The pottery and its garden are looking great just now and for the next few weeks. All the spring flowers are coming out, just in time for the Open Studio weekends.

We are firing both electric kilns every day for the past week. We are getting all of the final glaze firings done. Working like a well oiled machine. We have been so lucky, that the sun has been shining bright every day – until today. It’s overcast with just a few spots of drizzly rain now and then. Just enough to stop me wanting to go out and do some gardening. I have two more firings on. One stoneware and one gold lustre firing. It’s all coming together.

We have managed to do all our firings on sunshine up until this afternoon, when it had turned quite overcast. Not only have we managed to glaze everything with our own electricity, but I have been careful to manage it so that I have kept both electric cars fully charged, at the same time and still been able to sell just a little of our occasional excess back to the grid to cover our daily access charges. It’s important to me to live a green, low carbon, passive, low energy, non polluting, life of minimal consumption, and we are doing it. We are managing it pretty well. But this afternoon, I will be withdrawing some expensive ‘green’ sustainable energy from the grid, for the last 3 hours of these current firings.

I have been experimenting with some new coloured pastel slips that I developed before we went to WA for the conference. See my previous post;  More rain and tasting cider, Posted on 27/08/2025

I weighed out almost 300 different pastel tones of stoneware slips. 

Using these colours, I tried making some new square plates, with a Korean inspired ‘Bojagi’ traditional fabric design. I’m very pleased with them, for a first attempt. I quite like the one were I ‘channel’ Piet Mondrian. Mondrianic bojagi!

I have also been making some more Korean inspired ‘Moon Jars’, but with an Australian twist. No photos yet, that are still in the kilns.

Please call in to see us on the next two weekends 1st/2nd and the 8th/9th of November. We will have tea or coffee and even cake for the first in and best fed.

In the kitchen, I’ve been harvesting lots of leaks, and making chicken and leak pie. I’ve got quite quick at knocking up small batches of wholemeal pastry for pie crusts and pizza bases.

We may be very busy in the pottery, but there is always time to raid the garden for food for dinner and to cook up something wholesome and delicious for dinner.