Category Archives: In the pottery

Rock Glaze Workshop

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Last week I was busy making clay for the fast approaching, up-coming weekend workshops. I made half a tonne of special clay body with a bit of extra grit, adding some more ‘tooth’ to the usual reliable body that I make up for us. 

It took me two days. I can make up a quarter of a tonne of clay each day from scratch, pug it twice to ensure even mixing, then re-pugged through the Venco Vacuum pug mill and finally bagged and stacked. Along with sorting materials, weighing out, mixing, pugging and finally cleaning up, I have to have a day off in-between to catch up and to avoid over-doing it. Suddenly a week has gone by, but now it’s all done and ready for the next couple of workshops. We are pretty self reliant in the pottery here. Using our own electricity, our own rain water, using all the machinery and equipment that I have either made, re-purposed or re-built after the fire. I’m fairly proud of this minor achievement of self-sufficiency. 

This week we have been very busy with all sorts of little jobs. We ate the last of our late season tomatoes. Surely this must be the last of the late crop. I’m not expecting the last 3 green toms to ripen very well, so these half dozen little self sown gems will probably be it. And very nice too. We cant expect to see another ripe tomato here until just before Xmas if all goes well with the spring planting for next summer’s crop. This must be some sort of record for us, eating home grown red ripe tomatoes for the garden in the last week of July.

What we are getting a lot of from the garden are cauliflowers, broccoli and Brussels sprouts, all the usual winter fare. last night I harvested the first pick of parsnips for our baked veggie dinner. Cauliflowers, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, parsnips, potato, pumpkin and onion, baked in the oven and then dressed in a cheesy béchamel source. A lovely, warming, winters dinner.

This weeks loaf of rye bread was the usual beauty. All crusty and solid dense rye inside. I use 50% of wheat flour as well so as the get it to rise, as there is very little gluten in rye flour, but it has fantastic flavour. I’m using locally grown and milled organic stone ground flours from the wheat belt of NSW. All grown, harvested and milled on site on the family farm.

This week we also hosted a weekend workshop, but held mid-week, Tuesday to Thursday for a student from FNQ. I had offered a glaze workshop last year, but only got 3 replies, and only one who paid. so it was cancelled. Not enough to make it worthwhile to run it. One potter enquired as to when the next one would be offered. I told her that it wouldn’t. Then she asked how much it would cost for me to do a private one-on-one workshop. She applied for a grant, was successful and so she was here this week. A year later than originally offered.  

I spent Tuesday morning waiting for her to arrive from Queensland sieving wood ashes from the various fires, stoves, burn piles and kiln fireboxes, ready for use in our testing. I still had a little time, before she arrived, so decided to make a wooden pottery tool. At the last throwing workshop, my good friend Len Smith left behind a wooden comb that turned up in the throwing water. I really liked it and had got used to using it. It’s very comfortable in the hand and very useful. I really like it and was sad to have to give it back when Len next visited for the recent wood firing a week or so back. I decided to make one for myself, so I set to it and in half an hour I had one made. Not as good as Len’s, but I think that it is workable. and most importantly, it’s home made onsite from scrap wood. Not as good as the bought one perhaps, but individual, personal and much more meaningful. It still needs a little bit more sanding and finishing, then some vegetable oil, and it’s ready to go.

When my student arrived from the airport, we had lunch and spent the afternoon doing a geology tour of the Southern Highlands, collecting samples and talking geology, analysis and geological maps on the short drives in-between sites. Day two was spent crushing and milling our samples in the morning and then making glaze tests in the afternoon. We finished the weighing out in the late afternoon, having completed 13 test tiles, half for oxidation and half destined for reduction firing. We packed both the electric kiln and small gas kiln with our test tiles before dinner. The solar electric kiln was fired over night used the days stored sunlight energy from our battery, while we fired the small portable gas kiln during the evening into the night, a 3 hour reduction firing from 6 till 9.00PM.

Day three morning was spent unpacking the kilns, debriefing on the results, and then a theory class on glaze technology, choice of materials, Segar Formula and loads of other relevant related glaze topics. We finished on que at lunch time, in time for her return to the airport for her flight home. A fully packed, midweek-weekend, intensive crash course in geology, rock glazes and using collected ‘wild’ local materials. Ashes, gravels, arkose, clays and rocks, all alchemically metamorphosed from road side dirt into shiny glazes. 

Back home from Korea

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I’m back home from my work in Korea. I managed to drop a firebrick on my foot on the 3rd day. I couldn’t wear a shoe after that, as the big toe had swollen up so much, such that I had to wear a plastic ‘flip-flop’ thong to keep working. I went to the local convenience store in the village and bought alcohol disinfectant spray for cleaning the toe, over-sized bandaids, gauze bandage and medical tape. I was amazed that such a tiny village shop had everything that I needed.  
The next day, the local government health clinic was open and my friends took me to the clinic to see the doctor. I needed them to translate for me. The doctor told me that I had kept it very clean and to try and keep it elevated, not to walk on it too much and that if it started to throb or get red. I should come back ASAP. As a precaution, he prescribed and also issued me with 2 different antibiotics, for 3 times a day, enough for 10 days. I don’t like to take any antibiotics if I don’t absolutely need to, but I certainly didn’t want to end up with medical complications while in a foreign country, so I took them.  I didn’t want to risk getting toe-main poisoning and it spreading up my leg to Knee-monia and possibly even dick-theria.The doctor offered me an X-ray, but I assured him that I could still bend the toe. I had to demonstrate that for him, so that he was satisfied. 

My friend got out his credit card to pay, but there was no charge!!!! I’m a foreigner here. I don’t pay taxes here. I should pay for such a terrific service. Korea is an amazing place!

My foot was still swollen, and I was still wearing a plastic flip-flop thong on my foot right up until I left Korea. I even had to attend the official opening of the exhibition in my formal black thong. The nail has since died and come off. I’m so lucky that I have such good friends and that it wasn’t worse.
The garden has grown such a lot while I was away, and badly needs a lot of weeding. Apparently there was a lot of rain and the temperature was quite mild. So plenty of late autumn growth. I got stuck into the weeding straight away, just an hour at a time each day. Weeding always involves such a lot of bending. I’m of an age where this is not so comfortable any more. So I space out my efforts, I didn’t want to over do it. 
The second day, I decided to wear knee pads so that I could get closer to the weeds, to minimise the bending. I also wore light gloves to save my fingers. So I am learning to change my old habits to make living here the way that I have so far, and want to continue to do into the future, a more achievable prospect. This is a really hands-on life style, doing almost everything the old fashioned way, by hand, honouring local gardening lore and organic traditions with green environmental knowhow/theories.  A permanent garden/orchard/vegetable patch, including chickens, all inter-woven and based on sustainable living principals, but with a nod to modern conveniences where necessary, like a cultivator and a mower. 
We can still pick all of our salad lunches and our nightly dinner from the garden each evening, it’s just that the flavours have changed to winter forage now. We have all the usual winter greens, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, beetroot, cabbage, pumpkin and kohlrabi. We cook a lot of vegetable stir fry, tofu, okonomiyaki, Japanese style cabbage pan cake, baked mixed vegetables, and cauliflower au gratin etc. We have also just celebrated the start of the cold winter season with an old fashioned baked dinner. Our first red meat meal since last winter.

  Other than weeding the garden, there is also a lot of mowing, so an hour or so of that each day too. The garden work fills half the day. I’m using the electric ride-on mower for the bigger areas that have become deep in luscious growth. But I also use the electric strimmer for all the edges where the ride on can’t get to. It’s a good feeling to know that all the work is being achieved powered by sunshine these days instead of fossil fuels. Janine fills in the gaps with the electric push mower, to get in under the branches of the fruit trees and other similarly appropriate places for that mower.


We have worked hard at planning and finally becoming a fully solar electric household. We started back in 2007, when the cost of solar panels finally became affordable for us. When I was a teenager, the only solar panels were to be found on space craft and satellites. We’ve come a long way and Australia can be proud of the world famous, ground breaking research into refining solar panel technology done by Professor Green at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. We have slowly increased our solar PV over the years, until now we have 17kW of PV panels and two 15 kWh batteries. Sufficient to charge 2 electric cars, run the house and pottery workshop, Fire our electric kilns and if carefully managed, also selling the excess back to the grid. Although we try to minimise our exports, as we only get paid 5 cents per kWh. It’s better to use it all ourselves. We haven’t paid a power bill since 2007, and spend more money on petrol for things like the chain saw and fire fighting pumps than we do on our Plug-In Hybrid car.
Now that the garden and grounds are back under control, I’m also back in the pottery, making pots again, for the other half of each day, making again is fun and half of my existence. My start back on the potters wheel was delayed by a day, as the pug mill had seized up from being left for too long without use. I had to hand scrape the clay from the barrel nozzle and take out the vacuum screens to remove hardened clay from the mesh.  Quicker and easier than a complete strip down, but still time consuming. It somehow feels like a bit of a waste of time, but any other option is far worse, I’m so grateful to my friends who passed on their old pug mills to me after the fire. You know who you are. Thank You! I’m very grateful to be so lucky to own my very old, re-furbished, Venco pug mills. 

The next day I’m back on the wheel throwing perfectly de-aired and beautifully mixed plastic clay. My old wrists are too worn out to hand wedge all my clay any more. I did manage a lot of hand wedging for the first year back at work here, during lock down. I couldn’t buy a new Venco as they were out of production, and the large 100mm. model is still un-available! I don’t know where I get the energy and enthusiasm to keep on working like this into my older years, other friends and colleagues have retired, but I was determined not to let the 3rd bush fire in 50 years and loss of another pottery workshop stop me. I’m still here and still creating the things that I love. So out of desperation and necessity, I hand wedged my clay to my lasting detriment. My ageing wrists have never really recovered. Even throwing slowly on the kick wheel, causes just a little bit of a twinge, so I have to modify my hand position slightly to cope. We have a few Shimpo electric potters wheels, mostly used for our weekend workshops, that run on our solar power, but I really prefer the old ‘Leach’ treadle style kick wheel for all the smaller domestic pots.

Winter brings on the citrus crop, so we start the season by making 2 batches of marmalade, lemon, lemonade and lime marmalade and then tangelo and navel orange marmalade. The Seville oranges aren’t ready yet. They come on later in the season. They make the very best marmalade.

It’s hard to believe, but today, in winter, at the end of the first week of June, I picked a ripe red tomato. We still have self sown tomato plants flowering. We have had ripe tomatoes in June before. It all depends on the severity of the frosts. At this stage we have had a frost during the week, but because the vegetable garden is fully netted to keep out the birds, that netting seems to just take the edge off the frosts, allowing us to still harvest tomatoes so late in the season.

It’s so good to be home again! We have a quotidian flock of wild wood ducks, that have decided to take up residence on the front lawn, sometimes up to 30 or so of them. They seem to like it here. Plenty of grass to eat and 4 dams to explore. Why wouldn’t they? They were probably all born and raised here over the years. They do pooh all over the lawn, so we have to watch where we step and wipe our feet at lot. We have a shoes-off household, so no problem about the house, but a lot of pooh gets tramped into the pottery workshop when we have weekend workshops and open days.

If this is my biggest problem in life. I’m so, so lucky!

Nothing is perfect, nothing is ever finished, and nothing lasts.

Autumns rewards

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Exactly 8 weeks ago today, Janine and I harvested all of our apples and pears. We juiced them and used ‘Moet and Chandon’ champagne yeast to ferment them all into cider.

Now, 8 weeks on, the ferment has completely died down and used up all the available sugary nutrient in the juice. Now that it is completely still, it is safe to bottle it. We must make sure that it is fully fermented out, so that it wont keep on fermenting and explode the bottles.

I remember back in my childhood in the 60’s, stories of exploding ginger beer bottles that had too much sugar in them.

We have been making our own cider here for almost 50 years now, ever since we planted our first orchard and got a reasonable crop of apples. 

This is our first vintage of cider in ten years now, because the orchard was burnt out in the big bush fires of 2019, but before that, there was a ten year draught that made it very hard to keep the fruit tress alive , never mind getting a good crop off any of them.

So this is our first really good cropping year from the newly planted fruit trees in the new orchard five years on.See; It’s almost autumn, Time to make cider.Posted on 

I have just spent two days hand weeding and digging over the pottery verandah garden bed. It had gone completely feral and needed a good sorting out. All of the spring and summer flower display was mostly over and I’m hoping that all those flowers dropped a load of seeds down into the bed, so that now, given a bit of free space and sunlight, they will germinate and grow a new generation of flowers to welcome visitors along the driveway past the new pottery. I spent a long time on my hands and knees, making sure that I got the majority of the couch grass and kikuyu runners out of the soil. 

To prevent the grass runners from returning and growing back into the freshly weeded soil. I needed to make a border edging along the beds. In the vegetable garden, I made galvanised iron sheeting edging strips from off-cuts of galvanised flat plate that were left over from kiln jobs in the past. A very productive re-use of what was waste material. 

These days I don’t have off-cuts any more, but Janine reminded me that I had stacked up half a dozen lengths of old recycled roofing iron ridge capping that might be usable.

I got stuck in and flattened it all, split it in two long lengths, and then folded a strengthening right angle edge on one side so that i could bury it half way into the soil to delineate the garden bed, but most importantly to cut off access to the grass runners from growing back into the beds. I dug in a ute load of compost, watered it well in, so now will wait to see what germinates.

Re-use, re-cycle, re-purpose!

One of our cherry trees has decided to flower again in autumn. I think that it had a few cold nights, followed now with some warm weather,  and that was sufficient to reset the biological clock thinking that winter is over and time for the spring flowering. We have had this sort of thing happen in the past. Particularly with the ‘low-chill’ cultivars.

Winter hasn’t arrived yet, so I wonder if this tree will still flower as normal in 4 months time when spring does actually arrive?

In the pottery, I have retested the rock glaze tests that i started exploring a few weeks back. This time, I have made larger sized samples to see the quality of the glazes better. All 3 have potential, but still need further testing to get them ‘right’.

After washing and sterilising all the glass bottles for the cider bottling this morning. I had and hour to wait for the sterilising process to complete, and could hear the birds in the lillypilly tree next to the house. I asked Janine if she wanted to make some lillypilly jelly, so got out the 3 metre step ladder and climbed up into the canopy to fill a bucket with fruit. The fruit only starts 4 to 5 .metres off the ground. The tree is much taller then the house.

After we had bottled all the cider, Janine boiled up the berries and started the process of making the jelly. It takes two days. Tomorrow to sieve out the skins and stones from this batch, then re-boil it and set it up in a cheese cloth to drip out to clear jelly.

Nothing is ever finished, nothing is perfect and nothing lasts.

First cabbage of the cool season.

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We have just harvested the first cabbage and first broccoli of the autumn. I planted a range of brassica seeds on boxing day. The first batch were all dug out by the blackbirds, so when I re-planted the 2nd sowing, some time later. I also covered the bed with bird netting to stop a repeat of the blackbirds scratching out the seeds. Blackbirds don’t want the seeds, they just like to scratch into freshly worked and composted soil looking for worms. This little hiccup set me back a few weeks, so our first cabbage is a bit late arriving.

I have now repaired all the melted sections of the plastic netting over the vegetable garden. Almost total replacement at both ends that were worst hit by the fire, then applying patches to the large holes in the other walls, and finally stitching together the small 50mm to 100mm holes that are scattered all over the enclosure walls and roof. I purchased a commercial size roll of 100metres by 10 metres of netting over 30 years ago to cover the vineyard at harvest time. The netting that is over the veggie garden now is all that is left over from that time. It had a 10 years warranty against going brittle with the ultra violet light. So I’m very pleased that it has lasted so long. However, it is getting very brittle and the galvanised steel netting is all rusted through in places. So a total rebuild is in order, but I’m not too sure that I can manage that big a job these days, or if it would even be wise to attempt it at my age, having just turned 73, I shouldn’t be up and down ladders for days on end.

I made an Australian version of oka-nomiyaki pancake. Of course it is not really an okonomiyaki, as I don’t have mountain-potato starch, or almost any other authentic Japanese ingredients, but I do the best that I can with what I have. The super-fresh garden ripe cabbage makes it really fresh, crisp and delicious. The broccoli goes into a veggie stir fry along with all the other garden delights of the current season and some tofu for protein. Vegetable gardening, which mostly involves a lot of weeding, mowing and watering, suddenly becomes so worthwhile when you are harvesting such beautiful produce each afternoon, freshly picked ready for dinner. Our food has carbon metres, not miles!

I have also planted another 4 different varieties of seed garlic in the garden, just to see if any of therm are well adapted to grow here in the future.

In the pottery, I have been throwing some sericite porcelain stone bodies. This stuff is so short that I have to make the wall bases thick to hold the form up. That then means a lot of turning to get the pot thinner again. This weird stuff tears and rips as the turning tool cuts into it – unless it is turned quite firm and almost dry. But then there is the dust to contend with, so I like to do it while it is still a bit damp, but then it chips a lot. It becomes a two stage process. Roughing out the mass of extra thickness, drying some more, then final turning. I get to do a lot of slaking and re-cycling of turnings.

I have built an extra-large tray for my shimpo, but with this porcelain, I still fill it very quickly. This image is of the trimmings from just 15 small 150mm. bowls.

It all goes into the mixer pug and is recycled, ready for throwing again the next day, although leaving it to age a little bit and ‘recover’ would be even better, but because I use a dozen different mixtures and recipes, it is easy to loose track, with too many small packs of different clays hanging around. So I prefer to use up each batch all in one go as soon as possible.

The tyre on the old wheel barrow went flat last week. I took it to the tyre place to get a patch or a new inner tube, but they told me that the tyre wasn’t worth working on and I’d need a new tyre and a new inner tube – at a cost of $78! As the old metal rim is quite rusty, I decided that I might just as well buy a whole new wheel unit from the big hardware chain for $32! But then I remembered that I had a complete wheel off a buggered trolly that I picked up off the side of the road on council clean-up day. It is 25mm smaller in dia. but still holds air pressure well, so I had to change the shaft size and make some new brackets to hold it on, out of scrap tin plate. 20 mins later we are all back in business and good to go. It’s not perfect, but it works. Recycle, reuse, repurpose!

The Japanese have a word ‘Mottainai’ – too good to waste!

A botched up job that will keep all of this useful material out of the waste stream and land fill for another decade. I actually picked this whole wheel barrow up off the side of the road in the village some years ago on Council clean-up day, when the owner decided that it was just junk, because the tyre was flat. I took it home and just pumped it up. It worked! And has been working hard here for all those years of reprieve since then – and now still continues to be useful. Waste averted, Mottainai!

Nothing is ever finished, nothing is perfect and nothing lasts.

First firing of new portable wood fired kiln design

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I’ve just completed the first firing in the new version of the small portable  wood fired kiln that I have built for a friend.

This kiln is a little bit different from the ones that I used to build for a living before the fire.

In this case, I’m building it as a favour for an old friend. To repay an old debt. No money is changing hands.

I’m also using up a lot of old refractory bricks and fibre that I had in stock before the fire, and which subsequently got burnt, but were largely unaffected by the fire, as they are ‘refractory’ after all. They are scorched black in places and impregnated with a lot of soot and carbon, where the cardboard packaging burnt off.

I’m confident that they will be fine. This first test firing will burn off all the carbon and return them to pristine white, albeit with a little bit of flashing and wood ash decoration.

The purpose of the test firing is to make sure that the kiln will get to stoneware temperature easily, just like all the others that I used to build. In this current kiln, I have made changes that allowed me to use up a lot of the left over materials, this makes the kiln just a little bit different in dimensions, so testing is required. 

I sharpened my designers pencil and had a good long think about how I could use up what I had to the best advantage, and still have much the same outcome. As the old saying goes. There is more than one way to skin a cat. Who’d want to skin a cat anyway! weird! Anyway, this kiln looks pretty much the same as all the others, superficially at least, but all the critical dimensions are kept in the same relationship, so it ought to work OK.

I started by redesigning how I cut the frame out from the standard 2440 x 1220 mm sheets of Stainless steel. I thought it through and started from the out side measurements of the sheets and worked back inwards. In this way, I was able to use every last millimetre of the material, with minimal leftover off-cuts. I am still using the same 450 x 450 size kiln shelf as the setting and the height is still more or less 450 mm high in the setting. Only I can see where the changes are, and I’ve done a work-around so that it doesn’t matter or affect the outcome too much. Or, at least that is what I thought, hence the need for a test firing. I’m actually a little bit pleased with myself, if I do say so myself.

I hate wasting precious material like stainless steel. Of course, I always managed to use up all the off-cuts from the previous kilns in subtle ways, right down to making throwing tools out of the smallest little pieces. So no more stainless steel throwing tools for sale or give-aways anymore.

This cunning use of everything made me re-design the handles, reinforcing angle brackets and support lugs etc that I have on the kiln. They don’t look so different, but still do their job effectively.

All the bricks look a bit ‘dirty’ but are brand new. These are the equivalent of RI 23 insulating refractories. Good for firing to stoneware in fast firings. They are not very suitable for long, high temperature firings, as they would shrink a bit. but not so in this fast firing kiln.

I made some more ceramic buttons to keep the fibre in place. I also made a new stainless steel grate from old burnt stainless steel rod that was in the pottery when it burnt down. It looks a bit rusty, but it would look very black and rusty after the first firing anyway.

The test firing went very well. I got it up to 1300 in just over 3 hours and 15 mins. I used 2 wheel barrow loads of wood to get it up to temperature.

Just a few skerricks of wood left at the end of the firing. A lucky guess !

A nice resolution for an example of necessity being the mother of invention. This new design variation will be my new standard design.

If I ever make another one!

Good thing that I don’t have many friends 🙂

Nothing is ever finished, nothing is perfect and nothing lasts.

Autumn is here

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It’s March and autumn is supposed to be here, but it has been delayed by Global Heating! We are having some of the hottest recorded days for this time of year. We are used to the long ‘Indian Summer’ season transition, but this is the heat that we used to expect in the middle of summer.

The cherry trees have lost all their leaves. They are the first to bud-up in the spring and the first to drop their leaves in Autumn.

March is the month to plant garlic. The small cloves that we missed picking 6 months ago have shot up in the places where we left them invisibly underground. Their tender, slim, green aromatic shoots are a very good sign that it’s time for garlic to grow again. They have decided!  I planted 5 rows of our own, best-of-crop, home-grown garlic, the largest knobs from last year. 

I planted about 15 cloves to a row, that’s about 70 plants, if they all do well. I left a gap, for a place to stand while weeding the crop as will be necessary several times over the next 6 months. 

Then I planted 4 rows of commercially grown varieties of seed garlic. This year I’m growing ‘Rojo de Castro’ ‘Dynamite’ and ‘Spanish Roja’. Just to see if they will do well or even better than what we already have.

I left another walking gap for weeding and watering, then another 3 more rows of other bought seed garlic varieties. ‘Dunganski’, and ‘Festival’. Our very good friend Anne, organised a bulk purchase for a few of us in the ‘seed-savers’ group. I’m always interested in trying something new. Thank you Anne!

I always plant the best of last years harvest, whatever variety(ies) that is, very often a mix of what grows best here over the decades. All self selected, simply by growing well with large easy to peel large cloves. These new varieties all have a red, or pinkish hue, simply because I like the look of them when hung up in the kitchen drying and waiting to be used.

Whatever does well and grows best will be added to our localised crop for the following season. Life goes on. All the same as before, but with small changes and additions and hopefully improvements.

In the pottery I have been collecting, crushing and ball milling a few new local rocks for testing as glaze material.

As soon as the heat subsides, I’ll be firing the small portable wood fired kiln, filled with test bodies and glazes, to prepare for the firing of the big wood kiln over the winter months.

After the ‘big-pot’ throwing Summer Schools that we held here over January and February. I had about 80 kgs of the special course grained/textured clay left over. So I decided, rather than store it away somewhere, I would be better off to use it up making a few big jars for myself. I have always liked the traditional Korean ‘Moon Jars’, so I decided to have a go at making a few Korean inspired big round jars. They are NOT Moon jars, but my interpretation of the big, round, pale glazed form.

Janine decorated some of them for me using her carved/sgraffito through slip technique.

I have continued planting brassicas since Xmas day, when I planted the first seeds. I have planted 8 to 10 plants of mixed types each month to ensure a continuing crop of cauliflowers, broccoli, cabbage, Brussel sprouts and kohlrabi through out the autumn/winter.

I noticed today that the first broccoli head is forming on one of the first plantings.

I have to grow them under protective netting for the first few weeks to a month, to stop the black birds and bowerbirds from digging them out and eating the tops off them. The vegetable garden was completely covered in a mix of galvanised and plastic netting. But in the catastrophic bush fires of 2019 the heat of the fire melted the plastic netting on the west and east faces. All the birds were burnt in that fire, so there was no immediate need to repair the netting. EVERYTHING else was so much more important, like rebuilding. 

Now the birds are recovering and breeding up in numbers, coming back into our area. They have figured out that they can squeeze in through the gaps in the melted areas. So I have booked a friend to come and help me next week to get up on our tall step ladders and re-cover the burnt out sections with new netting. A big job that in the past I would have thought nothing of doing by myself with the occasional helping hand from Janine in the difficult areas, pushing up from underneath with a broom to get an even cover. Luckily, a very nice couple donated a huge amount of plastic bird netting from their farm, when they took down their orchard cover and moved into a smaller holding. We are very happy to use this re-cycled netting, both galvanised and plastic. Nothing wasted. Recycle, re-use, re-purpose.I may be old and stupid, but still just smart enough to know that I don’t want to do this job all by myself anymore. It’s just one of those endless series of jobs that we have to tackle everyday to keep on living here in this self-reliant, low-carbon, organic, minimal consumerist muddle.

Nothing is ever finished, nothing is perfect and nothing lasts!

3rd Summer School completed, Feb 2025

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We have just completed the 3rd of our Jan/Feb summer school series. Just 1 to go, starting on Friday.

We have had 3 great classes with a bunch of wonderfully talented and enthusiastic students – as they all-ways are every time. It’s such a privilege to be able to work like this, passing on what we have learnt over our lifetime, to enthusiastic potters, keen to learn the techniques that we have accumulated during our careers, and to sample a bit of what we do here. Between us, Janine, Leonard and I have notched up a total of about 150 years of ceramic practice and experience.

The last of the wild poppies are in their final fling of exuberant and cheerful rich red colour. These ones have come up, self sown, wild, in the cracks in the paving around the pottery.

Even though everything is more of less completed around the pottery, it still takes us a day to set the studio up for a workshop, prep all the clay, clean the batts and pot boards etc, then do some cooking to share for our joint lunches. Afterwards, there is a day to recycle the abandoned pots, crushed and soaked in the left over throwing slip, and wash everything down. The next day, I transferred all the re-cycled clay slip/slop/slurry from the 20 litre buckets into the plaster batts in the clay room to stiffen-up for re-pugging. 

I have 5 big plaster tubs/batts on a shelf in front of the huge north-facing window in the clay room, they get baking hot in the sun and are almost always very dry and receptive to stiffen up our recycled clay slip/slop/slurry. 

However, 30 litres of fairly thin slurry does set them back a bit in the drying stakes.

Today I dug out all the very soft plastic mass, in its slightly stiffened, but still very wet plastic state and piled it up in lumps on the pugging table to air dry. Once the plaster is saturated, it keeps the clay damp, so best to get it out and get it air drying. This has proved tot be the fastest way to deal with so much slurry. I also need the plaster tubs dry again for Friday’s next onslaught of failed experiments from the last 3-day summer school.

Everything will be in order by the time the next class starts tomorrow.

After the cleaning I baked another loaf of bread and cooked a potato dauphinoise for dinner finishing it off with a whole camembert sliced on top. The garden is revelling in all this warm weather and occasional storms. The self-sown tomatoes are small but prolific. I found the time in the evenings to make my first batch of tomato, garlic, capsicum and basil passata. 10 litres of sliced tomatoes boiled down in their own juice and then reduced by half to concentrate the flavour.

The bread turned out well – as usual. I’ve got it nailed now. Success every time. but I’m still trying variations, and different brands of flour. I’ve ended up with a 50/50 blend of wheat and organic stone ground rye flours.

There are so many vegetables coming from the garden in summer, we give a lot away, and do a lot of preserving. We also eat as much as we can. 

Nina and I worked together to make a sort of Greek inspired moussaka dish. I did the tomato/meat sauce and Nina did the béchamel topping. Working together made it so much quicker. Everything from the garden, egg plants, zucchinis, garlic and last years passata.

It was so nice on a cool rainy evening, we’ll be doing it again.

We are continuing to cube and roast pumpkin with olive oil, garlic and a sprinkle of salt. Everything is working, we are well, although quite tired from the intensity of the work load with the workshops, added to the summer harvest work, which can’t be put off or delayed. After next weekend’s workshop, I might try and make some cider from the apple and pear crop that is peaking at the moment.

Is there a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, in the new pottery? Hit by the end of the amazing double rainbow. I rushed down there to check it out. I went to the decorating cupboard where I keep all the pure gold leaf for use in kintsugi. But no pot of gold!

I could swear that I had a full fresh book of gold leaf in there, but NO! all gone.

I think that we got the wrong end of the rainbow. It sucked up all my gold and dropped it over the rainbow, somewhere else. Possibly in Kansas?

Bummer!

January in the Garden, Orchards and Pottery

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We have been very busy with our summer schools since the beginning of January. I originally advertised one Summer School to teach the making of larger forms on the potters wheel by ‘top-hatting’ and ‘coil-&-throw’ techniques.  We got such a massive response to my add that we could program 4 summer schools of 3 days each, and lined them up with a few days in-between. Two in January and two more in February. We only have 8 potters wheels in our workshop, and we got over 30 replies so I had to run 4 schools and space them out.

Top-hatting is a technique of placing one thrown form on top of another to make a larger pot than you might otherwise be able to throw in one piece. It can involve the stacking of multiple forms to gain extra height. Coil and Throw technique involves throwing a substantial base for the pot and then adding a coil of clay to the top and throwing that coil up to become the wall of the pot, extending the height. This technique can be repeated several times to make a taller pot.

We got such a massive response to my add that we could program 4 summer schools of 3 days each, and lined them up with a few days in-between. 2 in January and 2 more in February. As we only have 8 potters wheels in our workshop, and we got over 30 replies, that meant staging 4 consecutive schools. 

I made up some clay specially designed for big pot throwing by joining techniques, slightly softer than usual and with added ‘tooth’ and ‘grit’ for structure and good drying and firing of the larger forms. I originally made 400kgs of clay, thinking that it would be sufficient for the 4 workshops, but I was way out in my estimations. The first two workshops used up nearly all of my stash, so I was back in the clay making shed the next day to make up another 400kgs for the next two in February. I like the clay to get a little age on it to improve its work-ability, 3 months would be good, 3 years even better, but needs as needs must. One month in this case will have to be enough.

Clay develops its plasticity by the intimate mixing of water molecules in-between the infinitesimally small clay particles. The best way to achieve this is to make a ‘slip’. A very watery mixture of clay and water, to get the water into, and in-between the clay crystals, which in their purest form are flat and hexagonal shapes. It takes a very long time for the water to penetrate the ‘pack of cards’ structure of the clay particles and individually flake off the crystals one at a time to get that intimate mixing of clay and water that is required to appreciate the very best potential of any particular clay.

I don’t have that luxury of time in this instance, so I am using powdered clay material that I bought in, in 25kg paper bags. I’m using a mixture of all Australian clays from Victoria, NSW and Qld. to get a good blend of the required properties that I need. It’s getting very difficult to buy Australian raw minerals and clays these days, as the multi-national mineral companies have bought up most of the clay mines and shut them down, forcing us to buy their imported products from overseas. We are not short of clay here, but we have been locked out of access to our own resources. Welcome to the future!

I mix the various minerals together in an old recycled bakery dough mixer. I have owned this machine for over 40 years. It has gone through 2 fires and been rebuilt each time. Luckily, it is very well made, mostly of cast iron frame, but the fabricated steel sheet bowl was very badly split and warped after the last fire and needed a lot of work to re build it, and get it back into action. see my blog post from 4/6/21  “Our Old Twice Burnt Dough Mixer Proves to be a ‘Phoenix’ mixer”.  I use a blend of recycled clay slip and the new powders to get the best outcome that I can from this compromise of speed, quality and efficiency. 

I use a few tricks of the trade to get the best possible result out of my available materials. I use water from the dam and rain water from the old pottery shed water tank that is full of gum leaves that creates a very useful tannic acid water that is ideal for making clay. It is a transparent pale grey and has a very low pH so that when mixed with white kaolin, it attaches to the clay particles and flocculates the clay mass, which settles tightly in the bucket leaving only crystal clear water on top. It is also ‘live’ as it has all sorts of microscopic organic matter and bacteria in there, which helps age the clay. City water that is full of chlorine is pretty much sterile and kills off any live matter that may help the clay mature and become more plastic and workable.

I have a ‘snorkel’ fitted to a fan in the wall that sucks all the fine dust out of the clay mixer room to keep me safe while I’m working in there, but I also wear protective gear as well. Afterwards, once the clay is all wetted, ‘plastic’ and ‘pugged’ into sausages. I cut all the ends off the stacked pugs and re-pug it all again to make sure that there is a consistent mix of all the 3 different batches of clay represented in each bag of finished clay body.

It is bagged and stacked to ‘age’ and the floor is wet mopped twice to collect all the clay dust off the floor and make the work space clean and safe again.

In the garden, we are picking the last of the blueberries, the first of the egg plants, and we are mid season for zucchinis. The tomatoes are coming on quite strong now and we have started to make our first batches of tomato passata for the summer. Every meal from now on will be some sort of variation of ratatouille in all its various forms. What else can we do when the garden is full to bursting with tomatoes, aubergines, zucchinis and basil? We try and give away as much as we can, but everyone in the village has an excess of tomatoes and zucchinis at this time of year.

Our breakfasts and deserts are mostly of fruit these days. November brings on the berries, December is the month of cherries and apricots, January for plums and peaches, February is all about apples and March for the last of the pears.

4th summer school announced

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We have filled 3 summer school workshops of three days each, learning coil and throw, plus top-hatting techniques. It’s a kind of hybrid combination of of hand building on the wheel.

I have 4 more names on my waiting list, for a 4th workshop during the 2nd week of February, 7th, 8th and 9th of Feb.

If you are interested, there a still 4 places left. Please let us know if you are interested.

If we can get 8 names on the list, then we will run the 4th workshop. Then that will be it for the year as far as coil and throw technique is concerned. In March or April, we may do throwing flatware, dishes, plates and platters. Then possibly a glaze workshop concentrating locally sourced and collected stones, gravels and ashes.

Summer School Throwing Workshop Jan 6th to 8th – FULL

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The second workshop on the 11th to the 13th of January is also now FULL

I have started a new waiting list for a third workshop for sometime early in February, yet to be determined. I already have 3 names, but need 8 to run the course.

Janine, Len Smith and I will be offering a 3 day throwing workshop over the summer break. Jan 6th to 8th.

We will be teaching throwing techniques for beginners and intermediate level, aimed at making larger forms.

This is NOT a Masterclass for advanced throwers. This workshop is aimed at beginner to intermediate level.

You will need to be able to center clay on the wheel, from there on we will help you make some larger forms, demonstrating exercises to give you confidence to tackle slightly larger projects. Progressing from whatever your current level of skill is.

I will be demonstrating a series of techniques such as top hatting and coil and throw building techniques. 

We will also be demonstrating construction techniques, assembling your thrown sections together to build slightly more complex or larger pieces. We will help you work at your own pace to gain confidence and increase the complexity of your forms, or the height and scale of your pots, as you choose.

The workshop runs for three days from 10 till 4pm on Monday 6th of January to Wednesday 8th of January.

Clay is provided, you will need to bring your throwing tools and lots of batts, a dozen or more. If you own an electrical heat gun, you can bring it along with your tools.

Tea and coffee are provided, please bring something to share for lunch.

Numbers are Limited, as we only have 8 wheels in the studio. First in best dressed.

Cost $375 for three days. Enrollment is confirmed after payment is made.

Bookings <hotnsticky@ozemail.com.au>