13 Years of Hard Work Up in Smoke

Posted on 08/08/2014 by hotnsticky

Winter Delights.

It’s the middle of winter and it’s time for pruning. I spend the morning pruning the dozen or so almond trees and then go on to prune the shiraz grape vines, as they are close together. These young almond trees are just coming into their 13th year now, we have other, older almonds that are 38 years old as well, but they are in another part of the garden, in with the original stone fruit orchard and are quite established.
Once you get into it, it’s an easy, mindless job. The sun is warm on my back, as there is no wind this morning. It’s a nice job, so much better than cleaning out the kiln firebox. My only difficulty is when I’m working around the trees and have to prune into the sun, which is low in the sky and makes me squint with it’s brightness. If this is the only thing that I can find to whinge about, then I am a happy man.
While I’m at it, I can’t help but recall Peter Mayle’s fictional neighbour ‘Massot” who he encounters while ‘Massot’ is pruning his vineyard. He has been pushing a wheel barrow along the rows depositing all the prunings into the wheel barrow. There is a small fire glowing in the bottom of the metal barrow and as each new collection of cuttings is deposited, it is ignited from the coals and ashes of the previous vine. As it is described, I can visualise that it’s a beautiful system of ancient ancestry. It removes the dead wood from the vineyard. It doesn’t require any cartage. It sterilizes the woody plant material that might otherwise spread infected material from vine to vine and as there is a hole in the bottom of the barrow, all the ash from the fire is slowly drained out along the rows of vines as soluble fertilizer for when it rains. A pretty perfect system. Beautiful in it’s simplicity. I’ve thought about burning my prunings in one of our metal barrows. Sending 13 years of hard work up in smoke.

Mayle takes great pleasure in humiliating his hard-working peasant neighbour for his earthy roots by pointing out that he has seen small bundles of vine cuttings for sale in posh English department stores, sold as kindling – selling for 10 Euros per bundle. Massot looks back along the long rows of vine trellises and can visualise hundreds of Euros of kindling gone up in smoke. It’s meant to be funny, but maybe it can be read in a different way. Perhaps it illustrates that Mayle feels inferior to the local French man in his natural environment. Mayle can’t see the beauty of the system, only the money and we know that the peasant isn’t getting the money, he has a life deeply embedded in the terroir. Mayle will never be part of this environment, never really comfortable, never naturalised into it, always the expat, his clean hands will always tell that he is from somewhere else.

I bundle my prunings, not for sale, but for kindling in our own fire place. Often used to start the kiln. I like the symmetry of the closed loop. Use what you’ve got. The prunings have to be removed from the orchard and vineyard. The best way to deal with the issues of disease is the burn them, but rather than burn them for no beneficial outcome, using them to start the kiln is a positive use, appropriate for a post-modern peasant-potter.

I water the big potato patch down in the Pantry Field and find that they are still growing wonderfully well, as are the field mushrooms in among them. The tall tree cover has worked wonderfully well to keep the frost off. I wasn’t fully aware up until now just how warm it was down there in that secluded little clearing. I collect a dozen big mushrooms for dinner from in amongst the spuds. We’ll have mushroom soup tonight. A few bunches of herbs and an onion browned in olive oil till soft, then the diced mushroom added and sautéed, some marrowbone and garden mirepoix stock added in and all left to simmer down and reduce, lastly a little flour and oil Roux to thicken it up a little, some pepper, a lovely warming and filling garden delight on a winters night.

We have a huge pile of stumps, old logs too big for the chain saw and too heavy for the tractor to move around, These massive sections of pine tree trunk were given to us to burn in the kiln by my friend’s Mother, when a hundred year old pine snapped off in a severe storm, crashing down in her garden narrowly missing her house. The tree was 1.8 metres across and each section weighed more than a tonne. It was delivered by bobcat and tip truck, 20 tonnes of it over three trips. I cut up what I could manage by myself, the section up to 1.2 metres, but some of the larger base sections were just too big. Now, after 3 or 4 years, the white ants and wood rot have set in, so I have to deal with it. I get the bobcat back and get what’s left pushed up into a pile. We add some nasty weeds that we don’t want to seed around the garden and woody garden waste too thick for the shredder, but too small for hob wood. It’s all piled up on the spare block, where we stock pile our kiln wood.

As the weather is clear and fine with no wind, it’s winter and there are no fire bans, we decide to burn off all this otherwise difficult to deal with herbage. In the evening we light it and it goes up like a Guy Fawkes’ night celebration. We have the long fire hoses ready and the high pressure fire pump going. It’s a good chance to give it a run and check that everything is in working order, ready for the summer.

We crack a bottle of home-brew beer, congratulate ourselves for a long day of hard work and watch it burn, The flare of light tinder is all over in half an hour, but the massive stumps and log sections remain glowing and smouldering into and through the night. Janine is up at 1.00 am to check it and I’m out there again at 6am.
In the early morning light there are three separate collections of smouldering lumps. I get the tractor out and push them all together, back into one big pile and they burst back into flames and continue to burn throughout the day. I hate to waste wood like this, but without the machinery to deal with such big lumps, there doesn’t seem to be any other option for me. I can’t afford to pay the bob cat driver to come and work here regularly, while I work my way through the pile, I don’t want to have a massive termite nest on my door step and now that it has spent a few years in the weather, what’s left of this spongy pine has all gone quite ‘manky’, and lost most of it’s calorific value. A fire seems to be the best way.

We spend all of the next day tending and supervising the fire. Cleaning up a lot of small rubbish, rotten wood and weeds. Someone has to stay with it all of the time, just to be safe. There might be some good ash to be collected, if there isn’t any wind or rain before it all cools down, so that I can get to it.
I cook tofu in sesame oil for lunch with garden vegetables, broccolini and coriander. A little bit of fish sauce makes it sing.

Day 3 of our fire sees very little left of the pile. Just one big block that started off as a 1.8 x 1.8 metre stump, weighing several tonnes, is now mostly gone. We have to drag in other pieces of wood to keep it alight. It’s a chance to clean up the back block and the little lane that wanders through the centre of our land. This pretty little wandering bushy lane was once the main east west road through the village. It was never legally gazetted, but just used by the locals as the shortest route between A and B. There were 3 attempt to make an access path through to the east ridge and 2 of them went through our place. They were both abandoned because the land there is so low-lying and boggy in wet weather. Parts of the lane were paved with stones to try to overcome this, but never satisfactorily. Eventually a legally gazetted road was built in the right place, but it meant a lot of very expensive earthworks.

Our small lane is almost completely over grown now. We’ve seen to that by blocking it off at both ends to stop weekend 4 wheel drivers winching their way through our land without asking on long weekends. It’s a very pretty place to go now, and as it isn’t used anymore, except by us to get to the back of our land to collect firewood, it has soon become over-grown. I decide to take the tractor down there, mow it and clean out all the dead wood, and while I’m at it, I cut up a few dead trees that have fallen down along the track and up on the dam bank of the ‘Max Lake’ out biggest dam, The one that we had built in order to collect and store water for irrigating our vineyard.

Janine has a stroke of genius in getting onto the hot smoldering coals and hot ashes to poke at the fire and shift logs with her rake without melting her shoes. She places thick sheets of stringybark bark down on the ashes first then steps onto them to do the work. She then retrieves them before they burst into flames. I have ruined one pair of old boots by working in the hot ashes and melting the soles.

As it’s Friday and the end of the week, we celebrate by not eating any mushrooms. We have lightly fried tofu again with more garden greens.

So that’s what ‘s been happening this week with the hot-footed, self-reliant Guy and Girl Fawkes, who are lighting the blue touch-paper and standing back to wait and see what happens.

With fond regards from his Naked Flame and her Rake

Go Slow, Look fast

Posted on 06/08/2014 by hotnsticky

The Pots from our own firing a week or so ago have all been cleaned and sorted out now in the spare-time that we can find between weekend workshops and work in the garden and orchards. We forwent the leisurely mushroom, egg and bacon brunch and got stuck into cleaning pots early instead. There’ll always be time for that leisure day sometime in the future – when I find myself bored and with nothing to do!

Janine got some really nice little cups with dramatic carbon sequestration and loads of natural ash deposit all over the fire-face. The clay body flashed red and the carbon inclusion is dark charcoal grey and black. A really lovely dramatic result for her. I think that they are stunning little gems.

She has used one of her older North coast, wild beach, pumice glaze. It varies from batch to batch, just as ‘wild’ glazes should. Varying from pale green celadon-like, through darker bottle greens into this transparent ‘honey’ brown on this occasion.

It’s a complex function of the natural variations of the materials, where they are collected and how they are processed, but also what they are blended with and in what proportions, plus the firing and the wood. I love this unknowable and unpredictable quality, so have absolutely no intension of trying to regulate or control this wild beach girl.

I love the way these little cups have flashed to a lovely warm red and yet picked up so much grey carbon during the firing, making for such a great contrast.

Some of these cups are so grey with sequestered carbon, that it makes them look as though they are on a dark clay body. but they’re not. In fact they are only glazed to half way, and the wood ash during the firing has glazed them all over in some places.

I have some nice rough country kitchen plates, glazed with the fluid blue/cream ash glaze. Some very nice ikebana vases fired in the front of the kiln in the ‘Zone of Death’ for the exhibition in Taiwan and three lovely tea bowls for the exhibition in Singapore. Plus two nice faux shino tea bowls for a group show at Kerrie Lowe Gallery in Sydney. So the pressure is off. I have everything that I need and more. This life of self-reliance and DIY seems to have worked out OK for us. However, it’s a bit late now after almost 40 years together and living here to go back and make any changes. We have committed to this life and it has been good to us.

The ash glazed plates will mostly go into use in our kitchen, but there will be a few for sale in the pottery and on our ‘Gallery’ menu on the blog, when I get around to it. I threw them with a feeling of being fast and loose so that the throwing marks are quite distinctive. They were actually thrown reasonably slowly, I just wanted them to look ‘fast’. This was to show off the pooling effect of the ash glaze at high temperature. They have turned out well and I’m happy with them. I wrote about making them 6 weeks ago in ‘Give Peas a Chance’, when I was throwing them.

There is an inevitable time lag between throwing the wet clay on the potters wheel, drying it to leather hard ready for turning the bases into a smooth shape and creating a ‘foot’ ring, if required by the form, then thoroughly drying them out before bisque firing. The biscuit firing is heated slowly up to 1000oC in the solar powered, electric kiln. Then after slow cooling, the pots are unpacked, fettled and prepared for glazing. The water based glaze mixture is made from sieved wood ash from the kiln and/or kitchen stove firebox, mixed with ground up local stones. In this case the application is quite thick because the glaze runs and pools at high temperature. After the glaze is dry, the pots are packed into the wood fired kiln to be heated up to 1300oC in reduction atmosphere over approximately 20 hours of constant stoking.

It’s amazing that potters will actually come here to work through the night firing the kiln with us and be happy for the experience! Potters?!!

The pieces below were in fact fired in my own firings, squeezed in-between the regular weekly workshop firings.

These 3 Ikebana vases have come from the kiln looking pretty good. I’m very lucky! They all say wood fired, but they are each different in their own way. The first 2 are made from my washed basalt gravel sediment paste body. Black and mat and exerting a strong influence on the glazes that I apply over them. The 3rd from red flashed stoneware that has picked up a lot of carbon inclusion during the firing.

I made a number of these vases, so I have a few to choose from. I will put these others up in the gallery.

The tea bowls that I have selected for the exhibition of ‘Chawan’ in Singapore are a mix of shapes and styles.

This bowl is of the more open ‘summer’ style of tea bowl.

It is gently undulating with a softness of form and surface, but with superb strength of character. It speaks quietly but looks as if it knows something about a big stick.

It is made from my washed basaltic gravel sediment body paste. It is very unusual. It fires dark charcoal grey to matt jet black. The extraordinarily high iron content makes it quite tricky to fire to high temperatures in reduction without melting it. When it survives, it is amazing. I love it. The body seeps its iron into what ever glaze is covering it and it changes them. In this case the glaze is an ash and rock combination that fires to a mushroom pink colour, with hints of grey and chocolate. Where the wood ash from the flame during firing impinges on the surface, it can bleed into the glaze base and turn it transparent so that the black body underneath is revealed. This bowl was very fortunate in the kiln. It was enhanced beyond what I put in the kiln, through the firing experience and emerged with a range of surface colours from matt pink to perlucent grey through to transparent black. The rim shows a saturated iron chocolate brown, where the glaze has run away from the rim during firing.

The surface exhibits four seasons, dry matt black, clear glossy transparent black, soft satin pearlescent blue/grey and densely matted soft mushroom pink. I love it!

This bowl although new, looks old.

It has had a tough short life and shows it experiences clearly on its surface. However, it still carries itself with grace and poise, despite its scars and marks of surviving the experience of the firefront. A bit like life.

It has superb strength of character. A strong, beautifully textured foot that illustrates the roughness of the clay beneath, while draping itself in a luxuriously soft, satiny, pink/grey cloak of wood ash and granite glaze, with highlights of runny pale blue opalescent ash glaze. It’s a closed ‘winter’ bowl and feels wonderful in the hands.

This ‘winter’ bowl is glazed from my local native ‘bai-tunze’ porcelain stone body, converted to a glaze by the addition of our local limestone deposit and a small amount of ash. The resulting glaze is of the ‘guan’ / ‘celadon’ family of glazes. it is pale blue/turquoise green where it is applied thickly over a pale clay and a more sombre grey where thin. this stoneware body has a small amount of iron present, just enough to colour the clay grey in reduction with a charcoal carbon inclusion where it is exposed directly to the wood fire flame. the ash that has melted over it during firing varies from golden yellow to mat brown and contrasts beautifully against the thicker turquoise glaze on the rim.

It has a quiet contemplative feeling and a subtle restrained beauty.

I’m quite happy with these three different bowls, made from 3 different ground or washed rock bodies and with 2 different wood ashes and ground rock glazes.

This next bowl is a response to some wonderful work exhibited by Toni Warburton, where she re-imagined traditional grey shino with a completely contemporary take that involved making grey shino images, textures and colours at earthenware temperatures. These were ceramic paintings/sculptures that imaged the aesthetics of the old wares. They were exhibited at the Australian Ceramics Assn. exhibition; “The Course of Objects – The Fine Lines of Enquiry”.

I really liked this work very much. I couldn’t have thought in this way. But, once having seen it, it spurred my imagination. I’ve always had a reluctance to try my hand at shino. It’s been so overdone and especially by wood firers, and why not? it’s an amazingly good and ever so attractive glaze surface. But, exactly because everyone is doing it, or has done it, it suffers from over exposure. I don’t want my work to be indistinguishable from everyone else’s.

I really admire the original pieces made in Japan in the Mino area in the last two or three generations by Arakawa and his followers and imitators. If Shino is what happens when you take the local stone and apply it over the local clay, then that might have some area left to be explored here in the Southern Highlands and its surrounds. It won’t be shino, but it will be one of the local aesthetic variations that are possible to conceive of in this place, at this time.

I decided to try my local granites. aplite, porphyry and other acid volcanics and their derivatives, just to see what would happen. I even drove out of my shire to access some acid volcanics next door.

I’m thinking that if I apply this simple formula of ‘use what I have’, then do the best that I can with it. I just might get something interesting.

So this is what I have started to do. I don’t know what I’m doing with shino, I’n a novice, but I know my materials, so something has to happen. Let’s hope it’s good.

This winter bowl was fired in the ‘Zone of Death’ at the front of my kiln firebox. It’s blushing with embarrassment at being so lucky to have survived the ‘zone’ in a first attempt at Faux Shino.

It’s called ” Me No Know Mino”

I think that there is a bit of potential here.

Watch this space.

This new work will be shown at the Kerrie Lowe Gallery in Newtown in a few weeks time.

Best wishes from the slow moving Faux Peasant and his Wild Beach Girl.

Old Slag and a Tosser

Posted on 05/08/2014 by hotnsticky

We have another weekend wood firing workshop. Another amazing group of wonderful people. Everyone so engaged and enthusiastic. I have to cut split and stack more wood. Prepare the kiln and its furniture, kiln shelves and props. Check out all the fittings and structural elements to make sure that it all goes smoothly. The fire box lid lining is on its last legs, but will last a few more firings. It takes a few hits from our enthusiastic new stokers, with well-meaning, but miss-placed logs at high temperature.

Before we can fire the kiln again, There is maintenance to do. I have to get inside the fire box of the kiln to chip out the molten ash glaze slag from the last firing. This has to be done after every firing. The ash from the firing collects in the base of the firebox and accumulates to the point that it melts into a molten slag at the high temperatures at the end of the firing. It forms flows of liquid natural ash glaze that pool into the floor bricks. This is the same natural ash glaze that decorates our pots during the wood firing and gives them their distinctive wood-fired look.

There is alway some minor repair work required after each firing . Sweeping out the dusty ash and charcoal, chipping out the slag that threatens to block off the air holes. This is normal maintenance. However, when I get inside the firebox this time I see that the last firing had such fluid ash glaze formed at the end of the firing that it has run and pooled into the very important mouse hole in the base of the ash pit. This hole is most important to keep the ember level under control during the firing. It has to work properly, otherwise I can’t control the fire as easily and everything could go pear-shaped.

On close inspection I find that the ash glaze slag has completely filled the air hole and sealed it off completely. To avoid this occurrence, I place a special little kiln shelf ‘lid’ over the hole to deflect most of the ash to the periphery of the hole and this usually works. But the combination of wood that I have used this last time has created a very fluid slag and every thing had disappeared into a grey/brown puddle of lava. I can’t even see the ‘lid’ or the hole beneath it. I work on the principal that I know that it is under there. I have to climb into the firebox base armed with a 2 kg hammer and cold chisel, a crow bar and a skutch hammer. I have protective goggles over my glasses and a dust mask as I set to work in this cramped space, hammering and chiselling as best I can without being fully able to swing the hammer properly. I bash, chip hammer and prize my way through the glassy, lava-like slag. It is brittle and smashes into jagged, conchoidal, shattered spalls. Bits fly everywhere. It’s in my hair and all through my clothes. I have to be careful not to cut my fingers trolling through the pieces, tossing them back into a bucket in the kiln chamber. I finish by sweeping up the small fragments and dust. It’s a crap job, stuffed into this small space with all the dust and sharp edges, but it has to be done and no-one else, including the kiln fairy, is likely to volunteer. I keep putting it off, hoping that the kiln fairy will do it, but no such luck there. It’s all part of being self-reliant. I often put it off till the last minute, because I just don’t enjoy it, other times I get stuck into it first thing. It all depends on my energy levels and state of mind. There is no avoiding it. It just has to be done.

Although it doesn’t look it, it’s actually all cleaned out and ready for more work.

I’m lucky and very grateful that this is the worst job that I have to put up with. It’s certainly the least glamorous job in the pottery. It’s all very well, sitting in the sun being creative and making lovely things that are visually engaging and wonderfully tactile. Unpacking the kiln is like Xmas, but no-one daydreams of all the hard graft that goes into ‘creativity’. Don’t give up your day job!

We have a -2 oC frost overnight, during the firing. It keeps us sitting up close to the kiln during the midnight to dawn shift. Our European friends will call us pathetic wimps. That isn’t cold! Minus 40 is cold. I know that, but we are in Australia, the land of heat and sunshine, draughts and heat waves and not used to the severe European cold. Minus 2, certainly felt cold enough to me. If it got colder than this on a regular basis, I’d build a different shed. One that had walls!

A quick walk around the garden reveals that the last 2 rows of very late potatoes in the garden have now had it. The frosts are coming regularly now. Not severe, but light and regular. I think that this must put an end to these spuds, but they still have a few green leaves. I don’t need the space just now, so will leave them to their own devices, till spring. I can’t see anything coming of them. However the single red Flanders Poppies growing among them seem to love it.

There are lots of pretty images in the garden of leaves tinged with white frost and ice crystals. The ground crunches under foot as I walk about. There have been several frosts like this one now. It’s good. It will finish off a lot of bugs like the fruit fly, that can over winter in milder climates. This ‘chill’ will help all the old varieties of fruit that need their winter chill to become fertile in the spring.

I walk down to the Pantry Field garden. It’s situated down at the bottom of our land, in a clearing in among the tall eucalypts. the tree cover of the tall crowns gives a modicum of protection. I have a quick look around and see that the frost hasn’t penetrated here as yet. The big potato crop is still doing just fine, no frost damage. But on closer inspection I see that a lot of the tender tops of the plants aren’t burn’t off, but completely missing. Nibbled off by our resident Eastern grey kangaroos that wander through here attracted by the grass, tree cover, undergrowth protection and the availability of 4 dams to choose from for water. No wonder that they hang around. They treat the place like they own it, and they do! They were here first. We haven’t fenced our land at the boundaries at all. It is all open for them to pass through and enjoy. What we have decided to do is to fence off the various islands of garden and orchard, to keep some possibility of getting a crop to ripen. These plants haven’t been attacked till now, so now is the time to do something about it, If I don’t, they all be gone in a week or so.

I make it a priority to extend the fencing wire up to 1.5 metres. Up until now we had got by with only rabbit proofing fencing. Wire mesh that we could step over. Now I need to make a taller fence with a walk in gate, plus an openable end to allow the tractor to be able to get in and out for tilling once a year. While thinking all this through I see that there are another crop of mushrooms coming along. I can count about twenty or more. We’ll be changing our diet slightly now and for the next few weeks to include Mushroom soup, mushroom sauces, mushroom risotto, mushroom in white sauce and eggs and bacon for that leisurely late brunch. If we can find a day that we can declare to be leisurely?

Fond regards from the old fun-gi

A brief History of Thyme

Posted on 31/07/2014 by hotnsticky

In the few days between workshops, we spend a day in the garden with Our Lovely Wwoofing Friend Kate. She is a good worker and keeps us going all day. She is full of energy and good ideas. No slacking off with Kate in charge. The two Lovelies go down to the pottery and make some 50 odd ceramic buttons for kiln building and repair work, while I take the truck down to the mushroom farm to get a load of spent mushroom compost to spread around the fruit trees and various vegetable plots so as to stifle weed growth. It works as a great mulch and weed suppressor, while it also has some fertilising effect as well. Best of all it’s cheap! Most plants seem to thrive with it around them. It is a little bit alkaline, so I don’t use it on any of the acid dependant plants like blueberries.

Janine harvests a couple of small rows of potatoes, left over from the late summer. With what we already have in store, this will be enough to see us through to the end of winter. She cleans them and dries them in the sun before she packs them away in a dark place.

I’m back late morning and we clean out a few garden beds of frosted and dead late-autumn stragglers, like chillies and capsicums. Kate strips off all the freeze dried chillies. We thread some of them and hang them in the kitchen. These will keep us going till next summer, when the next crop will be ready.

We’re ready for an early lunch. I cook stir-fried, green, leafy vegetables from the garden, 10th pick micro broccoli and firm tofu, fresh ginger and coarsely crushed and chopped, end of season garlic that has been hanging in the kitchen ceiling since Oct/Nov. It’s a little dry, so I add a slosh of white cooking wine from the fridge and a spoonful of garlic/chilli/tomato puree. It’s fresh, crisp and warming. While I am busy doing this, the girls are de-stemming very large mustard leaves and rubbing them with a little oil to make green leafy crisps that they bake quickly in the oven. They are fresh and crispy, but with a little bit of salt to spark them up a bit. They just melt in your mouth, they are so fine and delicate. Totally ephemeral, but delicious as an amuse before a meal.

After lunch, we clean out a few garden beds ready for mulching. We start with the herb row. The thyme has grown out into the path and abandoned growing in the garden bed altogether. It has decided to migrate over a number of years. Progressing by layering itself bit by bit, metre by metre. We got our first rooted pieces of thyme from our neighbour, the famous Australian writer, musicologist and historian, John Meredith. He kept s superb herb garden, vegetable garden stone fruit orchard and apothecaries garden. Everything that he did, he did well. John was a fantastic mentor. He took us under his wing and educated us in ‘country’ ways and hospitality, folk lore, gardening, self-sufficiency, and bush music.

We were so lucky to find out that he was our neighbour. So our first sprigs of thyme came from him. I try explaining this to anyone who will listen. But no-one is, when the lovely comes over and explains to Kate that, “Steve’s hawking his brief history of thyme”. I know my place and I go back to work shovelling s%#t and spreading compost. I divide the thyme into a dozen small rooted pieces and replant them back into the herb bed. They’ll continue to grow there for while, at least until they start to migrate again.

After lunch we make yeasted dough in the marmalade making machine. In the later afternoon we come in from our labours and I make 3 disks of dough and let them continue to rise in the oven while the girls come in. Kate is shredding the tiny leaves from the pruned and cropped thyme, collecting them in a small colander. It’s a labour of love, as the leaves are very tiny and it takes her some time. We appreciate it, as she is about to use it all to teach us how to make manakish ‘Zataar’ , fragrant middle Eastern herbed flat bread.

Kate stripping the thyme leaves, sitting in the sun on the verandah.

Kate starts with the fresh thyme leaves that she has just stripped from the stalks, then fresh oregano,These are all finely chopped up together, then freshly pan roasted sesame seeds, sumac. These are all mixed together with olive oil to make a fragrant paste. This is spread over the flat bread dough, with a little extra drizzle of olive oil over the top and placed in a hot oven at 220 oC for 10 mins. When it comes out we grind a little salt over it and sprinkle a few shredded olives on top. We try 3 different variations using dried tomatos and even yoghurt on top . They are all delicious and it takes no time at all to finish most of them off. It’s a fabulously fragrant and energy rich carbohydrate hit to end off a day of working in the garden.

We send Kate home with 1/3rd of each one for her own family to try.

I love this exchange. We give and we receive. It’s all good and everything is as it sound be. We consider ourselves so fortunate to have such great friends, mentors and associates to help us along on our way.

I am grateful!

More of the days pick, potatoes, beetroot, carrots, parsnips, coriander. Abundance!

Best wishes from the Low GI, un-leavened Lovely and her dough-boy!

The completeness of it all

Posted on 28/07/2014 by hotnsticky

I love the completeness of it all.

We have had all our firing partners back again for the unpacking of last weeks woodfiring. A lot of nice pots come from the kiln and everyone makes a line of human-chain to pass them all the way to the top of the kiln shed. It’s a slow process, as each and every pot is examined and discussed all along the way.

These potters have helped pack the kiln with all of their own work. They have stacked the wood and stoked the fire. Shared meals together and stayed up all of the night in shifts to see the firing successfully reach the bright white heat of stoneware temperature, then fired down to a safe state, where the kiln could be left to cool un-attended.

Now we are all back together again to experience the un-bricking of the door. Cleaning and carefully stacking all our home-made, hand-made, fire bricks, then carefully sorting, cleaning and re-stacking our kiln shelves and home-made props. Together, we share the delights and disappointments of the results. Fortunately, nearly everything comes out really well. There are so many beautiful pots here. We have experienced the completeness of the firing cycle together.

This isn’t ‘virtual’. It’s real, gritty, up all night, bags under the eyes and soot on the sleeves reality. It’s just one part of our attempt at a sustainable process here. The wood for most of this firing was cut just 20 metres away from the kiln site, where we are now growing potatoes, down below the pottery.

Janine, The King of Glaze Testing has her own special moment, when her ‘StONeS of beaches’, glaze test tile emerges. The Princess of Pumice, she has tested the new pale ‘wild’ beach pumice with limestone in known and reliable recipes as a control against the same pumice fluxed with cuttlefish ‘bone’ from the same beach and mixed to the same recipes.

There is no discernible difference between the mineral ‘Whiting,’ calcium carbonate powder and the ground up cuttlefish bone powder. They have behaved identically, if anything the cuttlefish is purer and whiter than the limestone.

We are satisfied that cuttlefish bone is composed of calcium carbonate. We are also very pleased to see that the glaze is quite stable and a lovely mid to dark bottle green celadon. We will call it our Sealadon glaze. The third test on the tile is straight pumice and it looks like it will be quite good just by itself. So further testing is in order. I love the completeness of the idea that we can make a total stoneware glaze from the sea, just picked up off the beach in front of our friends house, like so much flotsam. I suppose that if the glaze needed some extra quartz, we could use the sand and fire the kiln with drift wood? I like it.

Just to make it a complete series, the Queen of Quadaxials has mixed all seven test samples together and glazed one of my small coffee cups with it. It has turned out terrific, so now we have a new cup with added meaning in the kitchen. ‘StONeS of beaches’ glazed short black.

The beautiful potter is already back in the pottery making some pots to try this new glaze on.

Although we only have glaze tests in this firing, I am feeling quite good about it. Isn’t it amazing how something so small can have such an effect? We rarely get out of the kiln what we packed in. We pack our pots in there to be sure, but we also pack in all our hopes and dreams, but all we get out are cups and bowls. So when there is something else that has that ill-defined promise of potential, then that is a real reward. I was interested to see what the effect of cuttlefish fluxed pumice would be and now I know. It has a completeness about it that is very sustaining and intellectually rewarding, not to mention frugal.

Meanwhile, in the orchard, the almonds have just burst into blossom. Spring is almost here.

The over-winter trial of potatoes down in the ‘Pantry Field’ garden are doing well and have managed to avoid the frost so far. I’m hoping that we will be able to get away with it. Not that it matters. If they don’t thrive or even survive, then that is just the way that it is. They would have died anyway if we hadn’t planted them out. We’ll plant more in spring.

We are forecast to have more frosts this weekend, during our next overnight wood firing, brrrrr!

Where we have situated this garden, seems to be quite well protected in amongst the tall trees. There are also some remnants of the cottage garden flowers still lingering on down there.

A big surprise yesterday, was to find a few really nice, big plump mushrooms growing in with the potatoes. It isn’t all that surprising, as we used a ute load of spent mushroom compost to fertilise this patch of garden when we planted these potatoes in late autumn. There are more mushrooms emerging as well, with some other larger ones coming along as well. We picked four of them and had a mushroom risotto for dinner.

Fond regards from the complete Mr cephalopod fluxed ignimbrite and his Regal sealadon glaze tester, who compliment and complete each other.

Bitter and twisted

Posted on 27/07/2014 by hotnsticky

Making marmalade on a sunny winters morning.

I’ve found the time to make some more marmalade. The citrus trees have fruit to be picked, so I make the time and manage 4 batches throughout the day. I use mainly Seville oranges, but I also like to experiment, we have tangelos, lemons, ruby grapefruit, nagami cumquats and Italian bitter chinotto.

The Sweet One has already made the tangelo/seville mix. She does everything so properly, measuring out the ingredients to a recipe. Her marmalade always works. She is so sweet, she even adds the correct amount of sugar. I tend to make mine with a little bit less sugar, as I find some marmalade far too sweet for my taste. I have reduced the sugar to 300 grams to 1kg of whole fruit. I juice the fruit and add it into the pan, and that is the only licquid that I use. Then I scrape out all the pith from inside and discard it to the compost. i havent weighed this pulp, so Im not too sure what the final balance of sugar to peel ends up being, but it works. Next I slice the peel finely, add it to the pan and lastly weight out 300g of sugar and toss it on top. I bake it in the bread maker, set to ‘jam’ setting. I know that it doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that I’d normally do. I’m usually so hans-on. But it works so well. I don’t use the pips, nor do I soak the peel overnight. The machine does a perfect job of it in one hour, while I get on with other things.

This next batch, I decide to make a straight seville orange batch, then another one with seville orange, ruby grapefruit and lemon. Lastly I add some of the bitter Chinotto

The ruby grapefruits are on at the moment so we are having one each morning before breakfast to cleanse our pallets and freshen us up to start the day, beautiful glowing colour and sharp astringent sour/sweet pulp.

After we have had our ruby grapefruit for breakfast, which The Sweet One has peeled in one long twisted strip of peel. I see that it looks so great. I don’t want to waste it, so I decide to add it to the next batch of marmalade. I will mix it with Seville orange and Myer lemon, with the addition of the finely sliced up twisted grapefruit skin from breakfast and a bitter Italian chinotto.

In this way I can call this batch of marmalade ‘bitter and twisted’.

I like it.

With best wishes from The Sweet One and her bitter and twisted marmalade maker

A special moment

Posted on 25/07/2014 by hotnsticky

A precious friend drops by quite unexpectedly.
We get a call. “just passing by on route to help an ailing relative, will be there shortly.”
It’s a big surprise and a wonderful one. We offer coffee, tea? What about green tea? “Yes. Lets have green tea”.
Whisked in beautiful bowls.
We don’t often get out our really beautiful tea bowls very often. It’s a special occasion. So lets celebrate.
We share tea and a few sweets. It’s good!
We are both stimulated, enriched and enlivened by the shared experience.
We examine, share, appreciate and discuss the bowls, the process, the taste and the experience. We are uplifted by each others company.
It’s a special moment and I am grateful.
Life goes on.

Defying Entropy

Posted on 21/07/2014 by hotnsticky

I’ve been out all day way down south, doing a repair job on a kiln. Not one of mine. Fortunately most of the kilns that I have built have not needed repairing — so far. They seem to last a very long time. I’ve made it my business to build out any chance of obsolescence. Everything is so over specified that it is my intension that they out-last me. This was a repair job as a favour for a friend. I don’t do repair work generally. I prefer to custom build from scratch. However, I’m also committed to the concept of reducing waste and not throwing anything out until it is really worn out and not able to be repaired any more. There is so much embedded energy in all our modern ‘stuff’ It is a crime against society to throw ‘stuff’ away.

Our parents generation had an excuse, in their time there was a place called ‘Away’ and things could be thrown there. But now that we have taken an interest and gone out looking. We have found — or not found, that place called away. It isn’t anywhere to be found. Everywhere is some where and what’s more, it’s someone else’s backyard, and they are not too happy to have everyone else’s junk dumped there. We don’t have our parents excuse. We’ve been told. We know. So we can’t go on doing it. Pretending that we can just throw things ‘away.’

This is why I will do some repair work on other manufacturers kilns. To forestal waste and preserve the embedded energy a little bit longer. But everything has a time, and that time has to come to an end at some point. Life is terminal and all flesh is grass. I’ve spent my life so far trying to defeat entropy. I know that ultimately I will fail, but like King Cnut (Canute) I’ll give it a good try.

So as a special favour to my friend, I spend the day re-furbishing this old kiln. I’ve taken along a lot of new furbishes to replace all the old furbishes. So now it’s totally re-furbished. Actually it’s still an old piece of worn out junk, but it will keep on going and working for a few more years now. I can’t make a silk purse out of it, at least not for a few hundred dollars, I can’t. Still, everyone is happy with this outcome it seems.

When I return home. I find that that my very own lovely Mrs Beaton of garden, kitchen and household management has our friend and garden helper Kate here to do some work in the garden and pottery, but the weather is so windy and unpleasant outside, that they have spent the day in the kitchen, making marmalade, candied peel and other culinary delights, like spinach and ricotta cheese pies. She has also been baking Ethiopian cabbage and mustard greens, rubbed with a little olive oil, so that turn crispy and delicious, add a little salt and they are just like crisps. This works well with all sorts of other firm green leaves as well, especially the brassicas like kale.

Kate makes the pastry from the recipe that we got off Marta Armarda from Spain when she was visiting here. It’s so quick and works a treat. I don’t know how we got through life to this point without knowing about this simple recipe. I suppose that it was because we were always so head-down and butt-up everyday, that we just didn’t get out enough. It’s so simple. Just 1 tablespoon of oil, and another two of water and wine each, then firm it out with enough flour to bring it to consistency. It couldn’t be easier or quicker. We don’t chill it or leave it to settle, just roll it out and cook it.

We dine on hot pie from the oven for dinner.

A full tummy and a glass of wine makes entropy all that much easier to defy.

Kate and Janine crush pumice (ignimbrite) that we collected on our mid-week, weekend down at the coast recently. Pumice is such an amazing rock. It’s an aerated volcanic glass composed mostly of felspathic minerals. These minerals (magma) are very viscous when hot and when forcefully ejected from a volcanic explosion, the trapped gasses in the rock, created under the intense pressure of the volcanic process are suddenly released. They can’t escape from the viscous magma quickly enough and so expand rapidly exfoliating the rock as it cools. Fluffing it up, like aero chocolate, Not unlike the way that grains of rice are ‘exfoliated’ into rice bubbles in a similar synthetic process.

My very own Mrs Beaton of household and pottery management grew up at the beach on the far North coast. Back in the early seventies, she collected beach pumice from the wild beaches up there to make her own local celadon. This recently collected ‘weekend’ pumice is rather paler than that which we are familiar. We hope that it will make a paler glaze.

We also found cuttle fish on the beach, so I have this crazy idea that cuttlefish ‘bone’ is possibly made of calcium? It’s possible. Many sea creatures utilise calcium from sea water to create their shells and carapaces. It occurred to me that it might be possible to make a sea-blue celadon glaze from the products of the sea? Sealadon?

Janine Beaton has just the recipe in her cornucopia of “The Woman Potters Big Book of Useful Recipes and Techniques for Every Glaze Situation,” No doubt soon to be serialised in 24 convenient monthly instalments. She fills a grid-tile of possible recipes and ‘control’ reference tests.

I’m keen to try her drift-wood, salt glaze, wood ash recipe!

Thanks to her stirling efforts, the ‘StONeS of beaches’ glaze tests are all made up and ready for the current firing.

I feel compelled to play something by Elgar to celebrate!

The pumice is quite damp from its journey across the sea. We have been told that this current appearance of pumice has come from a massive underwater volcanic eruption somewhere in the Pacific near Samoa or Tonga, and has spent the last few years floating it’s way here, driven by wind and sea currents.

It passes through the big ‘jaw’ crusher OK, but needs some encouragement, as it tends to stick to the jaws because it is so fresh and still damp. We try it through the other crushers, it won’t grind well, it jams up the small jaw crusher and will only passes through the Cornish rolls with some persuasion, as it packs into a damp ‘clag’ and binds up the milling process. It really needs drying well first. It packs to the wall of the ball mill and I have to switch it off and break up the mass, then add water and do a wet milling. This works OK but, no butts, it’s a pain in the butt. It mills down well, however, now it will need to be settled, dewatered and finally thoroughly dried out before we can use it for weighing out the glaze tests that we need to do to find the best recipe for this particular batch of unknown mineral. Mrs Janine Beaton, manages this one evening on the side of the wood stove after dinner.

To get things going we put the remaining rough crushed granules from the primary crushing into the electric kiln, packed in bisque-fired bowls and fired up to 400 oC to thoroughly dry it out, prior to dry milling. Pumice is a very soft rock and is very easy to dry mill, but only when it’s quite dry. In the past, my lovely Mrs Beaton of sea-side glaze management, would dry it in the sun and wind for a few weeks or months before milling, as there was no real rush, it was just a constant flow of material that was well understood. A job that needed doing to keep ahead of her usage. This time it’s something new and we want to see the results of this new material and what it will do. So Mrs Beat-on gets the heat-on.

We have just had a weekend wood firing workshop with another 10 potters working with us to make it a great success. All very enjoyable, but hectic. Everyone enjoyed roasting marshmallows for breakfast over the firebox towards the end of the firing. Janine has Beaten the rush, worked so very hard to get everything ready for this latest workshop. There is so much prep to do, but Mrs Beaton can’t be beaten when it comes to workshop management.

We have our sea glaze sealadon/celadon tests in this firing now thanks to her, so we are keen to see the outcome next weekend and just like everyone else, it will be like Xmas for us too.

With love from Mrs Capability Beaton and her workshop assistant, Mr Furbisher, The Kiln Whisperer, who are attempting to be so well organised — defying Entropy.

The Talented Ms Rippley

Posted on 16/07/2014 by hotnsticky

Have kiln will travel and unexpected visitors on our return

In between our hectic schedule of 10 weekend workshops in a row, we have managed to fit in a brief visit to the coast for a little break. Surprisingly, it takes us most of the week to prepare the kiln, props and shelves, cut, split, cart and stack the wood. I also want to slip a couple of rock glaze and woodash tests into the firing for my own interest. Weighing out glaze tests also takes a lot of time.

We are very lucky to have friends who own a part share in a holiday shack down the coast and we are extra lucky to be invited down to spend a couple of nights down there. We get to see the sea and it’s good!

We get away for a couple of days and as it is a potters holiday house, we take one of Stefan Jakob’s brilliant little Ikea rubbish bin kilns with us. It fits in the car with all our bedding, clothes and other travelling parafinalia, plus a big esky of produce from the garden. We know that there will be oysters down the coast, so we take a couple of bottles of cider along as well. Dry cider has to be my favourite accompanyment to go with fresh shucked oysters – maybe a little pepper too.

We enjoy the best sunsets and walks along the beach and a time spent in among the rock pools.

After settling in, we spend the day firing the little kiln with brushwood from around the site. It burns well, and the kiln fires quickly and easily all day with good results. We’ve brought along a bucket of glaze and some gloves, tongs and oxide etc, so we idle the day away sitting in the sun, looking at the view and occationally stoking the kiln. It’s a perfect pottery busmans holiday.

A fun day, good company, a nice meal and a bottle of wine and all is well with the world.

We return home to find a couple of unexpected visitors using our place as a short cut from the back gully up to the disused train line.

They are wondering what we are doing in their yard.

Our workshop students return to unpack the wood kiln and take their pots home. They all seem to be happy. I gave them a talk about the periodic table of the elements in the early hours of the morning during the firing. Something to fill the deadly hours of midnight to dawn. Lucky I didn’t put them all to sleep! They ask me if I have studdied science. I haven’t, but I’m an enthusiastic amateur. To make pots the way that I’m trying to do it, from a few buckets full of soil and some burnt plants from the garden, you need to be able to find your way around a little bit of everything. Chemistry, geology, engineering, maths. Even a bit of artistic talent would come in handy, but it’s The Lovely that has all the talent. Now that she has seen the tide marks on the sand, she’ll probably start making rippley textured pots. I find that hard slog and determined commitment gets me where I want to go. There is no substitute for hard graft.

I get to see my new woodash and local granite rock glaze tests come out of the kiln.

I get a lovely new version of my pink/mushroom ash glaze with a flat, dense, matt crystal surface. There’s a good mustard yellow with grey carbon inclusion where it’s thick. A very clear bright apple green and the usual runny chun, milky opalescent and white crystal glaze amongst others.

All in all a very good result. New buckets of all these can now be made up again. As wood ash varies from tree to tree and from limb to trunk, not to mention season to season. I always have to test every new batch for consistency before commiting to a bucket sized batch. It can take several days to a month to collect, crush, grind, mill, sieve, dry and otherwise prepare these rocks and ashes. I can’t aford to make any mistakes. But I always do. No batch is ever the same as the last using the same recipe. It’s the continual natural variations that make this kind of research so interesting.

fond regards from The Talented Ms Rippley and her Busman.

Pugging our Way Through Life

Posted on 14/07/2014 by hotnsticky

There is nothing quite so meaningless than pugging badly de-aired clay through a 4″ Venco with poorly fitted or leaky seals.

No matter how many times we re-pug it doesn’t get any better.

It is a beautifully rewarding example of futility, Sisyphus tried to tell me.

I’ve rolled a few stones up a hill or two, but I usually end up crushing them into glaze powder.

Preparing clay can fill our meaningless days in an endless cycle of pugging and re-pugging.

I’d better fix that seal.

But how can I fix that seal when there is so much pugging to do?

Pirsig tried to tell me in Zen and the Art of Venco Maintenance.

Still, everyday comes to an end.

Nothing lasts.

Nothing is ever finished.

Nothing is perfect.

The Gautama tried to tell me.

The Lovely is busy washing up. Washing-up like clay prep never ends, there is always more

The Lovely One tried to tell me.

Is this my beautiful wife?

Is this my beautiful House?

How did I get here?

Even Brian Eno and David Byrne tried to tell me!

Same as it ever was.

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