Boom!

A good friend from art school Stephen Jon, who has just come back from Kurdistan where he has been working on an arts project with masks and puppets, sent me this photograph. It is an improvised water trough which a herdsman had made for his cows and goats. Well spotted Stephen. of course I recognised and loved it immediately!

What has been happening in the land of Barnbarroch Pottery? I see it is three weeks since I last caught up on blogland. I've been busy, very busy, catching up and pressing on with with plenty of Christmas orders. Some have been going more successfully than others.


How easy it is to forget to vent an enclosed runner. Never done it before and I hope that I won't be so dozy again.... Disaster at bisc, and it was no small vessel! Oh the joys of pottery....

I hadn't really relished the idea of making Christmas mugs for an order, I thought that they could turn out a bit 'naff', but in the end I quite liked them! Think I might even make a few more 'reindeer on Criffel' ones.

I felt rather smug when managed to fit three of these in this kiln, (plus pots around of course), as I had been rather expecting another slanting kiln shelf escapade. The solution to long dishes and a tight kiln fit is to give them asymmetric handles it seems.



Lots of runners to wax, and I quite like them upside down. Hmmm...!



What a beautiful example of repeating patterns which repeat themselves. It's called a 'Romanesco' and when I found it in the Castle Douglas vegetable shop I just had to buy it. Way too lovely to eat though.

500 Vases and some new pots

A parcel arrived last week from the USA. A complimentary copy of 500 Vases, the latest Lark Books publication. How nice to be once again included in this sumtuous feast of pots. Having already been in 500 Platters and Chargers I was invited once again to submit an image, so thank you Lark Books. Most pots have a full page to themselves giving them the space they deserve and it is an interesting and varied collection with superb photographs. Mostly potters are from the USA with a few from Canada, and I have only found one other from Britain so far. Is it churlish to feel a bit peeved that I was one of the few who had to share a page, with the right hand side of the main image nearly lost in the spine? A pity, but still, nice to be in such good company whatever.



I had hoped that by now I would have sorted out my presentation and demo for the East Anglian Potters, but timing has been such that I have been too busy trying to get the last pots out for the Mainhill exhibition. So it’s all been pretty manic again. What is it about deadlines, however hard I try to keep ahead I still go crashing into them. Perhaps I am always too optimistic about how much I can achieve in one day.

So here I am on the computer getting some photos in order for East Anglia next weekend and thought I would just quickly catch up on the blog.



Two big kiln loads of glaze over the last few days. One unpacked and one cooling. My Father came over yesterday and kindly acting as courier to take the pots over to the Mainhill Gallery exhibition. He quite enjoyed leaving the cloudy East for a day to soak up a bit of Galloway Autumn sun.



Those two kiln firings coincided with beautiful and unseasonably hot weather here, leaving me gasping in what is normally a cool if not austere workshop.



Mainhill asked for something hare-ish. I was pleased with this one's face.


Here are some of the coracle boats. Above 'Noah with an outboard'.


This fellow is either being pecked, or has a hand full of corn.

..... Noah went for a swim?


Last week we took the big blue extruder off the wall and Rodger has found a thick board to mount it on. I am going to experiment with G clamping it to the table top and see if I can extrude from it horizontally. That way I can at least do some actual extrusions in situ next Sunday. Otherwise I will be taking pre extruded lengths and somehow not squashing them in transport. Quite a bit to work out yet. Better go!

A Harbour Full of Coracles

When I was in Kendal last weekend, immersing myself in Edun Ara (a fantastic event with singing, dance and drumming, and this year part of the Lakes Alive Festival), one of the participants asked me a simple question. So you are a potter, what sort of pots do you make?


Whether it was because at that moment in time I had a head full of music and not ceramics - but I found it very hard to answer. In fact I never have had a good answer to this question. Surely it can’t be that I don’t know what I make? But somehow I still don’t know how to communicate in a concise sentence WHAT it is I make. It would be so much easier if I could simply say, ‘wood fired stoneware, blue and white tableware, or even slipcast spiders. All rather worrying at this stage in my life and my career, especially as I have been invited down to the East Anglian Potters next month to give them a presentation and demo and generally explain myself.


Maybe I just I follow my nose? This month I decided to make a baby version of the coracle dishes, perhaps with a design of one bee or fish in the middle and they were to be dinky in scale. The first thing that happened is that when the first extrusion went through it became immediately apparent that I had misjudged the scale and they weren’t Mini coracles at all, more ‘Junior’ coracles. Then as Allie and I started to get the curves working they became very boat like indeed. I started to throw a few sailors and gannets and before I knew what I had a fair harbour full!


Di and Bill Bruce from Mainhill Gallery came over last week to discuss what sort of things they would like for their exhibition ‘The Shape of Things’ next month and dropped of this smart invitation. I get the whole back page which is rather good.

Creations, Chaos and last minute Panic

The last couple of weeks have had too few hours in them to achieve all that I had hoped and planned in the run up to Spring Fling. I have simply been juggling too many roles at once. As the days went by I had to rewrite a less ambitious schedule daily. The main priority was to get the eagle seat glazed and fired, along with the black twin vases and bendy vases, coracle pots and black tiles.


What have I achieved? Well, the eagle was glazed and fired, but being a perfectionist I decided to reglaze sections where I wasn’t happy with the patchiness of the glaze application. (It is really hard to apply the matt glaze at the correct thickness. Too thick it bubbles or crawls, too thin it looks mean and indecisive, and I didn’t want a bald headed eagle).



Of the black vases, most came out well and the second half will be cool enough to unpack tomorrow, along with the coracle pots and the eagle. The tiles will have to wait until another time.


I didn’t manage to start of any new work so I am afraid no slip trailing demos this year, unless I have time to extrude some tiles tomorrow, though I think that every minute may have already been accounted for!


Today I should have been tidying the workshop and cleaning the showroom but as I write both are still in chaos. The showroom is being used as a temporary photography studio, which is tricky as customers are still wanting to come in and are having to pick their way over pots which are strewn across the floor.

In my last post I described how I seemed to be having some issues over memory lapses. My last minute panic today arose from me losing my Spring Fling signage and incentive cards. Not just losing, but having no memory whatsoever of having them or putting them anywhere! With 24 hours left to go I was scrabbling round searching every crazy ‘safe’ place. Rodger eventually found them, this only after Rhiannon had set to to print and laminate some replacements, in ....the fridge!?

..and lets hope for a sunny Spring Fling!

A busy Easter

Some more new pots came out this week.


I got some of them priced and put out in the showroom just in time for the Easter holidays. It is always rewarding to get them away from the grubby workshop and see them in a good space. But it was a bit hard when one, (the three fish below), went in the first morning - before we had time to get to know it. Lucky I took some shots the day they came out.

I'm quite pleased with these new extruded shapes. I'm not sure what to call them. They do feel coconut shell like in your hands, and are sort of boat shaped. Maybe they should be called coracle pots.


I had to open the showroom early last Saturday for some people who wanted to call in on their way home. I was pretty pleased when they decided to buy the second of the two freestanding upright wavy pieces. But oh dear, then came the faff. The credit card machine was ‘out of sync’ with the bank, so I had to ring the helpline. Aware that the poor souls were trying to get away early, I was most apologetic. I was eventually passed on to the card machine company, whose stony recorded voice informed me would cost of 10p per minute. By this time the pair had decided to drive to Dalbeattie 3 miles away to the cashline machine, leaving me fuming at a service for which we already pay an exhorbitant amount. What a palaver -I really prefer making to selling, if you know what I mean.


Some more long dishes, slip decorated earlier in the week, and now drying out. Another fox and fox gloves,


some penguins,

and a tiger. A visitor remarked that I had gone all long and rectangular - oh dear, is it that obvious?!

Last Autumn I was invited by an nice gallery to exhibit in an exhibition entitled 'Twitter'. I had to turn it down, knowing that I would be hard pressed to fulfil at the time. However I had already formed an idea of a twin 'vase 'shape which I would have liked to have made for it. At last I am managing to get the idea out from my head and into reality. So far so good...

The twitter bit is still to come...

It's been a busy Easter weekend, and I am most encouraged by so many appreciative visitors. (Bit annoying though when I am TRYING to get a twitter vase made and keep having to stop for 'customers')!

For some strange reason, today I sold TWO sets of stacking pots. Unlike the coracle pot I have had them around for a quite a while now, but still I had a bit of an affection for them. They left a big gap in the showroom to fill with someting exciting though.