly when I thought of the tagline "handmade products that make you smile" but it was sometime between writing my "real deal" artist's statement and this spring. The artist's statement has gone down well with customers and other artists alike and this tells me I'm on the right track that being straightforward, honest and not too modest about your own work is a Good Thing. I've been describing my pottery as cheery and rustic for quite a while, because I genuinely think that's what it's like. If you don't like cheery or rustic you really aren't going to want my pots. It's part of what makes them suitable for everyday tableware. This led onto the tagline because, finally, I'm just going by the reactions on people's faces when they look at my work, whether they end up buying any or not. Generally, they smile.

This is very gratifying. Of course, sales are important if that's how you make your living, but for me it's equally important that I can see that the work brings people pleasure. I may have mentioned before that I don't go along with the generally British view that you shouldn't express high opinions about yourself or what you do. For goodness' sake, I've spent enough of my life finding things I didn't think I was good at - when I think I am good at something I'm jolly well going to say so! And I'm good at making pots, textile art and cards that make people smile. With any luck, even the tagline itself will have that effect.

Eventually I hope to redesign my website in line with the new look. I'm thinking that by October I may have a new look for my Farmers' Market stall, following my customary "end of season" sale there in September. However, I've already launched the new look for small events with the first one last Sunday at the Wearable Art Painswick festival. There were craft stalls outside, which I would have liked but they were taken by the time I applied, and a large number inside the Painswick Centre. As is usual with craft shows, each exhibitor gets one table, generally about 6' x 2'6", and I've rarely done these sort of events because it's difficult to display much pottery on a small space. Eventually, however, I've become the proud owner of a folding bookcase, which I've been on the lookout for for a few years, and so Painswick was a trial run of my new craft show display.

The hall was fairly well packed with stalls and I was in the centre section so behind me were the backs of other stalls and then the fronts of those against the far wall. These being rather distracting in my photo, I've blanked them out. No offence to any of the other stallholders!

I think it worked pretty well. A friend described the display as "fresh", which I like. I'm hoping it's also girly enough to fit in with the trend for "pamper evenings" as they seem to be very popular at the moment and I'd like to see whether people consider treating themselves to a new mug or dish to be pampering.

The Cloth and Clay and colour scheme will be, for the time being, permanent fixtures, and I'll use different words and possibly pictures according to occasion and use.

There. Thats' the branding theory written about for the time being. Now all I have to do is finish the practical!

Branding - part 2

2011-07-13T10:07:00.000+01:00

So, as I said, I'm re-branding. And this logo is at the centre.

A number of factors have been milling about in what passes for my mind and have eventually come together to produce the final result

Back in 1999 I started subscribing to UMRA , the newsgroup for the sort of people who might listen to The Archers. It's an astonishingly friendly group and back then there was an annual BBQ which we would travel to from all over the country. Following the 1999 BBQ, Michele was explaining to her partner "which one was Jane?" and answered "The potter in the purple socks." And so I became The Potter in the Purple Socks and eventually just The Purple Potter. Indeed, to this day you can follow PurplePotter on Twitter if you've a mind to. No, I'm not digressing, really I'm not. Here's the point - if I'm going to be the Purple Potter I might as well go for it and emphasise that I'm the Purple Potter. Why not go for a purplish theme rather than a bluish one? My pottery display has always been on white boards and plinths and dark blue cloths. It has always worked well with the range of glazes I use. For the market in particular, you don't want anything too pale as it will get grubby quite quickly in outside events. But part of the rebranding involves a gradual changing of colour scheme towards purple and its friends lilac, mauve, fuchsia, etc.

Another theme in the background lately has been what the market has been doing at the moment. I mean the market for handmade goods, not the Farmers Market. What I've been observing is a trend towards "Crafting" and "Crafters". I have to be honest, there are aspects of this that I find annoying. Crafting seems to have come to the UK from the USA and is about a new-found love of being practical and making things, mostly as a hobby and often from kits or pre-made components. I've no argument with this per se. As a teenager, it was just the sort of thing I used to enjoy. The problem arises when Crafters start selling the things they've made. If you are good with your hands and enjoy making things as a hobby, you have a completely different approach to selling. "Oh, I couldn't sell them for what they've cost me to make!" is a frequent reason given for very low prices. So when you put hobby crafters and their low prices next to professional craftspeople who depend on their craft to make their living, those of us who need to charge a fair rate (e.g. I aim for the minimum wage but often earn much less) look as if we're charging too high.

One positive thing the Crafting movement has done is to contribute to the reverse in trend back towards practical skills being a Good Thing. When I started teaching in the late 70s, practical skills were popular and they were given an important place in education. We certainly taught the theory behind the skills so that pupils learned why they were doing things but everyone had a chance to learn how to actually make things. After I left teaching in schools things began to deteriorate - no, no, I'm not suggesting cause and effect here! I was just lucky to get out when I did. By the time I was supporting youngsters having problems in school I was able to see that what we had thought of as craft subjects had become design subjects. The emphasis was on designing products, designing packaging and designing marketing. A small amount of time was spent on making some products. I may be exaggerating, but that was what I observed through the work of the children I was supporting. This is now thought of as an old-fashioned view, I believe. Others I trained with would possibly see me as out of touch. I'm sticking to my guns, though. I think it's great that young people should be aware of what goes into producing things and selling them but you need the product too and most skills take practice rather than occasional attempts. I don't watch The Apprentice very often but have read about the Biscuit Episode. For those not bothered about reading more, basically one team created a brilliant brand (aha! Is Jane returning to her theme at last?) but the biscuit inside the box was "rubbish". That team lost. Too right! I'm sorry for the generation that has grown up without practical skills but it's not too late for them to learn.

Well, do you know, I think that's probably enough for today. It turns out that Branding is a topic that will take more than two parts to explore. Next time - more about what my brand is about.

Branding - part 1

2011-07-09T14:36:00.000+01:00

I'm re-branding. Slowly. Not slowly from reluctance but from practicality - I just don't have the time to do it all at once. I had planned to revamp my website during our long stay in France this summer but of course we're not going at all this year now and life in Stroud gets filled up with other things so I don't really have time for the website at the moment. I have time for little bits and pieces, though.

I've always been aware of the concept of a brand, I think, though I wouldn't have called it that. In recent years 'brand' has become a phenomenon, buzz-word or whatever other term you wish to use for something that is 'in'. And I am distinctly ambivalent about 'in' things.

Clothes fashion is a really good example of this. In choosing what to wear I've never been one to follow fashion, really, other than when I was at college. There, fashion was mostly what I was engaged in, although even then, while we were following the general trends of what might be called 'high fashion' of the times, we were also supposed to be creating our own styles and mine, though influenced by the top designers and particularly Zandra Rhodes, was already recognisable. After college, though, clothes returned to being something that everybody just got on and wore and my style soon became pretty informal and unrelated to fashion. Periodically the clothes that come into fashion interest me more and at other times my favourite colours turn up as the colours of the year but by and large fashion trends and I have little to do with each other.

What I hate, though, is consumerism and the extent to which fashion and brand drive it. That people with not much money feel driven to replace perfectly serviceable items because the colour and shape isn't 'in' this year is, I think, what is behind many of the ills of our modern world. I've no wish to sound like an old fogie and drive my readers away so I won't go on about this, but suffice to say it couldn't matter less to me who has made my shoes so long as they feel comfortable, don't fall apart and I find them visually pleasing. (If you care, I wear Crocs during as much of the year as I can get away with them as they are amongst the few shoes I have ever owned which fulfil all three criteria.) But kitchen appliances, hi-fi equipment, three-piece suites and even wallpaper should not be replaced because they are not in the latest style if they are still in good order and do the job you want them to do.

So then, as a consumer, I'm mostly not keen on the whole brand thing. But here's where Ms Jekyll turns into Mistress Hyde, I'm afraid. As a manufacturer, Brand is important to me.

At Gloucestershire Arts & Crafts Centre we have more than 50 different makers selling in the shop at any one time. Some sell better than others and I'm convinced that this is often linked to whether or not they have a recognisable brand. When new people join, if they don't have much experience in selling their work we try to encourage them to think about their brand, or image. The worst way to sell is to be skilled in many crafts and display them all together. If among those things you've made are some pottery mugs, you need to provide a reason for the customer to pick your mug out of your mixed display instead of buying one of mine from a display of nothing but pottery. We all do it as shoppers - look at a display and in a split second make an assessment of what is being sold - and if that assessment doesn't come up with a clear concept, we tend to move on to something that has. Over more than twenty-five years of involvement in the arts and crafts business I've seen that the best sellers are always people whose brand is clearly recognisable.

Exactly because I do diversify more than most, it's always been important for me to present my work in a way that shows it clearly as mine. Working in both ceramics and textiles I can sometimes be seen as a bit of an amateur. I have been turned down for craft groups for reasons along the lines of if I was a proper potter/textile artist that would be all I do. I can understand that view even though in my case it's erroneous. I'm professional in all the things I make and more dedicated than many to my work. But so that other people recognise this I need to make sure I have an observable brand.

To some extent this was helped when I built my first website. Needing a domain name, I knew I had "The One" as soon as I thought of Cloth and Clay. It's what I do and it rolls of the tongue. Stage one achieved. In part 2 I'll write about my current rebranding project.

Choices

2011-06-28T17:25:00.001+01:00

Do you remember the old adage, "The camera never lies"? You don't hear it any more because it's now commonly known to be untrue. These days the camera and its associated software can be made to tell all kinds of extravagent lies. The saying was useful, though. It was shorthand for so many situations where you thought you'd taken a photo of one thing (a friend at her 21st birthday party) and found instead you'd perfectly captured the disgusting state of a row of teatowels distastefully displayed behind the birthday girl's head.) Or a photo of what you thought was a beautiful view which turned out to be of several pylons and numerous cables strung right across your eyeline. Well, here's another good example of the camera not lying. My old bag.

As an aside: I was never really a rebellious teenager. The most I ever got to was calling my mum an old bag occasionally. She usually retaliated by reasoning that if she was an old bag, I must be a baguette. It took the steam out of the insult and annoyed me very much.

This, however, really is my old bag. I've had this bag for possibly 15 years. When new the colours were rich purple and pink. Now even the leather section (what's left unshredded, that is) is more grey than purple. The thing is that it has probably looked disreputable for some time but I've chosen not to see that. This photo makes it unavoidable. I've loved this bag. It has the right dimensions. It takes all the usual financial essentials like purse and cheque books plus emergency medical supplies (including insect repellent and antihystemine cream for when the former fails), camera, umbrella, dog poo bags, keys, pens, pencils, emery boards, and tissues. When required it can also hold small shopping and/or a wine bottle. Its days were clearly numbered, though. A couple of the straps had split halfway across and it was only a matter of time before one of them continued its journey and the aforementioned contents were distributed across a car park or supermarket floor.

So, choices. No, not choice of bag. Choice of how to spend a small pocket of time. There were so many things I could have spent this time on that I have not seemed to find time for over the last year or so. Highest on my list has been visiting friends but there are other things I wish I could get back to doing also. But instead I chose to spend the time making a new bag.

It is rather splendid, though I say it myself. It's not that obvious that the leather is synthetic and it is wonderfully purple. It cost me £5 for the main fabric for a piece more than a metre square (more than half of which is left over) plus about £6 for three zips.

Inside is a central compartment which is zipped and has a rigid central divider so those important paper items like cards don't get crushed. The central compartment doesn't go all the way to the bottom so that a couple of rarely needed things can lurk underneath, across the whole width of the bag. There are two small pockets on the outside of the central section too. The lining is specially created patchwork. There is a zipped outside pocket for keys and pens. The base is reinforced for rigidity to stop the whole thing falling over. There's a handy loop for pulling the bag towards you when you feel lazy.

I can't remember the last time I actually sat down and made something that wasn't work. The fabric was more difficult to work with than I expected but still I had fun making it and will have even more fun using it.

Beastly pots

2011-06-15T19:24:00.000+01:00

It was Another Beastly Art Exhibition last weekend. Sadly, not a great success because Painswick has become a very quiet village. We'd hoped that there would be plenty of people about for Open Studios but it turned out that there is only one Open Studios venue in Painswick this year. Add to that the weather - horizontal rain on Sunday - and it was never going to be busy.

Sitting in the exhibition with no customers meant some time to spare, though, and I took my camera, my laptop and my (fairly) new graphics tablet. The reviews I read before buying the graphics tablet did mention time needed to get used to it and I haven't really had that time available until now, so a rather small silver lining must be admitted in that I was able to start to get more familiar with the graphics tablet. And it's really rather nice.

Anyway, here's a small selection of recent beastly pots, all of which appeared in the exhibition and all of which, sadly, came home with me, starting with a rather better picture of the lizard vase I blogged about under the heading of "Work in progress".

I like all of these, in different ways for different reasons. This last vase, though, is possibly my favourite.

The greenhouse project is plumbed

2011-05-21T13:47:00.001+01:00

This may be the most uninteresting picture you'll ever see on a blog and it may even be the most uninteresting blog post too, so I'll keep it short.

We have plumbing! You can see here on the left a tap with hose attached. Going up from there is more pipework and you can see a tap at the top centre of the picture. This one is for the watering system in this end of the greenhouse. Lower and to the right of the picture you can see through to the other end where the tap with a bit of hose stuck on awaits the watering system in that end of the greenhouse.

That's it. Plumbing in greenhouse. Really nothing more to say.

Except how pleasing it is.

Work in progress - 5

2011-05-19T13:57:00.001+01:00

Well, not really in progress any more as the lizard vase I've been documenting here is now finished. Here he is:

It's hard to photograph shiny things but I was very pleased with the vase so couldn't wait to have a go and post the pic here. I may have another go some time later.

The kiln was packed with pots I'm very happy with, most of which will remain uncovered until the exhibition in a few weeks time, but I'm delighted to share this chap with his loyal followers!

Work in progress - 4

2011-05-18T19:12:00.000+01:00

The lizard has survived the first firing. (Actually, several lizards have, but this is the one everyone has been following.) The green is perhaps a little pale but it's difficult to get right. If it is applied too thickly it will run straight down the pot in a spectacular fashion, so it's better to err on the thin side on the whole.

Applying the lustres requires even more imagination than applying glazes because here none of them remotely resemble in the raw stage what they will look like after firing. Then there are other complications. I may have written before about the green/purple dilemma. Basically, green and light green lustres come out as purple and light purple - except when they don't! What to do? If the green went green then it would be ideal for this lizard. But if it went purple then I'm not so sure it would do much for the light green. It goes purple much, much more often than it goes green, so I decided not to risk it. Instead, I went for turquoise lustre, which is fairly bluish usually, but perhaps not too far from the light green base. I like to use gold with the green too. Finally, wanting to make the chap really lizardy, I used a fair amount of mother-of-pearl lustre. Below is what he looked like once decorated.

I can't be sure how this will all look, but I can be certain that it won't look anything like it's unfired state. The kiln is firing as I type. Tomorrow I will unpack and the vase will be finished and, with any luck, will still be in one undamaged piece. I'll let you know.

Oatmeal

2011-05-17T09:00:00.000+01:00

I believe in the US "oatmeal" is sometimes used in place of the word "porridge". At least, when watching films or TV I've heard parents tell children to eat their oatmeal and seen a bowl of something looking porridgy. Anyway, this is definitely a bowl of porridge (with demarara sugar and double cream, since you ask) but it is in a cereal bowl with the glaze/design name of "oatmeal star". You can just see two tips of a greenish star poking up above the cream, but you can certainly see the overall colour of the pot so if I'm right about the US terminology you could say this is an oatmeal bowl of oatmeal.

As with all of my glazes, this one varies according to exact temperature, which usually means the position in the kiln as well as the temperature I have fired to. This oatmeal star design had been for many years sold only in The Made In Stroud Shop but in the last couple of years has begun to see the wider world and this particular bowl is the first one owned by me.

I rarely keep what I consider to be the nicest pots for myself. I rarely add a new design to my own kitchen collection either. This is mainly because of storage space in the kitchen and the fact that my pots are quite robust and don't tend to break unless treated badly. The cereal/soup bowl stacks have a little more room available so when this one came out of the kiln I decided it must be mine.

What I liked was the particular range of colours. The reduction was really good, in other words there were more than the usual scattering of speckles in the colour, the background colour itself is a soft, well, oatmeal colour, but with slight tinges of light blue where it had caught some extra heat. Yum. And so was the porridge.

Work in progress - 3

2011-05-15T14:23:00.001+01:00

Remember the lizard? Well, it's time for him to progress. Today I'm busy glazing and decorating. Tomorrow I'm working at Gloucestershire Arts and Crafts Centre all day but then on Tuesday I'll fire the kiln. So here's the lizard vase, which has survived the glazing process. This isn't a particularly risky stage but as I've said before, with unevenness on a pot, raw glazing can be just too much of a shock for the clay. If it is too much, the pot will crack quite drastically, so you can tell when it's happened!

Deciding how to decorate this vase wasn't easy. Usually I am pretty clear from the outset what I want a pot to look like. In this case perhaps there were too many choices for just the one lizard vase in white clay. What I went for was plain white/grey vase and painting the lizard green. Other details to both lizard and perhaps vase will be added in the form of lustres later on.

The firing stage is much more hazardous. There was a time some years ago, with my previous, much smaller kiln, that it was probably a 50/50 chance that lizard dishes came to grief. I was often on the phone to H, a friend and jeweller, to wail "another two dead lizards" in the weeks leading up to our annual exhibition.

I do still get casualties but in this larger kiln I have a better chance of having the lizard not too close to where the flame jets out from the burner and yet close enough to that side of the kiln to get the steady highest heat to turn the glaze blue if needed. It's fine tuning. I had a lovely big fish dish in the kiln the other week but it didn't like the place I put it - too near the burner on the bottom shelf - and the stresses caused it to break apart in three directions. I think four or five centimetres further away could well have been enough to prevent the break, but it's always hard to judge.

Last week I fired three lizard serving dishes and two butterfly vases, all of which survived. I can't help thinking this isn't a good omen for this next firing, which will contain two lizard dishes, two fish dishes, two lizard vases and two butterfly vases. It must be somebody's turn by now.

Wood

2011-04-24T17:56:00.000+01:00

Well, do you know, I've been sitting here for about ten minutes trying to work out what I want to say. And then eventually I realised I don't really want to say much about anything except our firewood. This may make for a dull post, I suppose. But it's exciting to me!

First of all, here's the final woodstack by the gate. See how the pedestrian gate is completely obliterated (not that we use it) and the big gate not able to go all the way open.

Then around the side of the house there was more wood, sawn up but not stored in the woodshed as it was collected during the time we were actually taking dry wood from the shed to burn. More trunks stacked up against a pile of wood sat beside the blue shed.

The weather has of course been unseasonably warm for a while but M decided at the beginning of the week that it was time to saw wood while we were still being promised warmth and no rain. He pointed out that he can plumb the greenhouse if it rains and I agreed that getting the wood sawn would be a more than justifiable interruption to the greenhouse.

He has a sawbench but for a large part of the job decided to use the old wooden table we've got parked outside the green shed for just such outdoor work purposes.

And so he set to work. And was sensible! Paced himself, came in for breaks without being nagged, drank plenty, had bath every evening.

Things didn't go entirely smoothly. At one point quite a chunk of a wall of stacked logs fell down. They were sliding for a while, M said, and he was trying to get other walls of logs against them before they fell. He was all for leaving the lot where it landed and stacking on top but I managed to get him to stop doing that after a short while on the grounds that I would do the re-stacking. I like stacking logs. Once I'd got that far, I continued to do the rest of the stacking. I should say that M was still responsible for most of the stacking.

Anyway. No more woodstack by the gate.

And none against the wall of the house, though still some left stacked against the blue shed. Nothing like as much as there was, however.

And of course you're dying to see where it all is now, aren't you?

Ta-da!

I'm disappointed with this photo because it really doesn't convey how impressive the woodshed is. The wood is stacked up to the rafters apart from the bit you see on the left right next to the shed. This is partly because it has to be further back there to allow for the shed door to open. If you look at the post for June 16th 2010 you can see how much we had last year. What you're looking at last year is the view from inside the woodshed pointing towards what you see here on the right. This time, inside the woodshed consists of wood and just a metre square standing space.

Isn't firewood lovely?

And - if you look carefully at the picture of the side of the house sans firewood, you'll see a well-swept, tidy path. M set about this task all on his own. I kid you not! J & J if reading may need to sit down to recover from the shock of their dad not only finishing a task completely but voluntarily wanting to tidy up at the end. I know I do.

A little bit of alchemy - part 2

2011-04-19T18:04:00.000+01:00

The science of glazes is, well, very scientific. Many years ago I attended a course on glazing with Mike Bailey as a guest tutor. Mike used to be one of the potters at Bath Potters Supplies, where potters from surrounding counties go not only for materials and equipment but for valuable advice. Mike was always the one to ask about glazes. As a tutor he was informative, thorough, inspiring and enthusiastic not only about what he was telling us but about what we were asking him.

As I have mentioned before, much of what I know about potting I have learned from Douglas Phillips (on whose glazing course Mike was the visiting tutor) and because he uses the once-fire or raw glaze method, so do I. This means that instead of firing pots first so that they are 'cooked', (called 'biscuit' firing and the pots are then biscuit ware) before glazing and then re-firing to a higher temperature, I glaze the bone-dry pots and then fire once. This saves fuel, naturally, and time. Why would one do any different? Well, there are disadvantages to raw glazing. The glazes are often very different from other glazes because they need to contain a certain percentage of clay in order for the glaze to 'fit' the pots. When glazing unfired pots, any unevenness in the pot can create a stress when the water from the glaze is quickly absorbed into the pot. You can easily imagine that in a thin section the clay becomes saturated (and therefore swells) while in a thicker section it does so much less. So you can get pots cracking when you glaze them because of this. Or when you fire them.

Then, there's the glaze recipes themselves. The best way I can think of to explain this to those who know nothing is to liken a glaze recipe to a cake recipe.

You want to make a cake. You have in mind a sponge. You know roughly the proportions of fat, sugar, eggs and flour. If that were a glaze recipe, though, then this classification by ingredient would be very primitive. No, what you are required to judge is the correctly proportions (correct, mind you, not rough) of protein, fat, carbohydrate, vitamins, minerals, water and fibre.

So, you find out how much fat there is in an egg. Add that to the fat in the butter. 7 grams out. Use a little less butter. But butter contains a little protein and now you have disrupted the exact amount of protein you need. Reduce the eggs by one and now you have far too little protein. Oh well, let's make it into a walnut sponge. Walnuts have protein in. Yes, but they also have fat, which you had too much of in the first place. Somewhere here is a balance of the number of walnuts and eggs and fat and then you can adjust the quantities of sugar and flour so that the proportions are right. You are probably getting the idea now :) Anyway, Mike Bailey taught us how to calculate these properties of the glaze using triaxial graphs. It involved a lot of maths and I found it fascinating and hugely enjoyable. Now I look at it all and I'm aware of two things - a) I've forgotten a lot of it through disuse because of lack of time, and b) I'm still fascinated with this kind of process. You'll have gathered from previous posts that lack of time generally wins hereabouts.

Your regular potter, though, doesn't usually bother with all of this. There are glaze recipe books. Other people have done the science and then used the glazes and proved their worth, just as in cooking. If you're no cook, you can buy premixed glaze ingredients where you just add water, just like packs of scone mix or sponge mix. There's room for all of this in the wonderful world of pottery.

If you're a raw glazer, though, you are a specialist. There are very few recipe books for raw glazes. In fact, I don't actually know of any. You will, though, find glazes in general books which either state that they can be used for raw glazes or look promising because of what you already know you need to include. You can try these. Most of them will not work for raw glazing. Or, you can rely on the generosity of other potters to pass on their recipes.

I use two recipes dictated to us on courses at Ridge Pottery year after year. The other two glazes I have adapted from one of Douglas' original glazes by playing around with the triaxial graph method, having read around the topic of the sort of colours I was trying to produce.

Only four glazes? But we've seen many more than four colours on your pots!

Well spotted. You have indeed. And that's the alchemy. Remember all those factors in the firing process. Well, add that to four glazes combined with two different clays, a couple of coloured slips and some decorating glazes and you get the picture.

I expect you're a bit bored with all this technical stuff now. Me, I could go on for ages. Writing about things in this way gets me back in touch with aspects of the work that I sometimes neglect. I'll spare your feelings, though, and stop here. You've seen the photo at the top of this post. You may remember there was a photo of some glazed pots in the previous alchemy post. Well, they were the same pots. Just to illustrate that what you see before the pots are fired often bears little resemblance to what they look like afterwards, here are the two pictures together.

Magic, isn't it?

A little bit of alchemy - part 1

2011-04-17T10:35:00.002+01:00

I know it's not alchemy and I know it's not magic. I realise that to a scientist, it's just that when you mix certain minerals together and subject them to different physical conditions this will result in changes to the nature and appearance of those minerals. However, I never got to even try the smallest taster of chemistry or physics at school so it's still possible for me to hang on to that little bit of mystery about what happens to clay and glazes when you fire them.

There are clays, glazes and firing methods which appear (to one who doesn't use them, anyway) to be able to produce fairly predictable results. Mine are not among these.

The firing process is probably the single most unpredictable part of what I do. I fire using gas, so that there is actual fire, flame, within the kiln chamber. You get this with wood-firing, of course, which I love but would never have wanted to tackle myself. I was lucky enough to spend a week or two over a couple of years helping out at Ridge Pottery when I was still very much a learner myself and had the opportunity to fire a wood-fire kiln on several occasions. It was daunting at first but by the second occasion I really loved the experience. Of course I was overseen very carefully, but I still learned a tremendous amount about the process of turning malleable clay into vitrified pots as well as about wood-firing itself.

Wood firing is hard work. It also requires plenty of storage space to season plenty of wood. It's not for me. However, the live flame you get from a gas firing can be the next best thing.

To explain this picture a little:

The lower part shows the kiln, with the light reflected very brightly off the front of the door, which explains the very light area on the left. To the right of that is a metal shelving unit, dexion type.

Above the kiln at the back is a hood leading to a ventilation pipe. The bright orange/red area you can see is a reflection on the inside of the hood of the inside of the chimney. At this stage the colour of the atmosphere in the kiln will be much yellower as it is hotter.

You can also see a blue area in about the centre of the picture. This is flame emerging from the chimney of the kiln. (The chimney in this case is not a tall, high thing but is an area at the back of the kiln which is only the height of the kiln itself.)

Live flames in the kiln chamber also allow you to manipulate the atmosphere in the kiln chamber so you get a process called 'reduction'. Basically, you push too much flame too fast into the kiln so that it uses up all the available oxygen in the atmosphere and has to take more from the oxygen-bearing molecules in the clay. At the same time, the flames will be escaping the kiln. This is what's happening in the photo.

Reduction often results in a speckled appearance but it also often changes the actual base colour of the glaze.

There are many other factors in the firing which induce variation in the finished results. These include:

the exact position of the kiln shelves, both in relation to the burners and kiln walls and in relation to the pots.
the spacing of the pots
what types of shapes of pots are next to each other
which glazes are next to each other
whether your kiln is full of smaller pots or bigger pots
whether your shelves contain both smaller and bigger pots
the rate of climb of the temperature at every stage of the firing
whether the gas bottles need changing at a crucial stage and especially if you don't notice for a while!

At this point some of you will be wondering why I fire by such a seemingly unpredictable method. But maybe others will be thinking how exciting it all sounds! Who wants predictabilty? Well, of course, I do, to some extent. Some of the problems I've been having with the work over the last year or so have been in trying to get to grips with how this particular kiln works best and then having got a long way in discovering that, in adapting what I do so that the differences in firing methods (tiny and subtle, but astonishing in their results) still produce results I want.

Goodness. Sorry. All very wordy. But I really couldn't explain much about the firing process without.

Part 2 of "A little bit of alchemy" will be more about glazing.

Just because ...

2011-04-15T08:01:00.000+01:00

... I really like lime green. I know it's been a bit of a gimmicky fashionable colour, but nonetheless, it appeals to me. One of my artist friends, J, really hates it (though I suspect she might admit the colour of yer actual limes as different and not what she means by lime green) and because I really respect her enormously as an artist I sometimes catch myself wondering if lime green is some sort of modern construct and not a proper colour at all and I am letting the side down.

I still like lime green, though.

The greenhouse project goes electric

2011-04-06T18:58:00.000+01:00

Remember the greenhouse project? You'd be forgiven for not doing so. I guess for most people outdoor tasks ground to a halt once the frosty and then snowy weather set in and even after that an aluminium greenhouse is not a place to work in the winter. By the time it might have been warm enough for M to start the wiring, we had both forgotten all the careful planning of how things were going to be attached so then M had to wait until I had a chunk of time to spend with him working it all out again.

Along with the mounting for the cables, we also had to plan out where to attach the patent shelves I've always used in a greenhouse. This goes back to 1983, when I had a conservatory, and I've used the same method ever since. Basically, you have two battens running from end to end of the greenhouse, supported on brackets. They are spaced so that standard seed trays can straddle them. When seedlings have been potted on and the seed trays removed, plants can grow up between the battens.

I bought brackets and little angle pieces with the greenhouse and all of these fit easily into channels in the main vertical struts of the greenhouse. Unfortunately, there aren't these grooved struts in every part of the thing; some pieces are smooth, so we had to devise methods of support for the places where the brackets wouldn't go.

The photo above shows wiring in progress. The one below shows it in use.

We worked on the same principle as wiring up a house - imagine all the things you want to plug into sockets and then add at least one extra per room. I wanted the light switch to be at the end nearest the back door of the house and the pottery, but M suggested a two-way switch so we can use the light as a yard light if we need one. You can see here one light pull and two double sockets.

Once the wiring was finished it it seemed the greenhouse could be used, even though there are things about it not yet finished. As it was my birthday, therefore, we had a greenhouse-warming party, pictures of which can be seen here.

Next, I have been putting up insulation. I wanted to get this prepared while the greenhouse was not only dry but completely clean as I've used stick-on Velcro to attach it.

The pieces of bubblewrap are cut to shape and then bound all round with duct tape. It will be very quick to remove and replace at the beginning or end of a season. Now, all we need is some plants .....

Pears

2011-03-23T08:44:00.001Z

Tricky blighters, your pears. I really love a pear that is just right but find it so, so difficult to buy pears so that that is what I get. I know they're not going to be exactly ripe when I buy them, but how can you tell which ones are good at that stage? And how do you know how long they'll take to ripen? And even, how can you tell from the outside whether the pear is ripe? Most pears I buy end up getting poached because they just aren't nice to eat raw. They are either too hard or have gone woolly, and there's little nastier in the fruit world than a woolly pear. I bought a bag of Conference pears last week. There they sit, looking promising. The first one I tried had the audacity to be too hard at one end and verging on the woolly at the other!

Then, there's their shape. Pear-shaped. Apparently the typical Englishwoman's figure, starting with narrow shoulders and bulging outwards towards the hips. It's not supposed to be a Good Thing. I'm not sure I am pear-shaped, though. Overweight, certainly, but I think more of a Bramley apple than a pear.

And finally, things go pear-shaped. This one I like. I've used the expression many times to describe 2010 as a whole. And at last I have an illustration to demonstrate it. You see above, ladies and gentlemen (and my other friends who don't qualify for the aforementioned titles) a large cardboard box full of A4 papers that is filing waiting to be done. I've just had to go through it to find all of a certain type of document and when I got to the bottom I found that in fact it contains papers for the last twelve months. In other words, I haven't done any filing since last year started to go pear-shaped towards the end of March.

If you read yesterday's blog you will remember my claiming to be organised and good at admin. I don't recant. It's still true. It's just that filing my own paperwork was one of the things that just went out the window last year. Not literally, of course. That would have been a disaster. No, papers just piled up and piled up until they needed this massive box.

"But it's a quarter of the way through 2011!" I hear you cry. Yes it is. And yes, I do seem to be getting my life back on track. However, this means that I am doing all the things I should normally be doing. It doesn't mean I can miraculously catch up with all the things that didn't get done last year.

It takes quite a lot to surprise me, but actually I was surprised to discover twelve months' worth of paperwork in this box. It's just not me.

Work cycles

2011-03-22T13:33:00.001Z

We're all different. Thank goodness. The world would be very dull if we weren't. For every human characteristic there seems to be a continuum and where you are on it can have wide-reaching effects. Artists and other creative people have a reputation for not being good at admin and it's often said that I am unusual in not only being very good at it but actually enjoying it. It's true. I've always enjoyed being organised.

It's just as well. Balancing all the different components of my working life needs careful planning and an eye for far-reaching implications when surprises turn up. Some of that is because I do different things within my working life - pottery, textiles, cards, working within organisations, to name but four. The rest is to do with the constraints of making pottery generally and, I have to admit, some created by the particular work that I choose to do.

Working in two clays in a smallish workshop with one wheel means that I can't just swap between clays on a daily or even weekly basis. There's a day's organisation in cleaning all the tools, the work area, etc between using one clay and another and it's not a job I enjoy.

Another factor is what happens in the kiln. Within the glazes that I use, different glazes require slightly different firing temperatures and since my kiln fires unevenly (as most seem to, to some extent or other) I achieve this with mixed firings. Also, in the grand scheme of things it's not big - about 10.5 cu ft - but you can get a lot of pots in there and I can't imagine ever needing to fire a whole kiln full of one type of pot. As an example, if I fired nothing but mugs, I'd probably be looking at more than 90 mugs (although I would have a shelf left over that wouldn't be high enough for any more mugs but would take cereal bowls.) I never need 90 mugs at once. I always need 45 mugs, 20 cereal bowls, a dozen dinner plates, a few salt pigs and some fruit bowls. And in case you're wondering, no, I wouldn't get all of those in one firing either!

So, firings are necessarily very mixed. I do also fire to two slightly different temperatures, so that's another element of variety added to the mix. It will now be clear why I need to have lots of all sizes of pots in both clays to start firing.

So, at last, I come to the point of the title, work cycles. My pottery work cycle is that I spend a couple of months or more at a time making pots in one clay. During this time I may have enough of the other pots to fire but often not. Then eventually I have made all the white clay pots I'm going to, as you see in the picture above, and I can start on the other colour of clay. That's where I am now. This morning I began throwing pots in the brown clay. It feels really good to be at that moving forward sort of stage, especially as the weather has been so springlike and there is a general feeling of regeneration. I've been busy with a few other things for about 10 days so it's also good to get back into the pottery in general.

What next? Well, next there need to be enough pots in brown clay ready to fire so that I can actually start on some firings. After that ... well, that's for another day, I think.

Workshops

2011-03-21T14:58:00.000Z

I spent last weekend running a silk painting workshop at Nature In Art. It's a wonderful place in a beautiful location. No doubt some reading this blog would consider Stroud rural but we live on the edge of the town, at a crossroads, and consider ourselves to be pretty urban. The minute you get out of the car at Nature In Art, though, you know you are in the country.

As I've mentioned here before, I've been Artist In Residence there a few times, I've run a silk-painting workshop there before and have done the Christmas Craft Fair a couple of times too. It's a place I feel really at home in as most of my textiles work is inspired by natural themes.

I've only been doing workshops for a few years. All the time I was teaching youngsters I didn't really want to add any more teaching to my working life but soon after I stopped, was persuaded to try a workshop and found I really love doing them. I've always enjoyed teaching people things but I suppose in the latter years of my teaching work it was usually more a case of teaching the young people, and the things were not necessarily the things I felt most passionate about. This way, though, I get to work with other people, which is lovely, and I get to be enthusiastic about textiles and colour and other things that inspire me, which is the icing on the cake.

This particular course had a relatively low number of students and I wasn't sure what to expect of that. As it turned out, it was a really enjoyable weekend and we all seemed to get on very well. Obviously my role is to advise and support individual projects as well as teach the skills needed but it's always good when the students end up supporting each other. This was one such group.

Because we were a small group we could also all join in one conversation so at coffee and lunch breaks we got onto other subjects and got to know each other further that way.

Everyone expressed satisfaction with the workshop (phew! :) ) and I think most of them are interested enough to do some more silk painting in future. That's one of the best bits for me. Above all, I do want people to enjoy what they're doing. Silk painting is a really absorbing activity. By the time we got to the afternoons, nobody wanted to take a break in the cafe and seeing everyone so inspired was really satisfying.

Some people use patterns I take along, or use designs from books and others develop a more freestyle approach. Nearly always, as in this last workshop, people play with colour, which is of course what I really love, and silk painting is an ideal medium for exploring it. Sometimes it's a case of experimenting with blending colours, sometimes trying out unfamiliar colours but nearly always the way colour has been used turns out to be the key to the pieces produced.

Because there were only four of them, in no particular order, the pictures here show the work produced by my weekend students, with thanks for being such an enjoyable group to work with.

Spring

2011-03-20T07:30:00.000Z

Well, that's it, really.

Work in progress - 2

2011-03-10T13:07:00.001Z

As promised, a progress report about the lizard vase. You may be able to see here that it is now a fairly uniform white in colour. That's the first way to tell that it is dry but you also have to feel the pot. If it's in a reasonably warm room it should feel the same temperature as the room. If it's still damp, it will feel slightly cooler. Finally, if I'm not sure, I press the pot to my cheek as there is a better sensitivity to damp on the skin there. In this case, though, I know the pot is dry and in any case it's now sitting waiting for the next stage.

So, the lizard has survived the drying out stage. This is actually the least precarious. They nearly always do survive drying out. The next thing will be to decide on the colouring I'm going for.

This is not an easy choice. I don't have many glazes and on this clay there are really three colour choices - a greyish white, such as you see on chicken pots, a creamy colour which is on the cream lustre pots and the colour I have called "heather" because it reminds me of the heather moors in Yorkshire in all its varieties.

What makes things more complicated is the choice of oxides, colouring glazes and lustres that will go on the lizard itself. With experience, one quickly learns some good and bad combinations of these but there is plenty of unpredictability in these things and I have to allow for that in what I plan to do. I think it depends how I'm feeling generally what level of risk I enjoy. Sometimes I want to play safe with a combination that almost always works and sometimes I'm in the mood to just go for something a little unexpected.

The jury is still very much out about how to glaze and decorate the lizard vase. I may be moving towards a decision but I'm certainly not going to announce it here until its done.

I may have mentioned before that for most pots I do only one firing. This is known as "once-firing" (subtle, eh? ;) ) or "raw glazing" because the pots are raw when glazed. To extend the cooking metaphor, the majority of UK potters probably don't do raw glazing and therefore their pots are cooked once before glazing. This is known as "biscuit firing" and the resultant pots as "biscuit ware". Completely unfired pots are "green ware."

So you take a bone dry pot and ruthlesslessly swill a whole lot of wet glaze around its insides before dunking it into more glaze and then placing it back up the right way on a board. Glazes are made of powdered minerals suspended in water. Raw glazes have a high proportion of clay in them to make them "fit" the pot and a consistency between single and double cream is what I go for. Still plenty of water around, though, which will of course soak immediately into the bone dry clay. If the thickness of the clay is uneven, the soaking of the liquid won't be even either and, particularly where the clay changes thickness, the pull of soaked clay against unsoaked clay can cause fractures.

Are you ahead of me? Yes indeed, lizards and their tails do present sudden changes of thickness of clay on a pot. And that, Best Beloved, is why so many lizard pots end up as casualties, either at the glazing stage or the firing stage, where there is a similar problem with water content and thicknesses. And why I'm not going to tell you how I decide to glaze and decorate the lizard vase until I know it has at least survived the glazing stage.

Is it spring yet?

2011-03-06T17:32:00.000Z

About a week ago M announced that we had just three or four days' worth of logs left this winter, so we've been doing without the fire mostly. We've had one of our three or four. I've had to put the heating higher again most evenings as it's been chilly, to say the least. It's not bad, though. I think we began lighting the fire on 14th October and went right through every evening unless we were out until the end of February.

Today, though, it really looked like spring out there. I went with M and Charlie on their walk, which doubles as a wooding session.

Note the nonchalant regal hands-behind-the-back pose as he balances the branch over his shoulder.

This winter the wooding M has done is spectacular and next year we'll certainly have enough to have fires for six months if we need them. We now have a small wood stack where last year was the whole stack ....

... and a large wood stack. You have to be impressed with the length of some of these. Mind you, the 7m one wasn't brought back over the shoulder ;)

Dinner ...

2011-02-20T16:00:00.000Z

You can tell that life is slowly returning to normal because at last we had some friends round to dinner yesterday evening. And this was it. I also managed to start doing something I've been trying to get round to for a long time - photographing food and photographing my pots with food in or on. These are two different projects. The photographs of food are to accompany recipes in one form or another and those of my pots with food are a project I have in mind to do with marketing the pottery. However, there's nothing to stop the same meal being used for both purposes.

In case there's any doubt, the platter above is not one of mine. It's a gloriously coloured Tunisian dish which I bought at a French market a few years ago. It sits on the shelf in the study/dining room where it goes splendidly with the decor and occasionally it gets put to use. This time for the geographically close Moroccan Chicken with Preserved Lemons and Couscous.

As with most recipes, I'm gradually adapting this one for our tastes and needs. It should have a red chilli in it but M detests anything above the mildest warmth in spices so I leave it out. I don't quite detest fresh coriander, as I used to, but I still dislike it, so I replace it with parsley. And so on. Anyway, it's a lovely dish.

To go with it I served French beans sauted in butter and garlic. I don't usually buy imported veg if I can help it but these were just the right thing to go with the dish, and I figure that whatever the other costs, Kenya is full of farmers who've come to rely on being able to sell their beans to Europe. So, once in a while. I also made aubergines with tomato. I really love this simple dish and have no idea why I don't make it more often. There was not nearly enough of the leftovers for my liking. But here is the dish before we tucked in:

But what is this?! A lizard! Yes, here's a finished lizard. Now, some of you might be thinking, "ooh, that's nice, so that's what the lizard vase will look like." Well, who knows. Lizards, as I mentioned in the last post, are tricky blighters. At one point a few years ago it was a common cry over the phone to H, "Another dead lizard came out of the kiln today." I was probably losing at least half of them in the firing. Another aspect of this particular lizard is that he was painted with dark green lustre and light green lustre. What? He's purple? Oh yes, so he is. Well, them's the breaks. Green lustres often turn out purple. Nearly always in this pottery. The only time they don't turn a beautiful rich purple is when I use them to paint irises. You may remember this post. If you look at it again and compare the colour of those irises with this lizard, you'll see what I mean. So - what to paint the lizard with? But this is not a post about pots, it's a post about dinner.

So finally to pudding. You might wish to call it dessert. But however refined the dish, I prefer pudding.

I hadn't made this chocolate tart before. The chocolate part was certainly exactly as described. But what's with the pastry? As I was making it, I thought, "This is shortbread with egg in it." I sort of expected something light and crumbly like shortbread, therefore. What I got was hard. You could eat it ok, it wasn't so hard as to be too unpleasant in the mouth. But it was one of those things that at any minute was going to embarrass somebody by shooting across the other side of the room. Miraculously, we all avoided this faux pas. Next time, though, I'll be making different pastry.

An another thing - how do you get proper chocolate curls with a vegetable peeler? I just get these shavings. Tasty, but not particularly decorative.

.......and lunch

We don't usually have fancy lunch hereabouts, but we had visitors doing a tour of family in Gloucestershire and I suddenly had a whim to pretend it was summer. I make this fairly often in France and it was a nice promise of things to come. The evenings are lighter all the time, I went to the supermarket without a coat today and the hellebores are coming into flower.

Work in progress

2011-02-19T09:00:00.001Z

Yesterday I posted on Twitter and Facebook that I was excited about a pot and that it hasn't happened much lately. I'm aware that makes it sound as if I don't enjoy my work, which is not the case at all, so I need to explain a little.

I love making pots. I've discovered over the years that I need the contact with the earthiness of the clay for my wellbeing and apart from when I'm firing the kiln, my pottery is always a place of calm. Most of the time I am making tableware, lost in the rhythm of making mugs or plates a dozen at a time. There are jobs I don't like much, like making up glazes, and putting handles on colanders and casseroles but even these are just work without any great pleasure rather than unpleasant tasks. But excitement is not usually a feature of the landscape in the pottery.

I guess it takes something completely new to get me itching to get on with it, impatient to see the next stage. At the beginning of the week I included some more beastly pots in my schedule. I also sold my last big butterfly vase at the end of last week. It seems the big vases are much more popular than small ones. So I added making a couple of vases to the list. Suddenly the two ideas went together. A lizard crawling up a vase. And that's the pot I'm excited about.

Most of the time in my work I have a clear idea of what the finished item will look like. With pottery, though, the best I can say is that I have a clear idea of what I want it to look like and with Beastly Pots and now Beastly Vases, the chances of that turning out to be what happens are reduced. Make the beast in question a lizard and it's anybody's guess what will happen.

With this in mind, I thought it would be interesting to chart the progress of such a piece here. At this stage I don't know whether I'll be showing you a success or a failure and if a failure, at what stage that will happen.

What the first picture shows is the basic shape of the creature attached and moulded to the form of the pot. I then cut away, add, or just re-shape to put in the details that hopefully make it come to life. In the case of lizards, doing the toes is undoubtedly the most time-consuming part of the whole thing. I've tried various ways but the best one is to start with a sort of flattish pad and then cut away the spaces between the toes.

So here it is. The pot I'm excited about. So much can go wrong from now on! Drying, glazing, firing, painting with lustre and re-firing are five opportunities. Of these, the drying process is the least hazardous as I can keep an eye on it and stop it drying out too fast. I'll keep you posted.

Hearts and Flowers goes live

2011-02-08T18:16:00.000Z

It looks like a fairly small space when you go downstairs at The Cotswold Craftsmen Gallery but I've come to the conclusion that that's partly because of the lowish ceiling. In fact, as you can see, half the room (someone else has the other half) gave me plenty of hanging space. The space is supposed to be for exhibitions of flat work but I was allowed plinths and shelves against my walls (as well as my card spinner) so the hearts and flowers theme could be exploited in full.

I'm toying with doing some textiles pieces with hearts. It would give me an opportunity to use some great colours. But would anyone like one for their home? I'm surprised to find that I would! Following on from the earlier post where I explained my reluctance to use hearts at all, I've discovered that context is all. A richly coloured and stitched heart would fit just right in my study! Or my living room. Will have to think about this one. Comments on the desirability or otherwise of hearts as home decor are welcomed.

In the mean time, I enjoyed putting this exhibition together very much and enjoyed writing a little blurb to go in it almost as much. I put the exhibition up on Sunday but it opened today.

"Hearts and Flowers - an exhibition of work for Valentines and other Romantics.

In between the hearts and flowers there's a smattering of cats and a smidgeon of chickens as well as something for the starry-eyed. This exhibition is about what appeals to the romantic in all of us."

Announcing fridge magnet cards!

2011-02-06T17:49:00.001Z

Well, it is at least the first time I've mentioned them here but to be fair, I did announce them on Twitter and Facebook some time ago and some have been in the shops for the past week. However, I promised to write more about my Valentine cards and here they are.

I've never made Valentine cards as such before, although I have made silk-painted cards with hearts in. These tend to go throughout the year, though I did initially make them one February. These cards here, though, are definitely very seasonal. After 15th February I'll bring them all home again.

You can probably see that once again I've been at PhotoShop with the heart masks, only this time went a bit further. I've used my own photographs. It was surprising to me how quickly photos taken for quite different reasons turned slushy with a bit of red surrounding them. But then, some people like slushy. M does, for a start. The one with the rose would be the sort of thing he would choose for me.

Anyway, as well as being Valentine cards, these were the first Jane Vernon fridge magnet cards. I've been meaning to make them for a couple of years and had all the stuff ready. Who knows what moves an idea far enough to the front of my brain that it's the next thing I do? But here they are. After Valentine's Day is over or at least after you feel cards should no longer be on the mantelpiece, simply peel off the magnetic image and stick it to your fridge, freezer or filing cabinet. I'd certainly be happy displyaing "Be my Valentine" on my fridge all year round, though of course I realise I'm unlikely to receive on of these myself.

Fridge magnet cards don't only come in Valentine flavour, they also come in wallhanging and photograph flavours.

Today I've been putting up the exhibition in Nailsworth. It doesn't open until Tuesday, so I'll save the photos until then.

I never thought ...

2011-02-01T18:10:00.000Z

... I'd find myself using hearts as a motif to decorate pots and I certainly never thought I'd make heart-shaped dishes.

but here are some of the latest batch. About thirty years ago when I was attending Ridge Pottery summer schools, Douglas used to show us how to make different shaped dishes, and often a heart shape was one of them. I was already teaching then and soon tired of "love-hearts", as the kids used to call them, decorating exercise books, pencil cases and anything else that could be doodled on. It really turned me off the whole idea of hearts as decoration.

I've thawed slowly over the years. Leaving full-time teaching in schools helped. The youngsters I worked with subsequently were, for whatever reason, less inclined to splatter their world with hearts. Eventually I started decorating some of my lustred mugs with hearts. They seemed to go down well enough.

Last year I introduced a new design on mugs and bowls and made my first heart-shaped dishes. They sold. Faster than the mugs and bowls, actually. I made some more. They sold out by Christmas. So this January I made lots more still. They are destined for "Hearts and Flowers" and some were also part of the deliveries I made to three outlets last week.

Hearts and Flowers

2011-01-30T09:42:00.000Z

.
We were well overdue for a change of picture on this blog, if nothing else. Dare I say it? The picture of Charlie in the snow was beginning to look unseasonal. Yes, I know, there's still plenty of winter left for more snow.

But on the other hand, Valentine's Day approaches and M reckons that if you start with midsummer's day being 21st June and then divide the year up accordingly, 14th February marks the beginning of spring. It's a cheering thought.

Anyway, I'm celebrating this particular season with a new exhibition Downstairs at Cotswold Craftsmen, in Nailsworth. I've always done the silk-painted cards with hearts on and hearts have been one of the shapes on lustred mugs and last year I started making heart-shaped dishes and mugs and bowls with a heart design. The cards sell out throughout the year and all the heart-shaped dishes sold out too, so it seemed a good opportunity to just go for it and enter the spirit of the thing.

You can't see on the photo but there is a lovely sugar-pink border of hearts on the poster. What you can see is heart-shaped cut-outs of various work and this was fun to learn. These days it seems that whatever you need to learn, someone has put a tutorial for it on the internet, and so I was able to learn about heart-shaped masks and produced the poster above.

Last week was spent firing heart pots, making Valentine cards (of which more in another blog) and delivering to By Local, Gloucestershire Arts and Crafts Centre and The Made In Stroud Shop. This week I need to make more general greetings cards and pack up for setting up the exhibition next Sunday. Today, though, is nominally a day off and I'll be ironing and cooking. And maybe dipping into my book on learning CSS as well ...

Lists

2011-01-05T10:28:00.002Z

This photo of Charlie, taken in January last year, has nothing to do with lists at all. It's just a particularly nice photo of him, which I used as our Christmas card and which Heather kindly commented on in my last post and I thought I'd like to share it with those to whom I don't send Christmas cards.

Lists, though. I'm feeling more like my normal self each day and today realised that I have a mental list of things I want to achieve today, which means I am getting back into the swing of things. However, it's 10.21 as I start to write this and I haven't done anything on my list yet! So I'm still obviously taking time out and taking life slowly, which is a Good Thing.

The downside of being more laid back is that I have forgotten to do something that I would normally have done as soon as I was asked, which is to write an A5 page of info for people who may be wanting to book the workshop I am doing at Nature In Art in March. It annoys me that I have forgotten and it is No. 1 task on my list for today. It won't take me that long and I really hope I haven't held things up at NIA. It's the sort of thing I've always been very conscientious about. Yes, I've the excuses of ill health and (non-)Christmas, but still excuses don't make any difference to deadlines, as I know too well as someone always asking others to send things to me.

This task was written on a list somewhere but because I am recuperating/chilling/getting a life I was trying not to be too anal about everything and making lists literally on the backs of envelopes, together with calculations of how much cash I needed, people's phone numbers and other bits and pieces.

I hope it's the only thing I've overlooked.

The subject of lists needs returning to later on, I feel.

New Years' Resolutions

2011-01-03T18:11:00.000Z

I don't usually make New Years' Resolutions, mostly because I'm not very successful at keeping them. This year, however, I have made two and am quietly confident!

My first resolution is to Say No. Not right across the board, you understand, but selectively. It's something I was rubbish at in 2010 and I ended the year with rubbish health as a result of not saying no to whatever I was asked to do. My chiropractor, a very calm man who normally reacts to whatever he finds with knowing nods and quiet sympathy and little else, exclaimed "what on earth have you been doing?" when he saw my back just before Christmas. I hadn't got far through my explanation before he just said, "You've obviously been over-doing it." My acupuncturist told me a couple of months ago that she was worried I would just become ill. I suppose I was worried too, but didn't manage to extract myself soon enough.

When Christmas turned into a non-event because I wasn't able to make presents, buy presents, wrap presents, visit friends or family or cook properly, I made my resolution and I am pleased to say that so far I am sticking to it. To assist me in my resolve, I have told many other people, including, now, you, so I will look even more of an idiot if I don't keep this one.

My second resolution is to learn CSS, which, for those who don't know, is a useful web-designing tool which will save me time in building web pages and save the viewer time in waiting for those pages to download. I've bought a book and will work through it methodically. It's not the way I do everything but it is a method I've used to learn things before and one I like and it's the one I've chosen this time. Building websites is something I'm hoping to move into even more in the future.

To encourage me on my way, and because it would be enjoyable, I wondered today if I could learn to make heart-shaped masks in Photoshop. I had an idea for the publicity of my next exhibition, of which more anon. In the meantime enjoy, or not, the fact that I was successful. More or less. If anyone knows why I get a white dot in the middle of some of my hearts, I'd be very grateful for advice for getting rid of it!

Life has its compensations .....

2010-12-18T10:00:00.000Z

... and here is one. These were on my desk as I walked in from the cold yesterday evening. I think I liked them better in the milk bottle with the note than if they had been in a vase.

SURPRISE!

2010-12-09T16:51:00.000Z

You know you see on TV programmes and films that people turn up at their own houses on their birthdays, open the door into a dark room and then all their friends and rellies shout "SURPRISE!"? Well, it was a bit like that when I opened the kiln door on Wednesday morning. And all these blue and orange stripey mugs shouted out at me.

What was the surprise? Well, I didn't know I'd painted orange stripes. They were meant to be dark blue ones. I quite like them, though. I hope other people do too as I've got eight of them.

The flan dishes weren't a surprise as such. What's more of a surprise is that I've never done blue ones before. I've only either done them in the oatmeal star design for the Made In Stroud shop, where they've usually gone quite quickly. I like these very much indeed. I'm getting more into serving dishes, I find.

Being creative

2010-11-18T14:34:00.000Z

Being creative is so much more than making concrete objects or being able to draw, as I'm sure most people would agree. I sometimes feel, however, that this idea is offered as a sort of sop to those who sound ashamed of not being able to make things. "Oh, but you're creative in other ways!" isn't really all that encouraging to people who are probably just expressing envy of those who can paint pictures or, yes, make pots. It doesn't stop them wishing they could paint too. I'd rather explore with people what is much more likely, which is that someone told them once they were no good at art. It takes a few seconds to say this to a child or young person but a lifetime to recover from and it makes me very sad. I try to encourage people by explaining how I failed my "O" level in art, and not just by one grade but quite convincingly, but I can see that often they just don't believe me.

When I was Artist in Residence at Nature in Art a couple of weeks ago, the door opened one day and a woman entered saying even before she got through the door, "I'm sorry, I don't know anything about art at all. I've been trying to think of an intelligent question to ask." Her friend, it seemed, knew more, and in fact paints a little and we were all three able to get into a relaxed conversation in the end. But I felt very sorry that someone had come through the education system believing not only that they couldn't 'do art' but that they had to apologise for wanting to look at it without being able to demonstrate some knowledge.

I've written here a month or two back about how much I'm enjoying writing websites and how, for me, the work is just as creative as making a wallhanging or a pot. I'm still pretty proud of the websites I've designed and written from scratch but am also enjoying making one to order where there is less of a design element and more of a making to commission feel about it. I'll provide a link once it's finished. This week, though, I've been aware of another aspect to my creativity which is certainly something common to many more people than those who can paint or make things - the idea of being creative with a situation. If you're given nothing but lemons, make lemonade.

The first lemon has been kilnloads of pots which haven't turned out the colours I was expecting. This has happened because learning to work with a gas kiln is a little like learning to live with an animal - not so much a question of taming a beast but of learning its natural habits and accepting a degree of unpredictability. After 100 firings I eventually found how to get the temperature to distribute more evenly throughout the kiln. This was a great discovery and huge progress rather than a final destination. The next stage is to find out exactly what to do to achieve the different temperatures that result in different colours in the glazes. The first firing at a lower temperature proved not to be all that much lower. One expects the first guess at an experiment not to succeed but I was left with lots of pots which weren't the colour I had hoped. Next time I'll use the information gained and have another guess.

The other lemon has been the situation which has made me stressed and gloomy - finding out that I have fallen so far behind with my production that whole chunks of ranges I normally keep stocked have disappeared and no real hope of catching up to where I was.

Where's the lemonade?

The photo at the top shows seven mugs, all rather different in colour. They are produced with two glazes and two clays only. Some of the colours are understandable by me, one, at least, is very surprising and so far unexplained. When my analytical brain eventually switched off trying to work this out, my creative brain took over and I suddenly realised the way forward. Let go of having to produce everthing within 'ranges'. Make more of the individuality of pots! How simple. I expect some of you out there are wondering what took me so long. Maybe that's a question for another time.

I really like all these colours coming out of the firings lately. Some are old and some are new but they've all got their attractions and I'm pretty sure that those who buy my pots will feel the same. So instead of thinking I've still not got replacements for the things that have run out, I'm thinking I have lovely new replacements! If anyone wants things to match existing ranges, I can do them, but just not straight away. J asked me if the iris mugs were to be a new range and the answer is yes, I think I'll make some more of them, and perhaps some other items if the mood takes me, but no, they're not going to be a range as such. No more pressure of keeping enough of everything in stock. Time to celebrate the pots I've got instead of bemoaning the ones I haven't.

It's an idea I've been pondering on for a few months, in fact, without the ideas reallly forming into a plan. Next time I'll show you a couple of new teapots. In the mean time, creativity in another form. How do you get good lighting and dry conditions for taking studio shots of pots in the winter? In your underused shiny new greenhouse, of course!

Can you tell what it is yet? #2

2010-11-16T10:04:00.000Z

What you need to know is that dark green lustre and light green lustre don't work for everyone and I am one of the people they don't work for. So I now use them in ways appropriate to the colour they usually turn out. Usually is about 95% of the time, at least. On this occasion, they decided to be halfway between the colour they usually do and the greens they are meant to be, resulting in a sort of greyish colour. I don't mind the effect, actually. I was reasonably happy with the results, until I asked M what he thought, and was rather taken aback to find that he didn't even know what they were supposed to be and didn't sound convinced when I told him.

Feedback from others gratefully received!

Nature In Art

2010-11-12T13:09:00.001Z

Last week I was Artist in Residence at Nature In Art, a lovely museum and art gallery dedicated entirely to, well, nature in art. I've been a couple of times before, in the spring but this was the first time I'd been at this time of year and filled in at the fairly last minute for someone else who had dropped out.

It's a lovely place to be and work but I have to admit that this time towards the end of the week I was feeling rather cold by mid-afternoon. The studio is in effect a conservatory onto a brick wall. Lovely light, plenty of space. But chilly, in spite of a new heater.

I spent most of the week catchin up with making silk-painted cards, a job which in fact I have been finishing off this week. The photo shows my latest additions. I don't think I've become obsessed with irises, but I do love them and so do many other people. The iris canvasses are much admired and I always sell a lot of cards of iris wallhangings, so I decided to do a few silk-painted cards as well. Normally the silk-painted cards are cartoon-like but this time I went for a slightly more realistic look. And I rather like them. I hope you do too. Especially if you're a customer.

Autumn palette

2010-11-11T08:50:00.000Z

Autumn Bliss

2010-10-24T13:55:00.000+01:00

This really is an amazing plant. It's supposed to be an autumn fruiting raspberry but ours starting fruiting towards the end of June and have continued uninterrupted until now, when the last dozen or so berries are there. M and I agree that raspberries are our favourite fruit. For the past two and a half months we've had a decent serving of raspberries once a week and during a few weeks twice a week or enough for a large batch of ice-cream. I didn't even cut them back as I was supposed to in February and they still rewarded me with masses of fruit.

Last weekend Dad brought me some more canes and we made room in a vegetable bed for them. I hope they do as well. As one of my cousins said once when she was little, "I will be gooder!" I shall make a big effort to cut the canes down next February, if that is what they like.

I have to admit to a hint or irony in the title of the blog. Autumn is not being very blissful for me this year, unfortunately. I've been snowed under with work I don't get paid for and today the inevitable happened - I tried to put together a top-up delivery of pots and found several things have now totally run out. Hoping very much to be able to do pottery work Wednesday - Saturday next week, but it'll be a bit of drop in the ocean :(

In order not to end on a gloomy note, it's a year since you'll have been treated to a photo of the red hot pokers in my garden so it's probably time for another one. This one is hot out of the camera this morning. Enjoy!

The greenhouse project - getting excited

2010-09-19T11:02:00.000+01:00

The greenhouse is built! It was actually built a week ago and S wanted me to be excited about it then but I had trouble with this. There were problems and until they were sorted out and I was reasonably confident that they wouldn't return, I couldn't be excited about something I didn't really have.

In the end I had decided to pay a "recommended fitter" to build the greenhouse. Seeing him pick out what he needed from the hundreds of components, we were both very glad in the end. They send you meticulous, well-written and very human instructions, but still it's a complex task. There were questions in the minds of the folks at the greenhouse company about how experienced this recommended fitter was, which first arose when some pieces were missing. They were missing but the greenhouse people needed to speak to the fitter first to make sure he was right. But they did tell me he had never fitted a partition before.

At first I didn't see any problem with this, but I do know now that his next partition will go in rather better. Mid-build I enquired about the curved sides of the greenhouse. The fitter said he had seen that and would have to undo the floor bolts and correct it. When I next saw it, nearly finished, there was still a curve, as well as a gap at the bottom of the partition door. When I measured, I discovered the partition was 2.5cms wider than the ends of the greenhouse. The fitter managed to push the sides in to correct this, but it was clear that he'd have done better to get it right from the start. Similarly with the doors, the main problems with which only became apparent a couple of days after he left. This was why I couldn't get excited about the greenhouse - we couldn't get in and out properly because both back and front doors had problems. We both looked thoroughly at the things and corrected one problem but couldn't get at the others. Eventually the fitter came back (hour journey each way for him, for about 30 mins work) and the problems were nearly all to do with some nuts not being properly tightened, which was of course entirely down to him. I felt sorry for him, having to come back, but it was his own fault and I sort of felt sorrier for me at having been very disappointed not to be able to play in my new greenhouse.

So here we are now - greenhouse up, concrete or mortar put under the gaps between the base and the concrete and it's ready to go. And now I can get excited. When I've got time (hah!) I can go and play, starting with scraping the remainder of the paper off the panes of glass, moving on to taking things into the greenhouse that have been stored in sheds and then putting things up like shelves and fittings.

I then need to work out what is going where. At the moment I have some things I already owned and a great deal of other greenhouse equipment given to me when my parents downsized a couple of years ago. I certainly don't know what everything is, nor how all the bits fit together, so I'm hoping when Dad visits he will remember enough about them to be able to identify things and match them up with each other! Then, finally, that will show where water and power need to get to and M can do the wiring and a builder finish the plumbing. The hose you can see here is operational but will become a tap and some hose outlets and the wiring will become lights and sockets.

A long term project. And I don't expect to use the greenhouse to its fullest capacity for the first few years. It's designed for maximum use eventually. Once you've got a new greenhouse, you're not going to want to upgrade it, believe me.

Yesterday, when the problems were fixed and I could say that I actually had a new greenhouse, was 18th September. The date was quite significant. It was really important to me that I had the greenhouse up by 28th September. There's no plant that required this, no deadline for the plumber to finish the waterworks, no real reason at all. It's just that on 28th September I'll have had the greenhouse here for an entire year. I'm not usually known for my patience, but I think you'd have to admit I've done ok. A year between delivery and actually being able to go inside. After all that, perhaps you can understand why I wasn't going to get excited until the job was done.

The greenhouse project - going up ....

2010-09-09T21:34:00.000+01:00

The greenhouse project - ready at last!

2010-09-07T16:30:00.000+01:00

I'd like to say I exect you'd forgotten about the greenhouse but I don't, really. I must admit I've got rather tired of people asking about it. If you've been following this blog, though, you'll have an idea of the sort of things we were doing first. And that other things have taken over from Life this year.

However - here is the plot - complete with new retaining wall and ready for the greenhouse. A man says he is coming at 9.00 tomorrow to start putting it up but I hardly dare believe it.

Another Beastly Art Exhibition

2010-08-29T09:35:00.000+01:00

Boy, has this year been complicated so far. I think what has happened is that although I am used to juggling, I had not fully understood that I have actually added another element and, unsurprisingly, one or another has been dropped from time to time. I hadn't looked at things this way before but it makes sense of a feeling I've had that I haven't really done anything as well as I usually do. And so it is that Another Beastly Art Exhibition has only two days to run and all I can manage is one photo and a few lines.

The exhibition looks great, as usual, and it's gratifying that even regular customers who've visited our exhibitions for years can still walk in and say "wow!". I really love that we have the wow factor and am proud of it.

Monday is our last day and then on Tuesday I shall be taking my textiles work to hang at Gloucestershire Arts and Crafts Centre in the new Lock Cafe Gallery. Watch this space. I may be more organised about posting to it in future!

I bought a hat!

2010-08-08T17:22:00.002+01:00

I'm amazed it's been more than a month since I last blogged. You would think life had been full-on for all of that time and perhaps M would say that it has, but looking back over the month it doesn't really seem that way to me. It has, though, been very busy since we got back from France, two and a half weeks ago.

The reason for coming back when we did was that I had got behind with my pottery work and have a deadline coming up in the form of Another Beastly Art Exhibition. Although the time needed to make the pots was relatively short, one has to allow a week or two for things to dry, depending on the weather, and then time for firings. I can fire every other day at a pinch but not if I am having to do anything else as unpacking, glazing and repacking can only just be done in a day. So today I turned some fruit bowls and that was the last making I am doing until some time in September. Tomorrow will be for glazing.

I was grumpy about returning from France, not least because I had just got into some new ideas in my textiles work. There are new pieces I was working on there that I haven't even unpacked yet and I can't wait to frame them and see how they've turned out. Working on these pieces led me to ideas for other developments and the frustration was that I knew once I had to interrupt the work, I won't be able to take up where I left off. I'll have to do some more pieces from where I am before the new ideas can be regenerated.

One of the reasons I haven't started the framing is that for the last week I've been building a new website for Gloucestershire Arts and Crafts Centre. We had a webs.com site before and there were many advantages to this, not least that it's free. However, it turned out that there were problems every few months with some UK users not being able to see any webs.com sites for a week or so and since everyone was blaming everyone else for the problem each time I lost confidence in its ever being permanently solved. We were quite possibly losing potential customers because of this so we decided to go for a domain name and a new site. I know my limitations in web building and am thinking I will soon want to investigate CSS but this was a job that needed getting on with so I decided to continue in my usual manner. And I have really loved doing it. This kind of work is really just as creative as any other that I do. They all have their disciplines - certainly making functional pottery is a very disciplined skill - it's just that this is a different sort.

So there's the homepage. And I have to say, I'm very pleased with the result. The homepage is only a taster - do go and look at the rest.

I was telling J, another potter, about this yesterday and saying that I've never had any trouble blowing my own trumpet. Apparently he's the same. M and I agree we had never noticed. It seems to be a British thing that one should not sing one's own praises, but I don't see why not. I'm fair-minded about it. I say when I fall short, point out work that didn't turn out as it should. People don't like that either and rush to say I am a perfectionist. (They may have a point there.) I just feel comfortable in my own skin and with my own talents and don't think it's wrong to say when I think I've made something good. Which is where today's title comes in.

I do, as it happens, have a very large head. Something like seven and three quarters, if that means anything to you. And then in the summer I wear my hair up on top in a bun. So hats are out just when you want something to keep the sun from your eyes. But in Chauvigny market M suddenly spotted some bright pink floppy-brimmed hats and, sometimes conventional and romatic that he is, said how lovely I would look in something like that. "They never fit," I said. "Look!" So he looked at this bright pink floppy-brimmed hat fitting comfortably on my head.

"What I did on my holidays"

2010-07-07T07:38:00.000+01:00

..... by Charlie.

Hermann the German

2010-07-04T09:26:00.000+01:00

“They call me Hermann the German,” he calls

in an ever-so-slightly falsetto stage voice.

I wonder if this is because

he’s introduced himself that way to ‘Them’, too.

His once-perfect English deteriorates now

and German and French (we are all in France) creep in

to his conversation, which is more anecdote than dialogue.

As usual, the stories are peppered with the Big Car Smash

and the Plane Crash and the piece of metal in his arm,

which has been taken out again.

Last year no-one saw Hermann and no Christmas cards

arrived for those who expected them.

We all thought we’d seen the last of him

but now we learn he was in hospital.

He invites me to feel his head (I’m not keen)

where they cut him from here, right down here

and down to here (somewhere in the chest area.)

It’s not clear to us what they did, but

“they took away my driving license!” he chuckles,

“But it’s ok, I still have a Swiss one!” - punchline laughter.

So we have been blessed one more summer by

this genial Europhile historian with impeccable timing,

turning up to camp in our yard just when we are here.

No longer searching for flint tools or taking aerial photographs,

now he is giving away all his positives and negatives,

he tells me. Giving away his flints. Everything.

Everything except his campervan.

Maybe it is better for him to travel hopefully,

believing he’ll find someone to drive him next year,

than to arrive at the knowledge that he won’t,

but I think this was our last meeting

with Hermann the German.

Photographing wildlife

2010-07-02T15:28:00.000+01:00

Followers of this blog and other friends to whom I send links to photos will know that I became a little obsessed with photographing insects last year. I had planned to concentrate on landscape photography but although I did take some good autumn landscape shots, most of my time was spent on insects.

Well, here I am again in photographer mode and I've still got the bug. (Sorry about that. You can stop groaning now.) This year we seem to have even more butterflies than ever and I have been snapping away. Actually, one or two pictures are rather promising. But then, just as I think I'm doing ok with the butterflies, along come some fledgling kestrels. They're not there all the time, of course. And when I go out to find them, the dog inevitably decides he must come too and I think it is he who disturbs them. We had a fantastic view of them flying low just over us when we came back in the car the other day but I haven't been able to get that close.

So - this is perhaps one of the clearest of the batch.

I'm not sure it's my favourite, though. I rather like the ones I captured when two of the young kestrels decided to descend on a crowd of pigeons I hadn't even noticed.

You can see the rest of the photos here.

Camouflage

2010-06-29T16:16:00.000+01:00

Eventually today was the day to return to my set of three landscapes that were begun last September, interrupted for lots of irises and sat around patiently waiting for me. I've been trying to face up to the challenge of continuing something that was already in my head without the sketchbook where I had recorded my ideas (which unfortunately I have left at home in my studio.) Things did not go well at first.

Taking a drink (and a chocolate eclair) outside, I suddenly found myself taking photos of creatures keen to camouflage themselves.

This chap is small - head and body about 8cms long. Being rather dull and plain light brown colours you'd think we couldn't miss him in the lush green grass, but in fact every time we looked away it was quite difficult to spot him.

At first glance I wouldn't have said the plum tree offered much cover to a camouflaged creature unless it was green but then suddenly two things appeared which were surprisingly different from my idea of a plum tree and yet kept losing themselves as soon as I took my eyes off them.

The swallowtail flew off too fast for me to capture his open wings but eventually the goldfinch (kept typing goldfish by mistake!) moved out into the open and I was rather pleased to get a clear shot of him in all his finery.

The same but different

2010-06-28T12:50:00.002+01:00

It's been a long time ...

2010-06-27T19:50:00.000+01:00

... since I posted any poetry here.

This one is new and is, in particular, for M and for S, A, J & P, A & N, who were here with us last year but alas, not this.

Sometimes there are sparrows
chattering in groups, sometimes
woodpigeons coo to their mates,
never too far away from company.
Swallows, or swifts, I’m never sure,
swoop about one after the other
and we have redstarts here,
singing from the trees
severally and together.

And then there is the lark,
flying solo, no need for crowds.
This wide French sky is filled
with his solitary song.
Plunging to earth to begin anew
such melodies that seem to have no repetition,
touching my heart like no other bird.

There is something magic here
encapsulated in this small bird
of midsummer.
Above the bustle on the ground
his hymn to freedom
is the anthem of this place
where weary spirits are renewed,
hopes revived,
and we are regenerated.

There are not many shepherds off the coast of northern France ...

2010-06-22T19:32:00.000+01:00

... so I had no worries about this lovely red sky at about 5.30 UK time today. We had already finished our breakfast and I hadn't got to sleep until about midnight so, as the modern saying goes, do the math. And yet here I am fourteen hours later still capable of conscious thought. Spending five months here last year has changed the place forever for me. As soon as we found ourselves sitting with 'un demi' talking with P in the cafe, I felt as if I hadn't been away. And this evening, as M was feeding Charlie, I thought, "should I water the vegetables now?" Of course there are no vegetables here this year and as we are only able to stay for four weeks there aren't going to be. But even the unpacked boxes, furniture still covered with polythene, to say nothing of the nine and a half months intervening, didn't stop the feeling of continuance.

We have been so fortunate today. Fingers crossed and perhaps tomorrow I will be eating my words, but we have hot and cold water and no leaks. In case this doesn't sound anything very much, I should tell you that M reported that this is the first time this has happened on his return after the winter in the fourteen years he has owned the house. It's fair enough: last September he stuffed old cushions and duvets and loft insulation in bin bags round every pipe he could find, even those which are empty over the winter. We haven't checked the cottage yet, but in the house we use all is well. Not only do we have hot and cold running water and electricity, we have phone and, obviously, internet. No delays this year. I can connect with the world and report that tonight I feel lucky.

Three posts at once

2010-06-16T08:13:00.000+01:00

One advantage of having delayed our trip to France is that we are here for the oriental poppies. There's really nothing like them.

You can see the rest of the set of poppy photos here.

Look at the wings on those pigs!

2010-06-16T08:03:00.001+01:00

Pigs might fly, Jane might get her vegetable plot all tidy and planted at once. Here's the proof.

I haven't been able to grow plants myself this year, not having a greenhouse at the moment, but was able to buy my vegetable plants from the excellent Pound Farm farm shop and plant centre. They have top quality vegetable plants in good varieties at very reasonable prices and thoroughly recommended to anyone in the vicinity. Naturally, the locals appreciate the plants as well and have already started munching on them ....

....though Jane's Patent Slug And Snail Detterrants are doing something to keep them at bay. Copper pipe surrounding tasty plants, eggshells on surface around and coffee grounds on surface immediately around the plants. Out of view, a beer-laden trap. It doesn't stop everything but it certainly slows the attacks and I hope to have the majority of plants surviving. It's not perfect, but the demolished plant on the right hadn't had the coffee grounds and I do think they protect against the very small earth-dwelling slugs to some extent. Last year in France the slugs were getting the first leaves of the newly-sprouted runner beans until I sprinkled on the coffee grounds and after that all grew happily un-munched.

Now I have the vegetable garden planted up there is nothing stopping us going to France. I am, of course, still behind with my work but it will be easier to catch up with it in one go nearer to the exhibition.

Logs on blogs

2010-06-16T08:03:00.000+01:00

This post does what it says on the tin. By popular request (you know who you are!)

For those requiring a little more information - at least one winter's supply of logs provided by M, bringing a fallen branch or two home each evening from his walk with Charlie, now finishing their drying-out under cover during the summer.

A good-enough artist

2010-06-13T10:47:00.001+01:00

On Sundays I try to find time to read one of the magazines I subscribe to while eating my breakfast. Sometimes I question my continuing subscriptions to Crafts Magazine and Ceramic Review. Over the years I've heard so many criticisms of Crafts, in particular from craftspeople. I know what they mean. What appears in the magazine often bears little resemblance to the quality crafts being produced all the time around the country. It's that age-old discussion about art versus craft. Crafts often seems to be more about art than craft as most people think of it.

I'm in danger of getting into the ramble of all rambles here. So many topics branch out from the art/craft discussion. (Thinks: or do they stem from it? What's the difference? Oh dear, that one really will have to wait for another time.) Today's magazine browsing made me think about my own place in things, though, so I will try to stay focussed on that.

I came away from college with a B.Ed. Hons in Art (Textiles). On paper this qualified me to teach Art. Our final year's 'main subject' work was to prepare for an exhibition, dissertation and viva along with other trainee art teachers and the ethos of the textiles department encouraged us to think of ourselves at this point as artists rather than teachers. However, most of our four-year training had been in teaching textiles in schools, where the subject was more usually a craft subject than part of the art department. I applied for a few jobs in art departments but at interviews it soon became clear to me that I was applying for the wrong jobs. I wasn't an art teacher. I really only knew about textiles. Having eventually secured a job to teach textiles, I went on my first pottery summer school course that year and so caught the clay bug and that reinforced my thinking that I belonged with crafts rather than art.

When I began to sell my own work it was framed pictures, embroidered onto a water-colour painted silk or cotton background. Describing my work in those terms I can see how others might have viewed it as art, but at the time I still thought of myself as a craftsperson. I was continuing my journey with clay (though not yet at the stage of selling pots.) I then went to some basic drawing and painting classes where I met and became friends with J, who was teaching me.

I became aware that J and another friend, S (who modelled in clay), would introduce me to people as "another artist". At first I would rather sheepishly try to disagree but I suppose I realised that this wasn't very polite to J and S and began to accept the description. Over some indeterminate period of time I gradually began to describe myself as an artist but all the time I think I was waiting to be challenged on the description by a 'proper' artist.

Friends who had other jobs would often be critical of what they thought was perfectionism. Time after time I would point out the flaws in my latest offerings from pottery summer school and get a tut-tut about it. Then one year I made a particular jug which I thought was a good pot. I said so. I'm not sure people liked that either.

So it was with the artist/craftsperson distinction. I see-sawed my way through the years and through stages in my own work, calling myself a variety of things but none totally comfortably. Stroud Valleys Craftsmen was born and I joined, happily feeling at home with the description. At the same time, my textiles work had evolved into wallhangings which really didn't belong on craft tables but were much more happily viewed on gallery walls. Craft shows were where I showed and sold pots but the wallhangings moved to mixed exhibitions of art. I was a potter and a textile artist. It's what I did, what I do and I still use this description of myself in some contexts.

Sometimes, though, you need a shorter job title and I am now clear, not only in my thinking but also in what I feel, that I am an artist. If you want to get into distinctions, my work with clay is craft work, undoubtedly, my photography is often on an amateur level, but my textiles work is art and I'm definitely an artist in the kitchen. Primarily, though, I'm an artist because I just am. I can't not be. Prevented from creativity in any form I soon become ill-at-ease and probably difficult to live with. Returning to creative work after an enforced break I feel above all a sense that all is right with the world.

So what's with the good-enough artist? Well, I still have what I would call a realistic view of things and others less comfortable with honest self-appraisal might call a lack of self esteem or too much perfectionism. I look through Crafts Magazine and see beautifully made pots and innovative textiles. My less confident self of years ago would have been prompted into self-doubt and feelings of inferiority and perhaps even thoughts of giving up in the face of standards I could never reach. Now, though, I enjoy looking at what is often better work than I can make but without devaluing my own work. I'm not a world-class artist, but I don't need to be. While thinking about all of this, I was reminded of my couselling training and the work of Donald Winnicott. Winnicot developed the concept of the 'good-enough mother', rather than the 'perfect mother', where the good-enough mother's children grow up to be psychologically healthy. I'm not drawing exact parallels between the good-enough mother and the good-enough artist but there is something here about what we think we should be striving for. Perfection isn't necessarily all it's cracked up to be and good enough isn't a put-down, though I think it's often thought of as one. Good-enough is good enough.

Honeysuckle

2010-06-05T08:29:00.000+01:00

Er, that's it, really. You can't smell it from where you're sitting, but at least you can see it.

The greenhouse project - concrete but still not concrete

2010-06-02T12:21:00.000+01:00

I know you have all been on tenterhooks waiting to see the finished concrete. Well, one or two of you have commented that the photos were still not up. So here they are. Concrete more or less finished but the greenhouse itself still not concrete. We're getting there, though.

Last Monday turned out to be the hottest day of the year which meant that the concrete was particularly difficult to get into place before it had set too much. The worst weather for concreting, I am told. There were one or two other hitches, such as one helper not turning up because his wife hadn't passed on a message (!) and M suddenly feeling unwell just as the readimix had arrived. He's fine now, though waiting for clarification from the doctor about what he should be doing now. The answer is currently, nothing until we have clarified things!

But anyway, here is a lovely new stretch of concrete.

The plants in the middle are something of a statement. I am going to have a greenhouse. I don't have one at the moment. This is where I am going to have a greenhouse, with plants in. Here are some plants, to prove it.

Actually, it seemed the safest place to put them, surrounded by copper piping, to protect them from the slugs. Hope to get them out into the garden in the next few days.

In other news .... well, really there is very little other news except that I am still either doing work for the Arts and Crafts centre, trying to catch up with household stuff or being too tired to do my own work anyway. Bit of a grumpy stage, I have to confess. We are delaying our trip to France but even so I don't see when I am going to catch up with my work.

Off to acupuncture this evening, which will no doubt put me right in a couple of days and I hope to get blitzing then. In the mean time, think yourselves lucky I've found a couple of minutes to write here! (Or not; this is not the best-written piece I've posted here, I know.) I'm sad at how little time I have in my life at the moment, particularly because it means I don't get a social life and don't get to see my friends. I know I've seemed to neglect everyone, but it's not intentional, just an unwanted result of having too much to do.

If only I could post a scent. The honeysuckle has been spectacular this year. You can even smell it from an open window on the opposite side of the house.

Greenhouse project - concrete

2010-05-24T08:02:00.000+01:00

I'm sorry I won't be here today; I'm working at the Arts and Crafts Centre. I've never actually seen premixed concrete being delivered and worked on and would very much have liked to. And it's my greenhouse, my garden, my pottery the concrete is surrounding. And I'd have liked to take pictures, for the record. But there we are. The concrete will be here this morning but I won't.

The site is prepared. Water and electricity emerge from the garage and will then go underground and re-appear in the greenhouse in each 'room'.

In front of the pottery (the building that may remind you of a garage) a retaining wall has been built so that the ground just in front can be level enough to wheel a ware trolley out to dry pots in the sun.

Behind the pottery (beside the new fence panels) the path will end up higher but level with the pottery floor, as it will be all round.

And over the main area is laid pig wire to reinforce the concrete.
Voila!

You can probably see now why I have been describing this as so much more than a greenhouse project.

A time of contrasts

2010-05-20T21:18:00.000+01:00

A long time ago I promised to put up some pictures and write about Going Solo, my first solo exhibition. It's now a month after the exhibition finished though it seems longer. I've always enjoyed taking photographs and do actually look at them again, even those from forty years ago. These photos are only a month old but already I need them to keep the exhibition fresh in my memory.

It was a lovely place to exhibit, having perfectly white walls, picture rails all round, large blank spaces so I could arrange the work however I wanted and plenty of white shelves and plinths.

It was especially nice to be able to arrange little groups of work. Being short of space on the card stand I displayed some cards with the wallhangings that they were photos of and this really added something to the colour groupings.

It was also good to have the blue slip design, with its seagulls and fish, near the two remaining water bird hangings in their own self-contained corner. The pottery design arrived the same year as the hangings and they were all very much inspired by the same sorts of ideas.

But that was then. Since then (in fact since just before the exhibition started) I have, as I've said before, been very involved in the new Gloucestershire Arts and Crafts Centre and this has given me an interesting perspective on the exhibition.

I'm struck by the contrast between my first solo exhibition and the work I've been doing on what is above all a group venture. Group events and outlets are, of course, what I'm most used to, apart from my small showroom here at home. One is given a space and inevitably compromises have to be made not only on the amount of work which can be displayed but sometimes about exactly which pieces will blend with the work others are showing. Having a whole, lovely space all to myself to arrange any amount of my work exactly as I wanted was a great pleasure. I'm not a person who believes in modesty for the sake of it and see no shame in saying that I thought my exhibition looked great! It was the sort of display I'd like to walk into a gallery and see. What I'm saying is not so much about the pieces of work themselves, by the way, but about the overall design and impact of the exhibition. Each morning opening up was a delight.

A week flies by and this one did just the same. Suddenly everything was being packed back up into boxes and carted off home again.

From the peace and tranquility (yes, that is a euphemism for not as many customers as I'd have liked!) of a solo exhibition I was plummetted straight back into the hurly-burly of the new arts and crafts centre and, as I've said, I've been spending quite a lot of time on it.

This work involves a certain amount of work on my own at home as I am responsible for much of the admin work but it also involves lots of phone calls and working in the shop, chatting to the other artists, selling to the public and other things involving lots of people contact. I like my space in the shop but it is of course limited in size and I have to select what work to show. I can arrange my own display but not those of other people. So the whole experience is a very strong contrast to that of the solo exhibition.

I enjoy being part of a group very much. I always enjoyed teaching groups in the reintegration centre more than the solo teaching because of working amongst other people. I enjoyed being part of a co-operative shop when it was one. I'm a gregarious sort in general. Early cine films of me learning to swim aged 4 show that even while concentrating on not drowning I was chattering away. And yet - I am constantly wanting time on my own.

Over the years I have come to the conclusion that this sometimes desperate need for solitude has much to do with being an only child. Most other only children I have known well as adults feel much the same. It's not always convenient, especially when you live with someone else. I am very lucky and very happy being married to M and love our life together but as we are both based at home it has taken us a while to work out how to fit our different needs for solitude and company together with one another.

This is suddenly gelled into a concept when I sat down to write this piece. Not just the solo exhibition but also my work in the pottery have a quality which for the moment I'm not going to attempt to explain. When I walk into the pottery to start work in the morning I get the same sort of feeling as when I walked into the gallery to open my exhibition. A sort of inner "aaah ... " accompanied by a feeling of relaxation and well-being.

I'd hate to be marooned on a desert island. I'd last about two minutes. I need human company desperately. I just like to choose when I have it, is all.

What I have been mostly doing lately ....

2010-05-11T14:43:00.000+01:00

... is getting involved at Gloucestershire Arts and Crafts Centre. Here I am in front of my pots in the shop. I have cards elsewhere and a few smaller wallhangings displayed above the pots.

It's all very exciting getting the centre going and it's been a fair bit of work for many of us. As I am going to be responsible for much of the admin, there's been lots to do getting systems organised. Once things are up and running it will all take less time but I have been busy, to say the least.

Today I should have been able to make pots. I'm about a month behind with making my own work and not altogether sure what I will do about it. But in the meantime we have both been struck by a Dreaded Lurgy. Actually, it's only a bad cold, but I am certainly under the weather and not up to anything very physical. It's most frustrating. It's not only a matter of getting behind but also of 'feeding the inner self'. I need to be making some of the time for my own general well-being. Going into the pottery to work feels very restorative these days and I miss it when I can't get in there.

Additionally, I have been living like a hermit lately. The lurgy struck just when I had planned to become a little more sociable and invite people round and go out with others. I'm certain none of them want my germs so once again I'm seeing nobody much, which I'm not happy about.

Hang on in there, folks. I haven't forgotten you all. I'm sure that one day I'll be back to my usual sociable self. In the mean time, I hope this blog is better than nothing and will try to write more frequently.

Life returns ....

2010-04-21T11:04:00.000+01:00

... to normal. In as much as I have what could be called a normal life. But today is the first time this month I've felt I have time to write this blog. It took a bit of doing. Having got out of the swing of it there are actually dozens of things which seemed more urgent for today and at first I thought this would have to be another blogless day. But then I realised that a different approach is needed because there will always be a dozen things to do. We're all familiar (aren't we?) with the concept of prioritising but I think it's something which is easily misused. It tends to acquire a rather mathematical, scientific flavour, to do with order of urgency. Writing my blog is in no way urgent. However, prioritising should be about the things that are most important and they may have some other quality that gets overlooked.

Over the last few months I have kept meaning to write about my bread-making but other things jumped up to be written about and the bread was neglected. I've been making all my own bread, though, since some time in February. One of the great joys of this is that M prefers my bread to most other (although he still feels that proper French bread is superior!) Previously, bread choosing has often been a bit of a compromise as we have different preferences in bought bread. Now, things are easy. Bread-making has also become a kind of symbol of "getting a life" and holding on to it that I set about last year. Gardening is another part of that picture. I have been particularly sad that for about two weeks we had bought bread again, simply because I wasn't home for long enough to complete the process. Yesterday, therefore, in spite of still having mountains of things to do, bread was made and life started to return to normal. It seems a natural step to add blogging today.

I wouldn't want to ally myself too closely with the slow-living movement because slower is not really what I'm aiming for. (Though having gone through about three weeks of much-too-fast-living I can appreciate the point!) I'm really after balance and a certain quality which I am struggling to find the words for this morning (clearly out of practice.) It's related to self-sufficiency but without the connotations of "I don't need anyone" that that phrase seems to have taken on recently. It's to do with being personally involved in the processes and physicality of one's own space. I don't need to grow my own food. I don't feel strongly about eating organically-produced things. I don't fret about a garden having weeds or looking untidy. I just love to be in contact with my own bit of soil and grow things. I like making food from scratch not because I don't trust or like any other type of food but just because it's important to me to feel involved in the process.

Writing a blog - using the many technologies of digital camera, computer, internet, blogging software - doesn't obviously have much in common with growing vegetables or making meals from scratch. There's something here, though, about a sort of hands-on connection with one's life. Writing involves reflection (well, it's probably better if it does!), which is itself a way of connecting to what is going on.

I do want to post pictures and write about Going Solo. I also want to write about the new Gloucester shop. But that is all for another day. Today is for enjoying being at home, doing washing, sowing long-overdue vegetable seeds and getting back in touch with life.

Busy, busy, busy.

2010-03-30T09:41:00.000+01:00

Er, well, that's it really. I'm sad I haven't had time to even write a few lines lately, but some time may come up soon, I hope. What am I busy with?

Firing pots, including new designs ready for exhibition
Publicity and organisation of exhibition
Packing and delivering pots to ByLocal in Cheltenham
Helping prepare room for new arts & crafts shop in Gloucester - opening Friday 2nd April!
Setting up admin for new shop
Packing up my own work for new shop to deliver on Thursday
Support for workers on greenhouse plot!

The greenhouse project - just keeps on growing!

2010-03-21T13:12:00.000Z

Things are moving forward. Now there is a small retaining wall and the area in front of the garage is more or less prepared for the concrete. This will give us an almost level in front of the garage. There will be a minimal slope to allow rainwater to drain off it instead of into the garage. It will be still be quite level enough for me to wheel a ware trolley out onto it to dry pots in the sun.

The other picture shows the soakaway drain that already existed, having had all the broken bits of concrete removed and the whole things stabilised and sited where it needs to be.

You might think this brings us closer to completion of the project, but you'd be wrong! We've decided to continue on the theme of doing a good job while we're at it and go for rebuilding the retaining wall between the greenhouse site and the vegetable plot. It's just as well. The demolition you see here took M no longer than half an hour. The concrete and stone topping on the wall apparently just levered off in one piece and the blocks, which had no kind of footings underneath, came away almost as easily. Extending the project has implications for how long it will take and when we will be able to go away, but each extra step does seem to be much better done now than later. The wall would have been difficult, if not impossible to deal with once the greenhouse is built.

Going solo

2010-03-13T08:43:00.001Z

Things were getting rather stale round here. The last couple of months had brought the lowest sales figures for a long time, partly because I had to turn down at least one opportunity because I was still not back making pots and other outlets had fizzled out for one reason or another. Eventually I fired the kiln the other day, only to have one of the most disappointing firings for a long time. This kiln has been uneven since I had it and there are things I can and do do to counteract that but sometimes it still surprises and therefore greatly disappoints me with how uneven it can be. There are still more things to try, which always makes me hopeful. But a downturn in selling opportunities and sales income together with a downer of a kiln firing didn't make me happy!

There have been things in melting pots, though. One of the melting pots - probably the biggest! - is my own mind. I may have looked idle in the pottery department but I have not been idle in the business planning department. At first sight, the recently offered opportunity to have a gallery all to myself in April looked impractical, especially as there are other things in the pipeline and bearing in mind that I have three missed months of production to catch up on. Yesterday, though, I made a decision. Commit myself to working on sales and being away from my workshop for April in order to get the sales figures lifted. There are opportunities coming up in the autumn, so it's now that I particularly need to give things a lift.

So. My first solo exhibition will be from 13th - 17th April at the Cotswold Craftsmen Gallery, Nailsworth!

I'm extremely excited about this.

But is it Art?

2010-03-07T10:57:00.003Z

When I turned up at Bath College of Higher Education in 1973 it wasn't even called that. I'm not sure it wasn't called Bath College of Domestic Science. It had an annual intake of about 100 domestic science students and 30 textiles students, ostensibly all training to be teachers of those subjects. I don't know what they thought of me. At my interview they asked me what I would do if they didn't give me a place. I replied that I would probably become a secretary. Possibly they were shocked into submission by this answer. I was 19 but if you met me you'd probably have placed me little older than 16. I look back now at that self and naturally parts of my present self were there and had been forming since birth but so much of my artist self (and, to be honest, my adult self) was completely unformed.

In 1973 "Crafts" magazine was launched, but I didn't know about it until 1974. I think it was the textile construction lecturer who first drew it to our attention and I bought one or two copies from 1973 and 1974. In 1975 I started buying every issue and have never stopped. Within the pages of "Crafts" I discovered my artist self as awareness, inspiration and ideas flourished in response to the work I saw there. Many artists and craftspeople I have known over the years have criticised the magazine as being elitist, out of touch and having lost its way and indeed sometimes I've wondered about cancelling my subscription because the world shown in "Crafts" seems so far from my own experience.

Today, though, I started reading through the March/April 2010 issue. Halfway through the magazine I realised that already there were two articles which really speak to me. The first is an article about Edmund de Waal. The piece shown in this link is one that I love but the others in the article (you'll have to buy the magazine to see them) are even better. The other item which really caught me was Moon by Tracey Heneberger. Again, this is a small picture and you'd probably have to buy Crafts Magazine to get the best effect of the piece, but turn the magnification up on your screen and you may be able to see that it is constructed from anchovies, with epoxy, shellac and resin.

I love this piece. No, of course I wouldn't want it in my house, but that's because my house is a 1930 brick-built three-bedroomed affair. I'd love to see it in any waiting room where I have to spend time, though, or any public foyer I have to pass through. The same goes for Edmund de Waal's installations. I don't even aspire to making ceramic work like this. Well, not much. OK maybe a little. OK, I do have a sort of idea I've been playing with for a couple of years for some decorative pieces, not installations, but purely decorative ceramics. I also have ideas for several different styles of functional bowls and glaze colours I'd like to develop too, though. It's good to have the ideas, but they certainly won't all come to fruition.

But is it Art? Or even Craft? I don't propose to embark on the art or craft discussion here, not this time anyway. I will say one thing, though. If someone has made something that I like to look at and would like to look at again and again, I reckon it must be something to do with art.

These two items have made me very happy this morning. Not just because I like them but because they touch something in me that I realise has only recently been allowed to re-emerge after a couple of years of being squeezed almost out of existence by sheer production of work, that only my 'getting a life' has allowed to return. I'd be hard pushed to name it. It has connections to creativity and inspiration but they haven't been absent. Open-ness is the nearest I can come to an explanation at the moment. Open-ness to thoughts and ideas and feelings just for their own sake, not because they must have a place in my current work or projects but just because. Because they feed the creative self.

It's a great feeling.

Large and imperfectly formed!

2010-03-06T08:48:00.000Z

Actually, it's not badly made. I did all the cutting and shaping and M did all the joining and putting up. I was still getting back into the hang of using my jigsaw so there are certainly uneven bits in some of the curves though you can't see those from this picture. And the point of making this towel rail was indeed that it is large. We found that you just can't buy large towel rails. What do people hang their bath towels on? Old ones, I suppose. Or maybe they all buy those radiator-types. But for our bathroom we just wanted a straightforward wooden towel rail, and here it is.

Small but perfectly formed.

2010-03-04T14:12:00.002Z

Well, not me, obviously! But take a look at Chicken Pots. This new site is just for online sales of, well, chicken pots! The limit of five products on the free webs.com sites makes them just right for focusing on one design of pottery. I must say I'm particularly pleased with how the site has turned out.

I've only really got plenty of stock in this one design, but have ideas for more mini-sites in due course.

If seasons are colours ...

2010-03-03T08:08:00.001Z

... then Spring is yellow.

Something cheering

2010-02-24T14:09:00.000Z

I know this looks as if it's at the wrong angle, but it's not. The horizontal leaves are last year's crocosmia leaves that haven't been cut back. What's cheering is the hellebore buds. I have several hellebores that flourish in the bed the kitchen sink looks out at and they're the first thing to flower in my garden each year.

M has a saying:
He who says Spring starts on the first warm day has a longer summer than he who says Winter finishes on the last cold one. I daresay we'll have more cold days and who knows, maybe even more snow, but this morning was mild, dry and at times sunny.

Batts R us

2010-02-20T08:45:00.000Z

I'm sorry about the title, but I couldn't resist.

As I mentioned recently, I've been making my own batts. You can buy them ready-made, of course, but large ones cost about six pounds each. I made nine large ones, ten small ones and four pot boards from one eight by four sheet of marine ply which cost me less than thirty-five pounds. Do the math, as they say in the US. It's not only the money, though. I really enjoyed working with wood again.

Since M came to live here I've hardly so much as sawn one cut of wood because he has skills in traditional blokish things like building and working with metal and wood so I have mostly handed things over to him that he can do. What he doesn't have, though, is finesse of measurement so when we finally decided that we would have to make a new towel rail, a sensible sized replacement for the broken one being quite impossible to buy, I became a little more involved. First, M suggested I provide him with a template for the rounded ends of the pole supports. I asked if he would like me to cut them with the jigsaw as well and, slightly to my surprise, he agreed. He has a jigsaw, of course, but I've had my own for about twenty years so I fetched it out of the cupboard from exactly where I knew it was kept (disorganised, him? surely not!) and set to. It took a little while to remember the best way to use it, but I really enjoyed working with wood again.

Once upon a time, when I was a full-time teacher, in the days when school holidays were holidays for teachers as well as children, I did all my own DIY. I didn't do any plumbing or electric work but there wasn't much else I didn't have a go at. Not just DIY, either. In my twenties I learned to make a lot of different things from different materials. I must have earned a reputation for it, too, because I remember buying a rather nice little rush-seated footstool and being asked whether I had made it myself. I think people expected that if you could make something, I had. It wasn't far off the mark. Gradually, though, work took a larger part of my time and in recent years I've hardly had time for anything else. So it was a great joy to be making the towel rail components. Having cut all the pieces, I used my electric sander to round the edges further. The project now awaits the next stage.

Having got out the jigsaw, this led naturally to the decision to make my own batts. Throwing batts have to fit tightly onto the wheel and the usual way is to have two metal pins in the wheel and two matching holes through the batts so that they just sit in place. I had never had a wheelhead with the holes in before so my last lot of batts were cobbled together with a home-grown system of four blocks screwed to the back of the batt in such a way that it gripped over the top. It worked fairly well but over the years the batts have warped and slightly shrunk so that the fit is not so tight and some of the batts go up and down as they go round. So - new wheel, new batts.

Cutting the rounds was fairly easy. They're not perfect, of course, but they don't have to be. Drilling the holes was more difficult. There were not many that were exactly right first time and I still don't really know why! It wasn't difficult to enlarge one of the holes in the right direction, though, and all the batts fit just right on the wheel. I shall be using them next week.

Making yoghurt

2010-02-16T18:08:00.004Z

About twenty-five years ago V bought me a yoghurt maker. I took to it straight away and used to make my own yoghurt all the time. I think I stopped when I got married and had to share my under-the-counter fridge with one and a half others (husband and ten-year-old stepson) and there just wasn't room in the fridge for the yoghurt tub. That was over twenty years ago.

I noticed the kit in its box in a cupboard recently and decided that either I had to start making yoghurt again or it had to go. I now have a larger fridge, so why not? I've googled and found that you can't get these Deva Bridge yoghurt makers any more, which is a great pity. Apparently you now have to have electric kits with individual pots. This way is so much better.

The kit consists of an insulated pot, a milk saver and a thermometer. You start with a little live yoghurt as a starter. The instructions say as little as 1 teaspoon will do. The fresher this starter the better. You then put your milk in a pan with the milk saver, bring to the boil, turn heat down and simmer for three minutes. Remove the pan from the heat and leave the milk to cool until the temperature drops below the top line on the thermometer. (If it drops below the bottom line, reheat the milk.)

Gradually blend the milk into the yoghurt starter, stirring all the time. Put the two lids on the pot. Apparently the curve of the inner lid, together with the channel in the rim, collects some of the condensation, but I'm not sure this would be completely necessary.) Leave for five hours.

Yoghurt.

It's a little difficult to photograph yoghurt but I think you can see the two curves on the spoon I stuck into the pot, which you wouldn't get with milk.

Fresh yoghurt is deliciously sweet. The instructions say that the acid taste will start after about three days. I remember only the first day as being actually sweet, though. You can flavour and sweeten your home-made yoghurt, of course, though I plan to have it just as it is, on muesli as I usually do.

POSTSCRIPT

There's good news and bad news. The bad news is that after 25 years of being careful, this morning I managed to catch the edge of the yoghurt thermometer with the dishcloth, sweep it to the ground where, of course, it broke. The situation is rescued, however.

Looking at the instructions that came with the yoghurt maker, I found the temperatures that were indicated by the thermometer. The top line, below which the milk must cool, is 49 deg C and the bottom line, below which it must not cool, is 43 deg C. Good news follows, though. By very happy chance, I was given a digital food thermometer from Lakeland Limited for Christmas, so it will do the job perfectly. (I do have, as I have mentioned here before, a jam thermometer but one of the ways in which I find them useless is that the line above which the liquid must come for accurate measurement of temperature is higher than I will ever have a pan of milk for yoghurt.)

More good news is that the yoghurt is still just as sweet this morning. And finally, although the directions say to leave the yoghurt making for five hours, by this morning it was considerably thicker than yesterday.

I'm still very sad at breaking the original thermometer, though.

If Winter Comes .....

2010-02-14T11:50:00.001Z

Not so long ago people used to say that we didn't have real winters any more. Then last year we had some serious snow for a week or so and people said it was a proper winter. Now we have winter. I don't remember hearing so many people in so many ways complaining of the winter for a long time. I really hate the cold. I don't cope well with it. This week I have been working in the unheated end of my reinforced concrete pottery doing woodwork (which I will write about some other time.) We insulated most of it a couple of years ago but the cold naturally comes up through the floor and the wooden doors and, of course, through the walls too eventually and it is perishing in there. I've been working up to an hour at a time until my feet (mostly) and hands and back can't stand it any more, by which time I end up feeling angry. M understands I am just raging because I am cold but I don't expect it makes it any nicer for him!

At the other end of the cold spectrum, if it is only just colder than I need, I tend not to notice for a long time but get progressively chilled through until I am just not functioning properly. At this point I usually think "I'm not functioning properly. What's the matter?" and after a couple of minutes work out that I have got cold. I then need heat, rather than warmth, to get warm again and then I can feel my brain perking up and starting to interract with the outside world again.

It's for this reason that I keep my house warmer than a lot of people. Nothing excessive. 21degC in any room where I am sitting still, because that's when the chill starts. I suspect that other people on low budgets don't pay for such high temperatures, though, and I can end up chilled after a visit to friends' houses. We're all different in our reactions to hot and cold. One degree lower is enough for me to chill through but I think I'm probably in a minority. As I wrote a few weeks ago, we are experimenting with having most of the house slightly cooler and being disciplined about shutting the doors on the rooms where we sit and I think it's working. I seem to have saved £10 per week on gas and electricity in January compared with December by doing this. I may turn the thermostat down a little more. So long as the radiators in the sitting room and study are turned up and the doors kept shut, I should be able to avoid the slow chill process.

So anyway, we've all noticed it's winter and the forecast doesn't promise anything different happening any time soon. What is different, though, is the light and this really does help how we all feel. We've had little bits of sunshine here and there last week, though they don't last long. Yesterday afternoon we had one such spell and set out to take some photos, but by the time we got to Cherington Lake the sun had gone.

In spite of the returning dullness, though, the sight of massed snowdrops was immensely cheering. I've been thinking of making a snowdrop picture and yesterday's photos may just be enough to get me started on one.

...can Spring be far behind?

Don't blink or you'll miss it

2010-02-10T16:28:00.000Z

The last time my ovens were this sparkling was when they were new. Oven cleaning is a domestic chore I've never managed to get into a routine, sadly. We had a scheme when this cooker was new that M would clean it every Monday, but somehow that was never convenient and it just got left! We did have one big blitz a year or so ago, but to be honest it still wasn't that good, especially on the upper and back sides. So when Alex Foster tweeted that he had had his oven cleaned and showed a photo on Twitpic, I got quite excited. More excited than I was about picking up the silk dupion to finish my new textiles pieces or the arrival of a new pair of shoes.

I think I should digress here. I rarely buy shoes. On the whole, I hate the things because I find them uncomfortable. I have been living in blissful unawareness that I am wearing shoes since I discovered Crocs but the Cayman is unsuitable for rainy or very cold weather and the styles designed to cope with these conditions just don't fit the bill for comfort in the same way. So I've been looking for a pair of shoes that can be work when it rains that have that same quality of not reminding me every thirty seconds that I am wearing shoes. It's been a difficult search. My feet seem an odd shape. So when I eventually tracked a pair down, although they were expensive, I decided to splash (oops, sorry!) out. I mean, I'll have them for years and years, and the difference between comfort and discomfort sometimes just has to be paid for. In case you're wondering what they're like, my new red shoes can be seen here. Well, at least until they go out of the catalogue, I guess.

So I was quite pleased with my new shoes. And really a bit excited about the silk dupion. But much, much more excited about the idea that I could pay someone to do a really thorough job of cleaning my oven. How sad is that!

I hope very much not to need their services again, but in case anyone in my area has the same problem, Cotswold Oven Valeting was who I used. They're not the cheapest, but they do work in my area. You may well be able to find someone a little cheaper if they are a member of The Association of Approved Oven Cleaners but sadly, the company that said it covered Gloucestershire didn't cover my bit of Gloucestershire. I'm so pleased that such an organisation exists, though.

I have a brand new magic oven cleaning cloth from Lakeland Limited and I hope this will help me keep my oven sparkly clean if only I can be disciplined enough to use it regularly. Time will tell.

The greenhouse project - well, I'm impressed ....

2010-02-08T17:12:00.001Z

... but I accept that you may not be. I mean, it's not a very exciting photo, really, and unless you're actually on the ground, perhaps you can't get a proper feel of the site, but for me, today's work (not mine, I hasten to add) has definitely turned the spot into a Site. Two trailer loads of subsoil were duly hoiked up to the tip, the last trip in snow, and the site is now somewhere near to being levelled. You can see the whole area which will be receiving new concrete. A little more excavation and a lot of working out of levels is now needed, but I understand that it may not be necessary to actually remove any more stuff from the site. The next job (when it is not snowing) will be for M to work out the exact levels all round where concrete will be deposited. At the same time we are ready to get our builder in to take a water pipe from the pottery (that's a garage to you) underneath where the greenhouse will be and for M to do the same with some electric cable.

The weather will need to improve even for these preliminary tasks, let alone any concreting, but rather like the first hellebore buds that I've spotted in the garden, this is a sign that growing things are on their way.

Cavalry

2010-02-07T15:33:00.000Z

Everyone needs the arrival of the cavalry once in a while.

The forecast promised a dry weekend so M hired a pneumatic drill to break up the old concrete on various levels that's going to be replaced by new and on part of which my new greenhouse will one day reside. He knew he would need a bit of help shifting the stuff up to the tip but then someone responded to my offer of hardcore on Freegle and said he would load the rubble onto the trailer as it was created.

So on Saturday morning M went to work. To begin with it was not promising. The first bit of concrete he tried seemed very sandy and the drill just went downwards rather than breaking anything up. Fortunately, as he moved back the concrete took on a more expected texture so his drilling work was breaking the stuff up into chunks. Just as his spirits were lifting again, the Freegle chap said he had hurt his back and couldn't collect the stuff. We had started loading the trailer so M took the rubble over for him, but he then said he didn't want any more.

M had expected to do the breaking up over the weekend and ask for help with the taking away but it became apparent that the two jobs needed doing in tandem. The person we had hoped to get helping seemed out of contact so it looked like M would be working alone. I tried some loading into the trailer but it wasn't doing my back or ribs any good, so I wasn't going to be able to help any more.

We were going out in the afternoon so it wasn't a long day's work, but even so M made great progress:

So, we bathed, changed and went and had tea and cake to celebrate J's birthday. Very pleasant company, delicious cake and progress had been made on the concrete work so we felt pleased with the day. However, shortly after returning home we had yet more icing on cake in the form of a phone call from the cavalry, who had been out of mobile signal range all day but had now got our call for help and would arrive on Sunday at 9.30 a.m. Hurray!

The cavalry has never been so welcome nor done such a wonderful job. M has discovered that he is even less fit than the last time he did this sort of stuff three years ago but when D got to work, M realised just how much difference 35 years makes! Not only that, but the bit M had removed on Saturday turned out to be of rather lesser quality and thickness and the next bits were really hard going, even for a fit 32-year-old.

Fortified by scrambled egg and beans, they worked on in the afternoon and by the time they stopped work had got much more done than M had expected. As well as the main area, old concrete has now been dug up behind the pottery and in front, where it had been rising up over the last six or seven years so that opening the big doors was sometimes a bit of a struggle. Instead of having to make endless 40-minute round trips to the tip, a new home was found for the hardcore where some hardstanding is being created, so it really was an excellent day's progress.

Next: removing the excess soil and rubble at the back of the site, but that is for another day.

Exciting things are happening ...

2010-01-31T18:57:00.000Z

I have at last finished my new big 'canvas' and I'm quite excited about the result. I can't remember which TV programme it was where someone regularly said, "I love it when a plan comes together," but that is basically me. I do spend many, many hours of my life planning things - meals, trips, budget and, of course, work. It could be a reflection of the time I spend planning or the determination which is typical of an Aries personality, but my plans usually do come together.

This one's been a long time in the making. Faithful followers of this blog may remember my writing about artist's block and then how I had the answer and the answer is silk dupion. (I know, I know, you thought it was 42.) Well, here is the last sneak preview of my new large canvas showing the silk dupion. What you don't see is that the dupion covers a framework.

This has been an interesting learning experience. I spent some time (while we were in France) making the first three frames for a set of landscapes. Working out how to stretch the dupion over the frame without a line from the inside edge of the frame showing on the front took quite a bit of fiddling about. Then when I went into the art shop to buy card to make my Christmas cards, I discovered that one can buy the sides ready cut, mitred and prepared for joining. This was such an exciting discovery that I immediately bought some of the smallest size to experiment with.

The size of the frames and the time of year and the general theme of irises immediately inspired me and I have now made two sets of three small pieces based on iris reticulata. These little chaps are so joyful - how can you not love them? I'm rather pleased with my two sets as well as the large piece. So then I had seven finished pieces to frame.

The frames do indeed join up really easily. I've since invested in a staple gun to make it easier to attach the silk to the frame. I've dusted off my jigsaw (well, to be fair it didn't need dusting off because I keep it in its original box) and this speeded up cutting the hardboard for the back.

The teaser photos are meant to be just that, however, I am so excited about the new work that I am thinking of posting just one picture of one of the small pieces sometime soon. A little more thought is needed.

The course of true love never did run smooth

2010-01-29T13:50:00.000Z

I think I will probably end up in love with my Whisper wheel but it has not been an easy start. If I have more than one problem of the same sort my distress tends to escalate exponentially and so it was with the Gremlins. So when my Whisper wheel didn't, I may possibly have overreacted but I may possibly be forgiven for doing so.

The really stressful aspect of the problem was the completely unknowable timescale of getting to speak to someone about the problem. As I mentioned before, the people at the suppliers had been off sick since before Christmas and were still unable to get up and into work. Eventually, though, they were back at work during the course of the week (although still sounding a bit rough, to be honest) and I was able to speak to people who knew things.

I had been adamant that a brand new wheel when taken out of its original packing should have been left in a perfectly working state and therefore I was insisting on a replacement but Mike at Potters Connection reminded me that they had taken the wheelhead off to drill holes for fixing batts and said perhaps they had not tightened it up quite enough, the 'key' for the wheel being still in its packing at the bottom of the box. He was most apologetic for this and was willing to travel down from Stoke to Stroud to see to it if I had still not been happy. However, M and I took it all out of the box again and although I didn't really feel there was any tightening to do, after trying, the clonk had gone. I was really very glad not to have to make the poor man make the journey when he clearly still wasn't feeling his best.

One very happy and entirely unexpected discovery was that at least one of my splash trays from previous Shimpo wheels was compatible. This is good because I have small strips of stainless steel bolted to the sides for scraping hands and because I like to swap splash trays when changing clays rather than thoroughly cleaning the tray out. As you can see in the photo, thorough cleaning of splash trays is not my forte.

So - all well and good? Well, no, not really. In case your nerves can't stand it, perhaps I should add that it is all well and good now, but it wasn't immediately. We put everything back where it was wanted, M moved shelf brackets that were now too low for the new wheel to fit under and I started to work. The previous day I made the first attempt at throwing for a couple of months and although my rib injury was complaining, I had decided that doing stuff might be the way to full recovery now rather than resting it and not doing stuff, so I was keen to follow up by making the lids to go with the casserole dishes of the previous day.

I could not throw. I just could not centre the clay. First, I thought it must be because the wheel is slightly higher and I was working at a different height, but we tried raising the chair on some blocks and it made no difference. Then I thought perhaps the clay had somehow (though I couldn't think how) become uneven and that was causing the problem. So I took myself and the clay through to the cold end of the pottery and tried a piece on the old wheel. Perfectly alright. I was convinced (as was M) there must still be some problem with the wheel. I phoned a potter friend, who said he thought perhaps it was just that the wheel and I needed to get acquainted and then I phoned Potters Connection who said more or less the same thing. Give it a few days, they said. This was not encouraging to someone who could really only do an hour or so a day.

Eventually I saw that I had no option, so I went back in to try again. And this is where some kind of explanation formed itself. I studied what was happening and realised that the new wheel is much faster than the old one. I had been trying to throw as if the wheel was identical. Additionally, I decided that the foot pedal, although not appearing particularly light of touch, was in fact sensitive in at least a different way, so it was possible that a very slight increase in pressure as I leant forward was changing the speed. I made the appropriate adjustments and hey presto! of course I can now throw again.

All of this would make me feel rather stupid, you can imagine, were it not for what I think is the explanation. I've been aware for a long time that I have a very particular connection between mind and body. In some ways the connection is stronger and clearer than for some people but in others there's just something missing. For some reason, noticing an 'obvious' increase in speed had not been straightforward for me. I find it difficult, at this point at least, to explain what I mean by this but I am fairly sure that it's not unrelated to other mind/body difficulties. How many other people do you know, for instance, who feel motion sickness for the first two or three weeks of driving a new car? It's always happened to me. I have other peculiar difficulties here and there which add up to some kind of problem between mind and body. None of them are too severe, but they can, as in this case, require concentration to overcome.

So here we are, my Whisper and I, after almost two years of my wanting to own one and after so many initial difficulties. I've always thought Shakespeare meant that if there aren't a few problems, it's not true love so I'm beginning to feel very encouraged by overcoming what seemed like rather serious problems. The Whisper really does whisper. Gone are the days of having to play CDs at full volume and needing to select music that does not vary in volume. I can now once again play symphonies and concertos without losing everything except the ff bits under the twangy buzz of the wheel. I can choose the music, or silence, that most suits my mood.

It already feels different. Making pots is not just a mechanical thing - one's inner processes always affect the quality of the work. Over the last two years my predominant inner process while throwing pots has been a rather tense struggle to ignore the horrible buzzy groaning that filled the pottery. I had thought that a lot of the tension came from the pressure I was putting on myself to make sufficient work but now I remember why I love making this work and I think I had underestimated the effects of the noise. There is a particular mixture of physical skill, intention of design and spiritual contemplation that leads to making good pots on the wheel. I think my Whisper and I might be on the way to achieving it.

Phew!

2010-01-29T09:58:00.001Z

We seem to have expelled, or at least calmed, the gremlins for now, but I don't want to say it too loudly.

Photoshop CS4 works just fine on Windows 7, which is on the laptop, which is what I bought it for, so I suppose I shouldn't mind too much. I do, though. It's a very expensive product and it *should* have worked ok on Windows XP. I spent at least two days in total working through various steps and talking to people on tech support and eventually found numerous threads on internet forums where people basically said that none of these workarounds or fixes actually work and this is Really Not Very Good, You Know, or words to that effect. I agree. But I have no more energy to pursue the problem since I do now have a solution in the form of a working copy on my Windows 7 laptop.

A very nice chap from the camera repair company phoned me to find out in more detail exactly what problem I was experiencing with the compact camera and discuss with me about the options for repair and that I should check whether my rechargeable batteries were still up to scratch before sending it back to them again should I need to do so. He replaced the flash unit, though I think he was unconvinced that the problem lay there, but anyway the camera returned pronto and works just fine now.

I had, as usual, a bit of a runaround from Dell. I don't really blame people who live thousands of miles away for not understanding what the weather is doing here right now but I did rather object to being told that the courier could not collect the laptop because of the difficult weather conditions and no, he certainly couldn't just come the next day but a trip would be rescheduled. Apparently, someone had to drive to my house with a box and another someone had to drive to my house to collect the box once I had placed the laptop in it. Naturally, none of this was true. There were no adverse weather conditions, as I knew, and as usual the arrangement is that the courier brings the box, I place the laptop in it and then he takes it away. On this occasion, though, I was Very Cross on the phone and Dell said they would send an engineer to replace the CD/DVD drive instead of collecting the machine. CitiLink, who were the couriers involved on this occasion, phoned me the next day and apologised that the driver had simply run out of time and would be arriving that morning. They were pleasantly understanding when I said they needn't bother any more. Sod's law said the engineer was then genuinely stopped by snow a couple of days later! Eventually another engineer arrived after the snow and duly replaced the drive. He also spotted a nasty little program called RoxioBurn that Dell like to give away free and that may have been conflicting with Windows Media Player and causing further problems so we removed that at high speed. CD/DVD drive now working perfectly.

Incidentally, the first time I asked Dell for tech support on the faulty drive, the guy wanted us to go through writing to DVD to find where it didn't work and said to start up this RoxioBurn. I said I didn't use it and would prefer to use Windows Media Player as usual. Amazingly, I got the reply, "Ma'am, we do not usually support Windows Media Player and I have never used the program, ma'am, so we should use RoxioBurn." I pointed out that the thing should work with Windows Media Player and he conceded. I found it astonishing, though, that someone trained in tech support should not ever have even used Windows Media Player. For the connoisseur, I'm sure there are plenty of special programs which produce better results but for most Joe and Jane Bloggs, WMP is perfectly adequate.

What else? Ah yes .....

Gremlins

2010-01-20T08:27:00.000Z

Oh boy, is my house inhabited by gremlins at the moment! The laptop and compact camera have swiftly been followed by Photoshop CS4 which will still not load properly after a day and a half of tech support and delving into the depths of System32 and then to cap it all I unpacked my new Whisper wheel and it didn't. Whisper, that is. It went "clonk clonk." I phoned the suppliers but only reached a hapless bod whose job is not normally in the office but who had gone in to answer the phone as the other two have been in bed with flu since before Christmas. I'm sorry for them; that's a long time still not to be able to get out of bed. But I'm probably sorrier for me.

This last has rendered me somewhat indecisive about work. Should we get the new wheel out of the workshop end of the pottery where we have only just put it and replace with the old one and then try to create some order and eventually try making pots again, or should we leave it in the workshop, optimistic that the flu-sufferers will recover rapidly and help with the problem? In the mean time I could continue with textiles work full time instead of the planned half days. I still don't know. I waver. It probably partly depends on how much time I have to spend on technical problems. Today an engineer sent by Dell should be arriving to replace the CD/DVD drive in the laptop, time as yet unspecified. And I should really plough on with the Photoshop problems. It's just snowed for an hour or so, which doesn't make the pottery feel inviting. Perhaps I will leave the decision for another day.

In the mean time I am quite excited about my new work. Here's another sneak preview. For the time being (by which I mean this year) I am sticking to the arrangement I've held to for the past eleven years - new textiles work doesn't get shown anywhere until it's been seen at Another Beastly Art Exhibition, but I think perhaps showing small areas one at a time doesn't count. It's a good compromise between showing you nothing and letting you see what I'm pleased about.

Economy of scale

2010-01-17T11:38:00.001Z

I am making trousers. Before you start wondering how trousers for a large-scale woman can be more economical, would it have been any better if I had called this post "bulk sewing"? No, I thought not. But put all those images aside and you may understand. It's actually much quicker to make several garments concurrently than one after the other.

You get this effect even more if there are two of you working together. In the late seventies and early eighties, when I was first teaching, I used to go and stay with my parents for a week or so during the school holidays. I would take clothes to make and usually my own sewing machine. Mum and I would make two or three garments for each of us in four or five days. One person would be stitching, one pressing and pinning and we would hand things backwards and forwards between us. It was astonishing how quickly the garments came together. As my art work filled more of my time, sparing a week for dressmaking became too difficult and we got out of the habit. I've usually made more than one garment at once since then, though.

I've never had five things on the go, but as I was trying to decide which of the trousers were the most urgent to make, I came to the conclusion that making five was not so daft. (I'd like to point out that I could probably have made ten pairs if I'd used all the trouser material in my possession, but lines have to be drawn somewhere.)

I am a person who takes naturally to economies of scale. Apparently by no means everyone does. Many friends shake their head in puzzlement at the idea that I will happily set to and make a batch of ten servings of some dish or other and freeze eight of them. To me, the idea that if the day has not gone to plan or I am in the middle of some work that takes me well into the evening, I can easily find something in the freezer that just needs heating up is a real plus.

I miscalculated once. I picked as much spinach as was ready, weighed it and then worked out that there was enough for three times the recipe I had in mind. I bought the ingredients. I did feel surprised at the tins of tomatoes but remembered that the recipe title included the phrase "rich tomato sauce" and that this was achieved by lots of cooking down. I started cooking. As I was turning in all the tins of tomatoes, alarm bells began to ring. I looked at the recipe again. "Serves 10." So we had thirty portions of spinach and ricotta in rich tomato sauce. It was good, though. And I'm often surprised and disappointed to find I don't have any in the freezer any more.

New work

2010-01-16T08:23:00.000Z

Well, it's been a funny old week, but I have at last got started on some new work. My rib injury still isn't completely healed but in any case the outer area of my pottery has been too cold to work in and the snow in the yard prevented easy moving of stuff which had been dumped in there so I decided it was best to focus on textiles work. On Monday I found all kinds of essential things to do first because it's always scary returning to something I haven't done for a while, particularly textiles work. I always worry that I won't be able to do it any more. There was a nasty half hour when I got up into my attic studio when I really felt I couldn't, but then I realised that I was just attempting the wrong piece of work and set about the right piece!

I had painted these irises way back in the summer but now the time was come to start adding thread. This small area was the first. I'm happy so far.

Twinkle, twinkle

2010-01-09T14:11:00.001Z

Silver and gold

2010-01-08T13:47:00.000Z

I've always been attracted to shiny things and as a child always wanted to know if things were "real" gold. Silver and gold have been embellishing my textiles work for a long time and it's probably something like ten years since I've used metal lustres on my pottery too. Sometimes customers at the market say things like "those stars aren't real gold, are they?" and I'm pleased when they look impressed to hear that they are.

Do you remember the children's hymn, "Daisies Are Our Silver" ? I once embroidered some very mini cushions (about 4cms x 6cms) each with the appropriate flower and line of the hymn. Just one of those textiles projects one does that nobody else knows what to do with ;) Those cushions were probably the first artwork I made using metallic thread. Recently I've been working on things that have no glitter or beads but I can't imagine that there isn't something sparkly just round the corner.

In the mean time, "silver and gold" was the phrase that jumped into my head yesterday morning when the first sun hit the snow-covered, frozen trees. These photos are some of a set which can be seen here. More snow pictures are here; these were mostly taken while it was snowing or just after. They have a quality of their own and I'm glad I've got them, but the silver and gold images lift my heart in a way that the very snowy pictures can't.

I must have been a magpie in a previous life!

O Stroud! Where is thy grit?

2010-01-05T16:39:00.002Z

I'm sure for many reading this, this picture of a snowy road will look like nothing much. It's notable, though, because I don't think I've ever seen the road outside our gate in this state. In fairness to Gloucestershire County Council, I have to say that roads are usually gritted hereabouts. Snow was forecast for this evening here and perhaps that was what led to the problem. I set out at 11.50 to pick up a friend to take her into Stroud. It began to snow at about 11.55. I made my way to my first destination where I was probably for about 10 minutes. By the time I came out, the roads and pavements in Stroud were covering up with snow and very slippery underfoot so I made my way to Withey's Yard, fired up my mobile and summoned the cavalry. M and Charlie arrived about 25 minutes later with my Yaktrax. I was then able to negotiate through Stroud, back to the carpark.

We took J home and then headed for Stroud. Lots of tail-lights ahead, so we tried a different route. More tail-lights. Luckily a helpful chap made his way through the snow to tell us that there was an accident on a junction ahead (accounting for both roads being blocked) and we were near enough to a junction to reverse and find an alternative route. Having planned a bit of a stock-up, we headed for the supermarket, where the shelves were completely empty of all vegetables except a few potatoes, onions, parsnips and marrows. Milk was just as low. Apparently everyone had descended a couple of hours earlier. We found most things on our list and headed home.

By now most roads were fairly well jammed. This is one of the delights of Stroud: if one central road has any kind of hold-up, the whole town will grind to a halt within fifteen minutes. We spotted a likely shortcut, avoiding the queues on the main road and made it home down a slightly snowy road by about 2.00. Once in the driveway, I need my Yaktrax on again to get from the car to the house.

Just in time. Barely fifteen minutes later and cars were having problems getting up and down the road. At least two cars slid backwards into other cars. Some have been abandoned, as you see here. Since then cars have gone both up and down the road but often only by snaking from side to side and others have either turned round or abandoned their journey.

I've seen it said somewhere on the web that some people are happy that the UK doesn't spend money preparing for bad weather that would most likely not happen. They feel it's a waste of resources that could be spent on things which definitely will happen. I do not share this view. We are lucky - we got our shopping and all got home without any mishaps and unless there is a power cut, can happily survive at home now for many days. But many are not so lucky. There will be people spending the night somewhere other than where they planned to tonight, that's for sure. There will be others who were planning to shop later who may now not have the supplies they need. There may be others still who are ill and need medical or other help which is not able to reach them. I'd prefer that resources were set aside in preparation for bad weather. If we don't need the grit, surely it will keep till we do?

As I type this (about 4.30) the sound of whining engines and spinning wheels makes its way periodically through the double-glazing. I can't see things improving in a hurry.

Something to look at

2010-01-05T08:43:00.001Z

Sometimes pictures are enough.

Happy. New. Year.

2010-01-01T09:44:00.000Z

I'm happy. I hope you are too. Nothing exciting or exhilarating has happened, but I'm just happy in a quiet, contented sort of way. The dog and I are up and ensconced in the study with the door shut. We (M and I, not the dog and I) started shutting the sitting room door when we had opened up the fireplace as it naturally created a draft. The sitting room is also M's domain, in that he has his desk and computer in there. Recently I started shutting the study door for the same reason and have found the experience remarkably liberating. I think I've spent the last ..... almost six years! goodness! ... since M first arrived here, trying not to be too antisocial while at the same time yearning for time on my own. I seem to have let go of whatever feelings restrained me from simply shutting the door and now realise that this simple action goes a long way to creating a little more space to myself.

I also plan to turn the central heating thermostat down a degree or two. It's in the hall so this will affect the hall, landing and any rooms which have their door open. We can then keep the doors shut and the radiators turned up in the rooms we are actually using and need to be warmer. I had great resolve last January to keep the hatch to my large attic room shut when the room was not expected to be in use but the reality turned out to be that I am always expecting it to be in use as there is always ironing or sewing or sorting or some other work up there that I hope to get round to today. The hatch stayed open. It's become clear, though, that the radiators work efficiently when turned up so I hope to reinstate the plan this winter and keep the hatch shut. When I actually go up to do something will be the time to open the hatch and turn up the radiator. Not exactly a New Year's Resolution, but at least a plan. I will report back on my success!

I love the sense of the new that I get on 1st January. I'm filled with anticipation and optimism that there are new possibilities, most of which I'm probably not even aware of. It's rather like the start of each new day. I'm very much a lark rather than an owl (which is why I've been up more than an hour even though we didn't get to bed till after 1.30) and towards the end of the day start running out of energy and oomph. I'm learning to recognise this rather better and when I feel downhearted and dispirited in the afternoon or evening I try to remind myself of this. When I get up I nearly always feel ready to take on anything and able to achieve everything. It may not be realistic but it's a pretty good way to start the day. Expand that, and you have how I feel at the beginning of a new year. I have heard all the arguments about dates being a man-made concept and therefore insignificant, but I have always had a very powerful sense of change and possibility with the turn of the new year. Underneath the man-made number structure is, after all, the natural year and the sense of cycles and regeneration. Yes, regeneration is more naturally associated with spring, but the fact that we've turned the corner from the shortest day must surely impact on our subconscious animal selves, if nothing else.

The idea of the numerical year itself is less important to me. I'm not making plans for how things will be just for a year, rather they are plans for how things can be from now on. It's when I look backwards that the year takes on more importance. I look back at what was different twelve months ago. I feel I should say that the biggest change for me in 2009 was getting married, but it really wasn't. It was a highlight, a lovely warm, fuzzy, loving, sunny friends and family sort of day and I'm really happy we did it. But I promised M it would not change things and it hasn't. Things were good before and they still are.

If I think about what has changed in 2009 there are two main themes. One is our time in France, my getting a life, now still not being able to make pots even though I really want to and all the other things that connect with lifestyle. The other is technology. Starting this blog and joining Twitter have felt like big changes. I'd be hard pressed to say why so perhaps the reasons are things which have yet to happen.

So here I sit, thinking about happy and new and year. The photo isn't significant to any of this but it's one I wanted to share. I know all the negative things about grey squirrels, but still, he's rather cute, isn't he?

Recipes

2009-12-30T14:26:00.000Z

This bookcase contains my recipe books. I have a sort of embargo on buying any more unless I get rid of something to make room. I broke this rule a couple of years ago by buying a book at a car boot fair that just would not fit in. The trouble is that I'd be able to get rid of some of the smaller books relatively easily but new ones tend to be bigger. I have now put this book in the bookcase. How have I made space? Ah. Well. I suppose I have broken the rules still further.

For years I've had an A4 ring binder containing plastic wallets full of collected recipes. Naturally, the collection is a growing one. Recently it's been getting difficult to wedge the folder back into the bookcase and some of the compartments have been so full that it's taken ages to find a particular recipe. Some serious sorting was called for!

I now have two A4 ring binders of recipes. Eek! How did this happen? Surely the trail of cuttings covering the study floor must mean I have more space in the folder? On closer examination the trail of cuttings proved to be only one sheet thick and when collected together there really were very few pages that I had steeled myself to get rid of. On the other hand, in the interests of clarity I have subdivided the recipes into much smaller sections so there are more layers of plastic wallets and the finished whole just wasn't going to go back into one folder.

Well, there certainly wasn't room for two A4 ring binders in the bookcase so I made a decision to put the folders somewhere else and just reinforce the rule that I must not own more recipe books than will fit in the bookcase.

Where are the folders going to live? Haven't a clue, I'm afraid.

In case it's of interest, the sections I have divided my recipe collection into are as follows:

soups
starters
fish
chicken
duck & game birds
beef, lamb, pork, venison & rabbit
Indian
vegetarian main dishes
vegetarian pastry dishes
vegetable side dishes & salads
dressings, sauces, marinades & stuffings
cold puddings
hot puddings
cakes & biscuits
preserves & snacks
sweets
drinks

I think I will bite the bullet and see whether I can't get rid of some recipe books, even if it means typing out the one or two recipes I use from the book. I think if you've had a recipe book more than ten years, you know how useful it is - or not.

'Tis the season

2009-12-28T14:10:00.002Z

Not the very best robin pic you ever saw, possibly, but not bad considering it was taken through a double-glazed door. We spent Christmas with my parents in Henley which, weirdly, really was one of the snowiest places. As we travelled down from Gloucestershire on the 24th, we decided that there must have been a big thaw since we spoke on the phone the previous day - until about 5 miles from Henley when suddenly fields were completely white and the road was bordered by those small banks of re-frozen snow and slush that you get when roads have been cleared but temperatures have not risen. This was a totally different landscape from the one we had left in Gloucestershire, in a reversal of the normal distribution of snowy, icy weather. The main road might have been cleared, but residential roads certainly weren't and we had some trouble getting off the cul-de-sac onto the driveway. Christmas day was sunny and the thaw was certainly under way but there had been plenty of snow and so we had a traditional-looking White Christmas.

I've always felt that the week between Christmas and New Year is a season all of its own. It's one I really like, though I don't get to spend it quite the same way as I used to now that I live with someone else. There is a level of consciousness which hovers about the line between conscious and subconscious where one finds ideas and feelings which are recognised if thought about but operate anyway if they're not thought about. For me, ideas, feelings and resonances about seasons are in this place. Below is a list that belongs to this particular season. It's a list of things I like to do during this week. Maybe it will ring some bells with you too.

Tidy the filing cabinet and weed stuff out
Re-print my filofax address pages
Read more than I usually find time to
Eat goodies like fudge, chocolate and Turkish Delight
Listen to music
Write down ideas for new shapes for pottery
Rootle through my cuttings box
Tidy sewing stuff
Make lists of meals I want to make
Make lists of friends I want to invite for meals
Make some new clothes
Go through piles of old magazines
Make lists of things I want to do in the coming year
Reorganise files on computer

Looking at the list, most things seem fairly prosaic and many don't seem to have much in common. For me, though, there is a general feeling that runs through this "between" week that is often prompted by the activities above. It's a time when new ideas pop up. Clearing out the old, slowing down and relaxing or just noticing things are all good ways to open the mind to possibilities, probabilities and general looking forward.

Christmas decoration

2009-12-23T11:15:00.000Z

Over the past eighteen years, I have developed some of my own traditions for Christmas decorations in this house. I love using candles around the house and there are always some in front of this mirror in the study but at Christmas I like to use gold ones if I can. I tend to buy things like that when they are reduced to half-price in January. Another of those many times when I feel sorry for people who don't have much space at home so they can't store much stuff. I am very lucky that way; I can always take advantage of half price or BOGOF offers, even for ridiculous quantities of things. So here are the gold candles that I probably bought last January!

I trail ivy, harvested from the garden, round the top and sides of the mirror and always buy a little holly with berries to decorate the top of the mirror and other bits and pieces round the house. The gold baubles and red ribbons stay tied up in their bunches in a box and are ready to hook round the ivy and there's my Christmas decoration for this room.

This year I added one extra thing. Normally there is a wind chime near the door and you can see that I have replaced it temporarily.

One year I held my Open Weekend at a time when I had already put up the decorations and someone wrote a lovely poem about the feeling of coming into the house and this room in particular. I always do mulled wine for the Open Weekend and I think the smell of it added to the atmosphere. At any rate, I was very pleased to know that I had created the ambience I had set out to create!

This year I haven't done as much decoration as usual. There's still time, and I haven't ruled it out completely, but I haven't yet decorated the stairs in the way I normally do, with trails of ivy, bunches of holly, fir and juniper, red ribbons and strings of metallic red 'pearls'. I often decorate the dining table in the same way, with bunches of greenery and red ribbons at each corner of a white cut-work cloth over a red one. I haven't done that either, yet, since we will be having Christmas dinner elsewhere this year and I haven't decided whether to do the same thing for our New Year's Eve meal.