Category Archives: In the pottery

Summer fruit harvest with pork and beans.

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December brings on the summer and the stone fruit harvest. We have all of the newly planted, now 4 years old. stone fruit trees in the new post fire orchard coming into fruit. We chose to plant all dwarf rootstock, low chill, hot weather tolerant, varieties. They are doing really well and everyone of them has fruit on them this year. Some of them set fruit from year one, but as this isn’t good for the health of the tree, I picked all the fruit off, bar one piece, just get a taste of what was to come. Fruit trees do better if they are left to grow on for a few years and put all their energies into developing a sound, strong branch structure and deep root system. As their first 3 years were all very wet here with the la nina event coinciding with their planting, They grew very well indeed and we hardly had to water them very often.

So now we have a surfeit of peaches and nectarines, on these pretty little bundles of red and green. All the fruit needs to be eaten now or very soon, so we have fruit salad for breakfast. 

BBQ’d peaches and or nectarines with dinner, and stewed fruit for desert. There is always a pressing problem with the fruit fly. I was a bit slow in getting all the fruit fly trap and lures re-charged with refreshed baits this year, so there is a bit of fly in the fruit. We cut this out and cook it up to kill the wrigglers. The rest of the otherwise undamaged fruit is stewed for breakfast or desert. 

This old fly trap has about 100 dead male fruit flies in the bottom from the early spring flourishing. I empty them out and replace the old bleached white bait with a new bright pink one. We have about 14 of these traps of various ages. I bought a few new ones each year, as the orchard grew. now I just buy refills for the bait.

You can tell their ages by the bleached out colour of their lids.

We picked the very last of the broad beans. I thought that I had picked them all last week, but I only had a boy-look. Janine went back through the crop and found another meal for us. I decided to cook that very old favourite of pork and beans. So called favourite of the cowboys on the trail in the old west. I first became aware of this combination watching old black and white western cow boy movies as a kid. I had no idea what it all meant, but it did cross my mind briefly – very briefly. Why were they eating pig when they were herding cattle?

Why weren’t they herding pigs if that is what they wanted to eat? Fortunately, my nascent and emerging tiny brain managed to accept and cope with this difficult dilemma, and moved on. 

Now fast forward to my early interest in cooking and coming across the wonderful Italian recipe of chorizo, beans and tomatoes, obviously with extra chilli and garlic, it goes without saying. It’s become one of our springtime/hungry gap favourites. The beans are usually all dried from last summer, as is the bottle of reduced tomato sugo or passata. As we don’t have our own pig, just chickens. I use what we have in the fridge. At this time, we only have some bacon, so that is what I use. With the shops being a good 50 km round trip away, we don’t drive there frivolously. So bacon it is.

Home grown beans, home grown sweet basil, home grown garlic and home made passata from home grown tomatoes. WARNING! A pig was harmed in the making of this meal.

Desert is fresh picked cling stone yellow fleshed peaches soused with a dash of amoretto half an hour before. Perfection!

These days I’m up in the early mornings from 5.30 and work outside until the sun gets too hot, possibly around 9.00am. Sometimes I am out in the garden working, or more recently. I have been updating our fire fighting capacity with extra sprinklers on the walls of the pottery, barn and big work shed. I have installed the ‘spare’ fire fighting pump that  I used to transfer water from dam to dam.

It is now more or less permanently in place to protect the pottery and barn with a high pressure water sprinkler system. This system used to be powered by an electric pump, I found out at my expense that electric pumps are useless in an emergency, even though I have solar power and a battery, when the fire came and burnt the pottery, it shorted out the power to the barn and only then did it catch fire.

So now everything is dual powered. We have electric pumps for hand watering the garden beds and running the roof cooling sprinkler on top of the roof. But for fighting is completely petrol driven and independent. Because you cant let petrol engines sit idle. They need to be started and run regularly. I have every thing in a dual system now, so that I can start up the fire pump when we are both want to water the garden and orchard trees at the same time. The fire pump handle that duel drain on its reserves of power with no problem, whereas the one horsepower electric pump struggles.

Inspired by all the talk of the Roselle spaghetti junction new motorway tunnel. I installed my own water fed spaghetti junction.

Situated directly behind, and close coupled to, the two 25,000 litre water tanks, it should be safe from fire there? Only time will tell. If you look hard at the image of the pottery shed, you will see the water misting out of the wall sprinklers along the verandah and up on the roof.

I’ve been spending the hottest part of the day inside working on the ongoing sgraffito project. I’ve finally run out of pre-slipped, press moulded dished and tiles. I’ll have to get on the wheel again soon and make more shapes to decorate.

Inspiration keeps on blossoming

And then the rains came.

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We have been going through a very dry time recently, with the onset of the summer heat and reports confirming that we are entering another el-nino period.

All a bit glum really, but then the rains finally came. We had about 150mm. that’s about 6 inches in the old money. I had recently spent a few days pumping water from one almost empty dam up to another, slowly accumulating what was left of our water in the 4 dams, all eventually up to the one small dam near the house, where we have both a high pressure, petrol driven, fire fighting pump, and a small electric pump that is mostly used for watering the garden.

I managed to get that little dam about 1/4 to 1/3rd full. not a bad effort. That would have been just enough to see us through the first half of summer.

Before the rains.

After the rain.

But now, since the down pour, we have 4 dams all about 3/4 full. The little house dam that started from 1/3rd full, over flowed down into the next dam in the series. A lot of that water I pushed up hill 2 weeks ago flowed back. A waste of a couple of gallons of petrol. I still buy petrol for the pumps, the chain saws, the mowers and diesel for the tractor. So we are not fully weaned off the dirty oil economy. I worked out recently that I spend a little bit more money on the fuel for the mowers and chain saws, than I do putting petrol in our Plug-in hybrid car, simply because we make sure that we keep the car fully charged off our solar panels, so we rarely ever need to put petrol in it. About $30 every 3 months, where as I spend about $100 twice a year filling up the fuel drums for the garden appliances.

We have recently bought a solar charged electric push mower, plus a whipper-snipper thingy, and a solar charged electric chain saw. So I expect that my visits to the petrol station will decrease accordingly. I still need diesel for the tractor and petrol for the ride on mower.

Since the weekend workshops of the last two weekends, Janine and I have spent a good part of each day during the week in the pottery consolidating our sgraffito skills and developing a few new designs, to include in our next batch of work. I would have liked to spend more time in the pottery, being creative and self absorbed. Once you start to draw and decorate the surface, the time just flashes past and it gets late so early. We  have to stop to do the watering. There will be more time tomorrow to get a bit more done. There is always enough time for everything. We just have to learn to allocate out time and and as we age to allocate our limited energy. 

There is so much to do around the garden and orchards. We have had to start watering by hand again since the rains stopped and the temperature has been going up – just touching on 40 degrees today. Even hotter in the west. Hand watering all the gardens and orchard trees. It takes us both over an hour to do a quick once-over, just to keep everything alive. It takes a lot longer to give specific beds a really good soak while we are at it.

We could probably buy vegetables much cheaper from one of the rip-off, price gouging supermarkets. But they wouldn’t so clean, fresh, healthy, organic and immediately delivered straight from the garden and onto the plate. There is something so very, even intensely, powerful in growing your own food. Not just the self reliance of it, but the intimate nature of the activity. It grounds me here in this place. I’m intimately here and now on this ground. This has become my little all-encompassing environment. My statement of belonging. I’ve sculptured this place into being as what is is now. It’s peaceful, abundant, pretty, and very functional as a home art space and garden.

We are just coming to the end of ‘the hungry gap’. That time of the year when most of the winter food in the garden is coming to an end, but the new spring planted summer crops haven’t started producing yet. We have been eating the last of our carrots, beetroots and cabbages, and have just picked the last of the broad beans along with the first of the new season zucchinis. Tomatoes have set on the bushes, but are still very green. It is always a challenge to get one ripe red tomato before Xmas. 

maybe not this year, due to our being away and not getting that head start early on at the end of winter, or the first weeks of spring.

One very nice treat for this time of the year is the summer fruit crop. We are harvesting strawberries, blue berries, peaches, nectarines and plums. That equals fruit salad for breakfast for the next month.

I love the summer garden, but I don’t like the 40 degree days, or the potential for bush fires that are always in the realm of possibility when the wind picks up from the west.

Open Studio Sale This Weekend

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The shelves have been re-stocked. The Pan Forte cake is mixed and is ready to bake. The coffee is freshly ground. 

We are ready for the 2nd Open Studio Sale Weekend starting tomorrow. What could possibly go wrong? Hopefully nothing, as we had 22mm of rain yesterday which has freshened up the garden and topped up the water tanks. 

Today started with a heavy mist from yesterdays rain. Regrettably, the rain wasn’t strong enough to flood the gutters and pour down the dirt road and flow into our dam. Most of it soaked in, but that is also very good for the garden and all our fruit trees, some of which had started to drop fruit in the prolonged dry spell. The lawn had turned brown and started to ’crunch’ underfoot it was so dry. However, it is amazing what a little rain will do. What was left of the burnt off grass has turned to a flush of green again over night. One blessing is that as it is only millimetres high, it doesn’t need mowing. There is always a bright side. The welcome rain has watered the english cottage garden flowers along the front of the pottery, so everything is looking bright and perky.

All the shelves are full and the gallery is looking good.

Call in and see us over the weekend if you are in the area. Stop for some cake and coffee if you have time, we’d love to catch up.

The veggie garden has been woefully neglected recently. It still feeds us well from our previous plantings, but because we were away for a lot of August and September. It was pointless planting any seeds in such dry weather, and then not being here to water and nurture them. So we missed out on our spring planting this year. I would normally have started seeds off in mid to late August, and then planted out in late September while keeping an eye on the frosts and possibly using our portable home made closh system of wire and shrink-wrap frames. However, as we have been so busy since our return, I have only just found time to work in the garden again. i found time in-between pumping water uphill to weed out and replant a few beds. 

I have had to resort to buying seedlings in punnets this year, so as to get some advanced tomatoes in the ground, along with zucchini, egg plants and lettuce. I also planted out seeds of the same for a follow up planting in December. It will be a smaller vegetable garden this summer. But you can’t do everything.

Buying punnets is a bit of a come-down, but I’m only human and needs as needs must. My own home grown seedlings are on their way.

Nothing is ever finished, nothing is perfect, and nothing lasts. Enjoy the moment.

Winters End – The Last Truffle of the Season

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Today we finished off the last truffle of the season. It was romantic, mysterious, fragrant, exotic and delectable. It really elevates the humble scrambled egg into something special without taking anything away, just adding loads of romance and aroma. The warmth of the freshly cooked eggs releases so many aromatic oils and esters from the tiny black fungus. It fills my nostrils as I bend over doing the shaving. It’s a good thing that we only get to eat these delicious little morsels in the winter months, otherwise we may become somewhat blasé about it all. As it is, they are still a very special seasonal treat, If somewhat expensive. We can only afford to live this decadent gourmet lifestyle on our frugal budget because we have a son in the industry.

We are also probably making our last batch of marmalade too, as we have picked most of the Seville oranges now and eaten nearly all of the other citrus fruit. Although this is the beginning of spring, it is also the end of winter in another way, so it’s the end of the winter crops like citrus. We try and live with the seasons, so that’s it for the big citrus splurge in our diet. 

It is one of the blessings of living in the Southern Highlands, that we have 4 distinct seasons. For instance, this morning we had another frost. This might possibly be our last really cold morning, but you never know with the climate emergency developing as it is, anything could happen.

I peel off the thin yellow layer of the skin without taking too much of the pith. I want the pith off!  With my pile of curly peels, I end up with what can only be called ‘bitter and twisted’ .

Janine removes the pith and cuts up the juicy centre to add to the pan. The first pan is on for 30 mins. before we get the 2nd pan on the stove and the difference in colour is dramatic, it  gets richer and deeper as it cooks. We try to use as little sugar as possible, while not making it too bitter and acidic, we also need enough sugar to make it ’set’. It takes about an hour of steady simmer to get it to thicken sufficiently. It’s worth all the effort, it tastes delicious, with just the right consistency. Seville oranges aren’t all that nice on their own. They are OK, but they really come into their own when it comes to making marmalade.

The stone fruit orchard is growing up well. This is its 3rd year and the trees are starting to look a lot more settled and established, with thicker trunks. I have been pruning them into open vase shapes where possible, but some of them have a very narrow vertical habit. They are all grafted onto ‘dwarf’ rootstocks, so they are keeping to a compact size. Most of them are now about 1.5 to 1.8 metres high, with an expected total height of 2.5 metres eventually. But I am well aware that plants can’t read their own labels! So there are bound to be variations.

We had a really great 1st Weekend workshop in the new pottery. It worked very well. The new studio is a great space to teach in. The light is good and the layout works ergonomically for 10 people, 8 students and 2 teachers. After everyone left I got stuck in and started making more pots for myself. The Open Studios, Arts Trail is coming up at the end of the year, so I need to get back to work making pots for that. I started back at it by making 30 straight sided mugs.

I spent a few days since the recent weekend workshop, in the afternoons, in my spare time, splitting and dressing sandstone blocks, to make some garden bed edging along the recently finished slate capping on the big sandstone retaining wall around the new pottery. It’s just another one of those jobs that has been in the offing and waiting for the ‘right’ time. I chose this ‘right’ time from what is left of my other time! Once the little wall was in place I shoveled in a load of top soil and planted seeds and a few seedlings to make the edging look a bit more settled and finished. I sprinkled in a packet of English Cottage Garden seed mix for good measure and 30 caper seeds, one every 600mm. Capers need an elevated, well drained, sun baked, dry, harsh environment to thrive. They take 2 years to establish, then persist for many more as long as they are cut back and pruned hard in the winter to stimulate good growth in the spring and summer, as flowers and fruit are produced on the new years growth. The elevated and exposed wall seemed like a pretty good place to try them out. I have read in a few books that they thrive on top of stone walls in the Med’s dry summers. I have no expectations, but if something comes of it, I’ll be pleased. If not, then I’ll chalk it down to another one of life’s enriching experiences. The stones look nice anyway, regardless of whether the plants grow or not!

After the soil was shoveled into the new beds, Edna the chicken, who had been helping me all day, came along and decided to help me some more by scratching a lot of it out again. I had to make some impromptu wire covers to protect the small seedlings from being excavated!

I’m happy with the result. 3 days work and $50 bucks goes a long way. I’m hoping that it will look greener in time for the November Arts Trail, Open Studios event.

Our first weekend workshop in the new pottery

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We have just completed the first weekend workshop in the new pottery.

We invited the potters and ex-students who had helped us clean up the mess from the catastrophic fire that cleaned us out in November 2019. We only have 8 potters wheels in the new throwing room, so our numbers were limited to the first 8 potters to get in touch with us.

Regrettably, we had to turn a few lovely people away. However, there will be other workshops coming along in the pipeline. I’ll be announcing them here on the blog as they become reality and when we have set firm dates. This first workshop was a ‘freebie’ as our thank you to those volunteers.

To help us out on this first workshop we invited or friend and collaborator Warren Hogden to join us. We started off with throwing mugs, cups and beakers.

The pottery was buzzing, with every one being busy. Janine, Warren and I all gave a demo of our throwing techniques, so everyone got 3 different approaches demonstrated, so that they could choose something to concentrate on for the day. 

Each lunch time, we asked our son Geordie, who is a ‘hatted’ chef, to come in and cook lunch for us – a very special treat.

We set up the hand-building room as our lunch room, I made a table out of a very large slab of wood from one of our trees that was killed by the fire. And rather than waste it. I couldn’t bear to see it bull-dozed, chopped up and burnt, so I hired a portable sawmill for 3 days and we milled the trees into all the planks and slabs that we needed to build the new pottery.

This solid table is one big slab of timber that can seat 12. We use this room for functions, dinner parties and openings. Our house is small, so if we need to sit more than 6 guests, we move out into the pottery where we can seat 12 to 14 at a pinch. It’s a large bright, well lit room with loads of practical, flexible space, so it has become an extension to our house in some ways.

On the 2nd day we all demonstrated turning our pots, then making and applying handles. We kept everyone busy all day for both days.

I demonstrated pulling handles from simple hand rolled coils, as well as my somewhat crude, but easily made, twisted-wire handle ‘blank’ extruder.

These ‘blank’ billets of proto-handles are applied to the pot and then ‘pulled’ in the traditional way to make an elegant, smooth, curved handle.

Janine demonstrated turning the base of her pots on a leather-hard clay ‘chuck’.

I couldn’t help by notice how things have changed over the years. These days everything is videoed on mobile phone for later reference.

Warren demonstrated the use of a ‘caulking’ gun to extrude the basic handle shape. He also demo’d the use of a plaster mould to press mound handles.

Everyone appeared to enjoy them selves. It was certainly an intensively productive 2 days.

We farewelled everyone with a very tiny taste of Geordie’s latest venture as the head distiller at ‘Renegade gin’ in Mittagong.

We had a bottle of his Australian Native Plum Gin. I served it in very petite antique Japanese porcelain sake cups. I didn’t want any one to get booked on the way home, so just 1 or 2 mls. It’s really delicious stuff. So intense, fruity and concentrated, just superb!

Old Shimpo RK1 potters wheel

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I recently bought an old Shimpo RK1 potters wheel from a friend.

It probably dates to the 70’s. These wheels were manufactured from 1958, probably up to the late 70’s or very early 80’s? 

The smaller RK2 wheel was released in 1967 and became the standard wheel from that time on. The RK2 was smaller, lighter, more portable and cheaper than the RK1. 

These larger and very much heavier RK1 wheels were built on a cast iron shell, making it quite stable, but very, very heavy. The RK1 has a kind of gearbox to increase torque when making very large pots, and the torque is finely adjustable using a handle on top of the casing to make the subtle changes needed, without stopping the wheel.

It’s a bit of a dinosaur. In fact I have only ever seen 3 of them in Australia. Les Blakeborough had one in the Sturt pottery workshop in Mittagong when I worked there in 1972. He had a special extra-large copper tray custom made for it. I’ve never seen anything else like it. My teacher Shigao Shiga had one in his studio when I was his apprentice in 1973, and Peter Rushforth had one in his later studio in Shipley. This one could possibly have been Shiga’s old one passed on to him, as they were close friends.

I missed out on getting my hands on all of these wheels when they changed hands, so I was pleased to see this one come up for sale recently.

I don’t think that it has had too much use, as it’s in good mechanical condition for such an old wheel. They were originally supplied with only a small splash guard in front of the wheel head, as were the original RK2 wheels in the 60’s. It was another 10 years before they started producing wheels with plastic trays – probably for the hobby market? All Japanese pottery studios in the early years had the wheel set down under the floor, and the potter sat cross-legged on the floor and bent forward to lean over the wheel head at floor level. Hence the arm bolted onto the foot pedal to reach up to floor level to control the speed. I had to learn to sit cross-legged just like this when I was an apprentice. As a 21 year old, it was a bit of a shock, and my legs went numb quite quickly. It took me months to get used to it. As I wasn’t accustomed to sitting cross legged on any floor, at any time. If I dangled my legs down into the wheel enclosure, they would get saturated with throwing water/slip. So I quickly learnt to throw with a minimal amount of water/slip. To this day, I still throw with almost no water.

The splash guard and it’s mountings were missing from this wheel when I bought it. This type of potters wheel is meant to be mounted in an enclosure to catch all the slip spray and turnings. I had two such enclosures in the old pottery, one for each of the smaller, more compact RK2 shimpo models that I owned back then. RK2 and RK2 super.

The good side was that you could work all week and the turnings would just pile up around the machine. Friday afternoon was the time to clean out the enclosure. The bad side was that you couldn’t change clays very easily. I use a lot of different clays/porcelain stone pastes these days and need to keep all the turnings and slip separate. So a full tray suits me better. Unfortunately, the plastic ones usually supplied with modern shimpo wheels a tediously small and so cramped that I can’t fit my fingers down into the gap to clean out the turnings. So I am forced to have to dismantle the tray to remove the turnings every few minutes, it’s so tedious. 

The marketing picture of the original RK1 from their website shows the wheel with its wheel head splash guard.

I have built new custom built trays for half of my Shimpos so far. It’s just one of those jobs that is on-going and a work in progress. I’ll get them all done in due course.

There was no easy way to fit a tray onto this old RK1 wheel with its sloping frame casting. So I had to weld up a support frame and drill and tap threaded holes into the cast iron casting to fix the new tray securely in place.

I siliconed all around the edges of the tray where the waterproof ply meets the stainless steel wall, and then glued on a strip of clear poly tubing all around the top of the steel edge to make it more comfortable for the user.  I also used the base of a plastic bucket to make a protective guard around the shaft to keep water and turnings  away from the bearings I screwed this down and siliconed it to the base as well. All good.

I made a wooden tool shelf for the end of the tray with an arc cut out to match the wheel head to allow for big batts when throwing platters.

The finished product in place and working. We now have 8 wheels up and running in time, ready for the first weekend throwing workshop, this coming weekend. This workshop was organised by invitation only, for those potters who came and helped us clean up after the fire. This one is free, as my thank you gift to those helpers. The next workshops will be advertised here to allow anyone who wants to, to apply. I’ve asked around and made a few enquiries. I’ve decided to charge a fee that is at the lower end of the current market price. I’ll be charging $125 per person per day. 

I see these proposed intermittent workshops, spread out throughout the year, as being my part-time job in retirement.

I’ll be teaching other workshops as well as throwing in the coming year; 

There will be throwing for wood firing, using my specially developed clay bodies.

Weekend wood kiln firings. Spread over two weekends, first weekend for packing and firing, then the following Sunday to unpack and debrief on the work.

One day geological field trip to collect samples followed by rock glaze testing and firing

Glaze theory and testing. + plus other topics as they appear appropriate or are requested.

Janine and I have acquired a lot of experience and skills over the years. We were trained in the 70’s when everything was done the old fashioned way and skills and theory were taught in greater detail than is done today. We are keen to pass on some of these skills before we expire.

The modern pottery workshop access classes, or potters wheel experience classes, don’t tend to teach much, if any, theory these days. We hope to fill part of that need.

Pugging Clay

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We’ve been busy in the clay making shed loading up the dough mixer with more clay mixtures for the coming throwing weekend workshops booked for the 26th and 27th of this month.  This time I made up a single batch each of vitreous white stoneware/porcelaneous body and a batch of coarse, wood firing, stoneware body using local rough crushed shale with both pale and brown kaolin powders.

We use the stainless steel twin auger Venco pug mill that I bought 2nd hand. It’s only small with a  3”, or 75mm dia, extrusion, but it is so quick, very quiet and self feeding. 

We started by recycling all the slaked and stiffened turnings from the last batch that had been sitting in the clay box ageing and waiting for the next pugging session.

Over the few months since I used it last, the clay had dried out a little in places in the barrel. Which was a little bit strange, as I had the pug mill pretty well sealed at both ends, but some of the clay dried out enough to be too firm to pass through the vacuum screen. It jammed in the screen mesh and slowed down the pugging significantly, so I had to pull the pug to bits and clean the screen. No problem! The beautiful feature of this pug mill, is that it only takes 60 seconds to rotate and un-clip the barrel, then lift it off to get to the screen. It’s so quick and easy with no bolts or spanners required. I scraped the screen clean and replaced it in 2 mins and back in business. Amazing!

The next batch of coarse textured wood firing clay was put through the dough mixer and the Venco 4” or 100 mm. dia. vacuum pug mill. This pug mill is fitted with coarse mesh vacuum screens, specifically for making clay bodies like this.

We start off by pugging all the recycled turnings from the last throwing session. These have been wet processed, bagged and then stored in the clay boxes waiting for the next pugging session with this mill. By having different pug mills for each different clay body. It saves so much time in not having to clean out the pug mill before changing clays. The recycled turnings also benefit by the time spent ageing in the clay box, increasing in plasticity over time. The new batch of clay is loaded onto the mobile clay table and wheeled out of the isolated and dust extracted mixer room, then wheeled out to the pug mill area. Janine can then start to pug the clay in a clean, dust free environment, while I return to the clay mixer room and start another batch.

The recycled clay and the new batch are then pugged together to get a good mix. But most importantly, all the pugged clay is stacked in a long stack on the pug mill bench and when full, all the ends of every pug of clay are all cut off and mixed together, and fed back through the pug mill, so that there is a little bit of every part of the new batch and all the turnings all aggregated in the new sausage of clay as it comes from the pug. This thrice pugged and well blended clay is then bagged and back into the clay store ready for use. This double processing and blending eliminates any variation between the first and last pugs of clay from that mix.

It doesn’t eliminate any mistakes in the weighing out or the dough mixing, but it minimizes the possibilities. Life is what it is.

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

All the machines are built on trollies or castors, so that once all the clay is bagged and stored away, I can then wheel all the machinery out of the way and mop the floor clean of any spilt fragments of clay, dropped while pugging. The whole area is opened up to a through breeze, and thoroughly wet cleaned and mopped, then allowed to dry, before the machinery is wheeled back into place.

It’s not perfect, nothing is, but it is very good and the best that I can do at the moment using the machines that I could get my hands on 2nd hand at the time, and others donated from friends. You know who you are! I thank you from the bottom of my heart for your support and thoughtful kindness!

Fire and Ash Exhibition

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Janine and I have work in the ‘Fire and Ash’ exhibition at the ‘Lowe and Lee Gallery’ in Sydney. The show opened last Friday.

I have a few wood fired bowls that had minor damage during the firing, and I repaired them with gold. If I was Japanese, or working in Japan using traditional materials. This work would be called ‘kintsugi’.

However, as I’m in Australia and using very westernized hybrid techniques, methods and materials. I choose to call these bowls ‘gold repair’ pieces. The only common material is the 23 karat gold.

I did a course on kintsugi repair when I was in Japan, but the uniquely Japanese materials like the sap of the Rhus tree are not readily available here in Australia, or not that I know of.

Also, it is worth noting that the sap of the Rhus tree is highly toxic and not to be used without extreme caution PPE. It causes Toxicodendron dermatitis.

So I have invented my own hybrid methods that incorporates locally available materials, like 5 minute epoxy glue instead. I make up my own blend of high strength filler putty, and I also make my own grinding and polishing discs to buff the surfaces up to a fine finish.

After a bit of work, they are greatly improved and given a new life. By selecting them as special and showing them some respect by repairing them. They are made even more beautiful, even with their scars, chips and cracks.

After the long weekend Open Studio Sale

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As soon as the Pop-Up long weekend Open Studio sale was over, we got busy tackling the next big urgent job.

That job is dealing with the cracking and spalling of the big sandstone blocks that we used to make the retaining wall behind the pottery.

I knew when I bought them that they were rejects. I naively thought that they were cheap because they were split in an irregular way and not square, but tapered. That didn’t worry me, as I could arrange them so that they had a reasonably flat and square face outwards. I could hide the unevenness in behind the grave back-fill.

However, as it has transpired, the real problem with them, and the reason for them being very cheap, is that they are not hard sandstone, but rather soft and sugary.

Bummer! 

Over the past 3 years that they have been sitting there year in, year out, through the rain storms and winter frosts, they have begun to spall. Water soaks in to the porous stone and when the frosts come and the ice expands, bits of the face split off. Recently we noticed that the blocks were beginning to split down the centre, not just the face and edges. This is serious stuff. If not dealt with immediately, the stones will start to loose their stability.

I decided that the best approach would be to cap the stones with some sort of waterproofing system. We had a load of old roofing slates stacked away under the railway station. They came off the roof of my brothers house before it was demolished many years ago. We always intended to use them as floor tiles, but never did. So we have plenty of these old weathered slates. We needed to get them out from under the floor and give them a good scrape and clean, then a good scrub and a wash to get all the grunge of history off them, so that we could get the cement to stick securely. 

We spent 2 half days fettling and washing the slates. A cold, wet job for the first of winter after a cracking good frost.

I took the truck down to the sand and gravel yard each day to pick up half a tonne of sand and 7 bags of cement each day for the 3 days that it took us to get the job done. We employed a young, local guy to give us a hand, as we are getting too old for this kind of heavy work on our own these days.

Using our very old ‘wabi-sabi’ Steam-Punk cement mixer that we bought 2nd hand for $50, 35 years ago. We mixed 14 loads a day and got through 1  1/2 tonnes of sand and 20 bags of cement to render a 70mm thick bed of mortar over the stones to get a continuous straight level, thick enough to be water proof and strong enough to cap the stones and support the slate capping.

Time will tell if this has worked well enough to deter any further spalling. I did notice that there was enough embedded heat energy in the stones, such that after the frost melted in the morning, the slates were very soon dry, except where the edge extends over the stonewall to create a clear drip line. The extended slate stayed wet, frozen and cold.

We still have a lot of paving to do, but everything in its own time. This job was an absolute priority now that winter is here and the frosts are back.