Autumn Bliss

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

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 ....

The greenhouse project - ready at last!

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

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!

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"

..... by Charlie.