This week we have experienced the longest night, and also the coldest day – so far.
We awoke to a fantastic white shimmering frost. All the paddocks were bright white for a couple of hours until the sun light reached them and burnt it all off. The sun rises at such a shallow angle in winter, it takes a long time for the sunlight to get higher in the sky, and then cast its bright energy onto the fields.
We have been making work for the first firing of the new wood kiln. This job was one of many put on hold while we made work for the ‘Pop-Up’ Open Studio weekend. Now that this is safely behind us, and with a little bit of liquidity to keep us afloat. We can concentrate on making the work for the wood firing.
I started last week by chopping wood and making clay. Now we are enjoying the fruits of that labour. I started with making the largest pieces, as these will take the longest time to dry, especially in mid-winter.
These big platters and dishes are 400 mm. dia. Janine has started by making some press moulded square dinner plates. These are an order that has flowed on from the Open Studio sale last Xmas.
I have also managed to get a couple of half-days in the veggie garden, so it is starting to look loved again.
The garden always looks so much better when there are a few rows of carefully weeded and tended seedlings and sprouting seeds coming up. I just made it, getting these leeks, onions and garlic in before it is too late. It is really too late for a good garlic crop, but this is the 3rd planting, so we will be OK. I also put in broad beans, peas and transplanted seedlings of Brassicas that I managed to sow 6 weeks ago. Everything is a bit ‘just-in-time’, but it will do to get us through this tough time of transition from Bushfire residue chaos into New, comfortable and productive post-fire life.
We have been enjoying a few very nice meals recently. Janine cooked 2 big spinach and cheese pies to feed all our helpers over the long weekend pot sale. But at the last minute a couple of our friends, Warren and Trudie, caught Covid and couldn’t turn up to give us a hand. Luckily our other friends Susan and Dave stayed on for an extra day to help us out. Because we had fewer people here, there was an excess of pre-cooked food, like two spinach and 3 cheeses pies, a lovely dish of mussels in rose wine and home made tomato passata, flavoured with a liberal sprinkling of chillis.
Ricotta, plus coarsely chopped Fetta for texture and the sharp spike of gorgonzola to lift the flavour profile and stop it from being too bland.
Janine and I were eating spinach and cheese pie for days. I tried reheating and serving it in a few different ways. One favourite was serving a slice with a home made tomato passata sauce bottled in the past summer, this was served with slices of chorizo, olives and capers. That was my favourite combination, combined with side of a small amount of sautéed mushrooms in garlic and olive oil.
Now that the Open Studio Long Weekend is over. I can get back to the issue/problem of the pug mills.
Success! I made two batches of clay for wood firing and processed them through the two refurbished pug mills.
They both worked just as they should. Instead of taking a whole day to pug the clay through the small 75mm pug mill, as we did a month ago.
This time, using the 100 mm vacuum pug mills we were able to get the clay pugged all through twice, to insure even mixing in record time.
I made a batch of 140 kgs of iron stained wood fired stoneware body in the dough mixer that I bought from my long time friend John Edye after he retired.
The clay mixing room is loosely sealed and has a vacuum nozzle positioned over the machine that is in current use. This removes a great percentage of the dust from the building, keeping a slight negative pressure in the mixer room and stopping any dust from migrating into the pugging room.
After the clay is removed from the dough mixer, it is placed on the clay trolley and wheeled out of the mixer room and into the pugging room, where it is pugged twice, blended, bagged and boxed.
I scrape, scrub and then sponge out the dough mixer bowl clean as soon as the clay is removed from the bowl. It is best to do it as soon as possible, while the clay is still moist.
It makes the job a whole lot easier. I take charge of mixing the new clay body batches in the vacuum sealed clay mixer room while Janine does all the pugging in the next room.
The fresh clay is then pugged through John’s 100mm. Venco pug mill that dates from the mid ’70’s. This pug mill is the first model of this size made by Geoff Hill.
It is currently disguised as a very large pretend musk stick!
We pug the clay through twice. The first time we stack all the pugs up in a pyramid fashion, then chop all the ends off the clay sausages, working our way back through the batch of clay to minimise any slight variations from batch to batch. Taking clay from the first, middle, and last pugs and blending them back through the machine.
It turns out that Geoff Hill learnt a lot in the building of this first model. And soon made changes to improve it’s design.
We bought our first 100mm. Venco about 6 months to 1 year later than John and we ended up with the second, re-designed model.
As it turned out the second model worked faster and was quieter than the first model.
I didn’t realise this at the time, but as we now have one of each of these earlier pug mill models running side by side, we can experience the differences.
When I made the second batches of clay. The wood fired porcelain clay body. Janine used the pug mill that we were given from our lovely friend Jane in Melbourne.
With its new reconditioned motor now in place, it works beautifully – now!
This is a later model pug mill. Possibly built a decade later than John’s pug. It is much quieter, runs a touch slower, but is much faster and is self feeding.
It runs a little bit slower, but pugs the clay a lot faster.
It doesn’t need a lever plunger to force the clay into the barrel. The clay is just naturally drawn into the pug barrel. This is how we experienced the use of our old original Venco pug mill from 1978.
I attribute this to the design of the blades as they are set up on the shaft. The newer model has the blades a little bit closer together, so that there are no ‘dead’ spots and is a great improvement.
After pugging both batches of clay and storing it all away in the plastic lined clay boxes. Janine puts the chooks to bed and then goes to the house to light the kitchen stove and start dinner.
I wheel the pug mills out of the way, and then wheel the clay bench and pug sausage tables both out of the way. So that I could wet mop the floor and get it scrupulously clean, before wheeling everything back in place. Ready for the next batch.
The mixer room is also mopped clean.
This practice, keeps the clay room spotlessly clean and minimises air born dust diseases.
I’m actually too old to die young now, but I still want to protect everybody else that comes here to visit.
Sandy Lockwood, Meg Patey and I will be having a show together at Sturt Gallery in 5 weeks time.
Save the date.
We will be giving an Artists talk at Sturt after the opening to explain the work and answer questions.
This is very new work for me, as all the pieces are decorated and have been made in response to my experiences during the 2019 catastrophic bush fire event that I endured and my engagement with recovery therapy since that time. Difficult work for me.
Janine and I have been hard at work making pots, glazing and firing, getting ready for next weekends Open Studio Sale.
Everything else has been put on hold, while we clean up the studio and finish glazing and firing to get pots on the shelves ready for next week.
We will be Open from 10:00am til 4:00pm. each day , Saturday, Sunday and Monday of the long weekend.
A few weeks ago, it was starting to get cold enough to warrant lighting the wood stove in the pottery studio.
We bought the stove last year in spring when it was the last one in the shop and on sale, reduced by a couple of hundred dollars.
Although it sat there in the pottery uninstalled all year. It turned out to be a good decision.
I saw the same model on sale recently, at the beginning of Winter, for $500 more than we paid.
So I finally got around to installing the chimney and roof flashing in time for this recent very cold spell.
We have had temperatures drop down to just 2 oC this last week, the first week of winter, with so much more to come as the winter proceeds. The stove has had a bit of use each day this week keeping us warm while we work.
This new model of wood burner incorporates an oven as well, so Janine baked a cake during the week to test it out and it worked really well.
I’m looking forward to more fresh baked cake and coffee while we work in future!
Over the past couple of weeks, we have been making pots, working towards the June Long Weekend ‘Pop-Up’ Open Studio Weekend.
I have finished building work for a while. I need to be making pots, no more work on the house until later in the year. I still need to fireproof the facia and eves of the roof against ember attack. The roof is now completely watertight. That’s the first step complete. Andy came back to help me fit the last sheet of roofing iron and then screw down the ridge capping, while I followed behind peening the ridge capping into the corrugations of the roofing iron. A very solid, proper, solid job of roofing. I’m glad that roof work is now over for some time.
In the pottery we have been throwing and turning domestic items like cups, bowl and plates to fill out the shelves for our Open Studio Sale.
I made 100 cups.
On the on-going pug mill front. I stripped down the big blue pug mill and took the motor off and sent it away to be re-wound and repaired – if that is at all possible? I should know in a weeks time. In the mean time, I took the worn-out vacuum pump off the purple pug and swapped it for the good one that was on the blue pug. So now I have a good working 3” purple pug that we are using for our white stoneware clay and the buggered vacuum pump is now on the blue pug mill that has no motor. A matching pair of non-goers. Well for the time being at least. I will get back onto that problem after our Open Studio Sale.
The blue pug is hoisted up onto a tressle to keep all the new, clean gear box oil down in the gear box while I take off the motor. There is no easy, clean way to drain the oil without some mess, so I’m leaving it here for the time being. Hopefully the motor can be rebuilt and back on the machine within a week or so?
I rang my friend John Edye recently and enquired about the 4” Venco Pug mill that he had for sale a while ago. I bought a lot of his equipment last year when he retired. I didn’t make an offer on the pug mill, as I thought that I was going to get a couple of pug mills from other friends. As these have proved to be a little bit problematic. A rang John and asked if the big pug was still for sale and amazingly it was. I’m so lucky! I bought it over the phone and made the trip up to John’s place to pick it up. Luckily, it isn’t as far away as Melbourne and I could do the return trip all in one day. John assured me that it worked, but that it had a lot of corrosion inside the barrel. I’ve dealt with that before over the years by fill ing the worst holes with a home made epoxy based filler, or ‘wick-in’ thread sealant, that seeps into crevices and sets in the absence of air.
When I got the pug mill home, I was able to lift it off the truck and straight onto a wheeled, steel pug trolley that I had welded up in advance. I even had a vacuum pump cradle welded on underneath for the pump. These machines are way too heavy for me to lift, so having them on a mobile trolley is the way to think about them.
It’s interesting that this machine is the first model of Venco 4” vacuum pug mill and presumably dates from the late 1970’s. It has an inline plunger handle and all the castings are different from the later models.
I had a bit of trouble getting all the bolts loose to strip the pug down to clean it out. A few bolts needed the impact-driver to get loose and one snapped off, requiring the hole to be drilled out and the thread re-tapped. Slow and a little bit tedious, but all do-able.
The pitting is deep, but hasn’t gone through the wall and with a little bit of maintenance, will see me out I’m sure. I cleaned everything back to the metal. There was a lot of flakey white aluminium oxide to clean off.
Some etch primer, followed by a couple of coats of paint and it is all back together now and ready for work. I’m not too sure how John will take the new colour scheme I’ve chosen to cheer up the clay making area of the workshop? Pink, purple and mauve, with a little bit of black detailing. I like it!
When all of this clay making machinery trouble is all sorted out, it will make our life so much easier. I am committed to making almost everything myself. To be as self-reliant as possible, in food, in water, in electricity, in wood fuel, and this extends to clay and glaze making in the pottery. The principal difficulty that I am dealing with here is that I’m trying to replace in a couple of years, what it took me to build up over the past 40 years of life experience. I don’t remember it being so difficult in the past, but I guess that I was only dealing with one or two problems per year over that extended time. Now I’m trying to do everything at once. It is a bit easier this time around as I have more life experience and more skills, but I’m so much older now and I don’t have the same energy that I used to. I certainly find it harder to go back down to the workshop at night, after dinner and continue working. Although I still do sometimes!
Janine and I will be opening our new pottery and gallery space on the long weekend in June.
We will be taking part in the Southern Highlands ‘Pop-Up’ Open Studios long weekend.
We have been working hard, both on and in the building.
We will have new work ready in time for the Long Weekend 11th, 12th, 13th of June.
If you can find the time to come and visit us, we’d love to see you here.
We’ll have cake and coffee to share and a chance to give you a guided tour of the new workshop. It’s almost finished and everything is coming together.
If you want to make a day of it, or even a full weekend away. There are over a dozen other artists studios, all open here in the Southern Highlands over the weekend.
If you have your own social network, please feel free to send this poster out to your friends as well.
We look forward to seeing you at some time over the long weekend.
I turned 70 last week. So, on the spur of the moment, I decided to invite all the local creatives from around the village, plus Len and Warren and their partners, who have been so incredibly helpful and supportive over the past two and bit years since the fire.
I was born on the cusp of Pisces and Aries. Not that I hold any interest in, or find any significance in this sort of thing, but it gave me a handle to organise a menu focussed around fish and goat.
I made an amuse of slow braised onion jam, served on narrow flaky pastry fingers, with a single anchovy laid across the top. That was a pretty nice start. I got this recipe from Simon Hopkinson and have had a couple of goes at it. I like his gentle approach to cooking. He has written two books, ‘How to cook roast chicken’ and ‘The good cook’. I liked them both and have tried recipes from both of them at various times.
I had filleted a whole snapper the night before for our dinner, so had the fish frame to make stock with. I also bought a salmon head at the fish markets while I was buying all the seafood for the bouillabaisse. These two fish heads and frame made a great start for the stock.
I started the stock with a bouquet garni of fresh garden herbs and onions fried in olive oil. Added the fish heads along with carrots picked freshly from the garden, some very young celery stalks, capsicums and parsley.
As we have a lot of capsicums at the moment, I roasted the excess over the open flame on the cook top, sweated then out in a bag for an hour and when cooled, I pickled them in a little oil and vinegar. Preserved for later.
The fish head stock was cooked out the night before and when cooled, passed through a sieve to make the clear stock for the bouillabaisse style fish soup. This was to be the first course. A bouillabaisse for the Pisces component of the meal. Just before the party. I added the diced octopus, and boiled it for half an hour to make sure that it was tender, then completed the soup with the fish fillets, prawns and mussels in that order, just before serving.
No one complained and some even returned for a second helping.
The main course was the baked, boned and butterflied leg of chevon to represent Aries. I had put it on earlier in the day for a slow roast and had it ready for the main course.
I made two versions of this course. One baked with home grown and preserved quinces in a light sugar syrup with sweet aromatic spices like star anise, cloves, and cinnamon.
The other baked with wine to stop it drying out with a rub of aromatic savoury herbs, fried onions and garlic.
The big glazing room in the pottery was converted into our dining room for the night and comfortably seated the 12 of us.
We didn’t finish till 1 am. so it must have been a good night.
The rest of the week was spent turning porcelain bowls in the pottery and continuing the work of paving along the back of the pottery.
I dug up a line of pavers that we had already laid behind the kiln chimney. I waited until all the pavers were laid, so that I would have all the levels correct and the fall just right.
I removed one single line of tiles, dug down into the gravel substrate and positioned a cheap plastic drainage gutter in the space and then cemented it in. When we have another rain event of biblical intensity, I want the water to flow away from the kiln and be easily removed instead of soaking in.
Now that I almost have a wood fired kiln built, it’s time for me to re-start the stalled research I was doing just before the Black Summer Fires interrupted my work. I have started to make the early tests for my commitment to the PowerHouse Willoughby Bequest. I have been processing some new porcelain bodies from Australian Halloysite, I ball milled them a couple of months ago to allow a bit of time for them to ‘age’. Two months is next to nothing in the broad scheme of things when it comes to single stone porcelains, but every little bit helps. I have also been working with sericite.
Both started off badly!
The halloysite cracked almost instantly as it stiffened up. It is as plastic as wet goats cheese ricotta. Actually, the cheese is much better!
It has so little plasticity that the act of cutting it through with a wire tears it apart underneath. I’ve been working with my local Mittagong halloysite/mica porcelain for almost 20 years now, and its been a difficult relationship. When I do get the pieces off the wheel successfully, I find that they have a desire to warp in the early stage of the firing. Nothing worthwhile ever comes easily. At least not to me anyway. However, I persist, because when I do get a lovely pot out of the kiln successfully, it is really uplifting and rewarding.
I have also started off badly with the sericite pieces. Any single stone porcelain with such a wide, flat base is going to be problematic, but 100% loss was a bit much as a starter!
I put it down to being out of practice and being distracted, with so much else on my plate. I pugged up this first batch of pots, re-worked the clay and threw it again the next day. The second batch, I cut off with a very fine wire and dried very slowly in the damp cupboard for two weeks. Cutting them off the batt again every 2 or 3 days, to allow them to separate from the base and shrink evenly without too much stress. This has worked. I am amazed how easily this strange stuff sticks itself back together again so easily. I have found that if I use a thicker twisted wire, they stay separated, but almost all of them crack against the line of the cut.
I have tried cutting straight across while the wheel is stationary, and alternatively, cutting off while the wheel is still turning. It has made no difference. They both cracked equally.
I had virtually no trouble with the smaller, narrow footed pieces. and the larger narrow footed bowls.
We are in our own very small and insignificant flood recovery mode
Now that the rain has eased. I can get out and start to repair the leaks that have become apparent in the pottery.
The tin shed builders were pretty basic, almost sub-prime. We have had so many leaks in this building.
The builders chose to use metal sheeting screws without any rubber seals. This must have saved them $10 bucks! So all the walls leaked in the first rain months ago.
I had to go around the whole building and seal all the screws. I had a few options. Firstly I could go around and take out every screw and replace it with the correct type 17 climaseal screws.
Or, I could go around and take out every one of the 3,000 screws, add a small rubber ‘O’ ring washer, then replace the screw. In the end I took the quicker and cheaper option of going around and siliconing the head of every screw. This turned out to be quicker and cheaper. But it still took me days to go around and seal every one to water proof it.
During this prolonged rain event we’ve had a lot of rain compared to our normal. At one point we had over 300mm in 2 days. I know that this is nothing compared to what other places have had to deal with, but it is more than our annual rain fall during the drought years. It became apparent that a couple of the windows were not installed correctly, so that water was leaking in around them. The builders must have been very sloppy with the flashing.
Rather than take the shed to bits to find and seal the problem. I decided to put an awning over the problem windows to keep the rain from getting in behind them.
I had to custom cut and fold some fancy flashing to fit the corrugations and keep the water out.
I cut them by hand using old fashioned ‘curved’ tin snips. Once screwed to the wall above the window and sealed with silicon, they look pretty neat. I’m hoping that this will solve the issue?
We were busy last weekend with a bunch of friends paving the court yard area around the new, almost finished, wood fired kiln.
I still need to finish laying the last of the floor bricks in the chamber, I would have finished this small job a couple of weeks ago, but when the court yard flooded with 70mm of water sloshing around in there. It wasn’t very appealing to be kneeling done and doing the bricklaying. Then all that water was sucked up into the floor bricks like a wick and they became saturated so that any new mortar wouldn’t stick in place. Finally, they have now turned green with algae. I’m sure that they will dry out – eventually!
This severe weather event, although not life or property threatening for us, like it has been for our friends and relatives up on the North Coast. It has been a good warning and trial run for what we can expect in the future as Global Heating increases unchecked. No one in government seems to be taking this seriously, so what can we expect for the future? Well my guess is more of the same, only much worse. We’ve been warned.
So this extreme weather event has been a great warning to us as to what we can expect in the future. I have learned from it and and I’m taking actions now to limit the sort of damage that very heavy rain fall can cause. To start with we have paved the kiln area with a significant fall away from the kiln and out into the open. I have also ordered some more steel batons and some more poly carbonate roofing sheets to wall in half of the courtyard directly behind the kiln. With contour drainage to take the water to the edge of the retaining wall. Although the pottery didn’t flood, it has become obvious that we need to create a dish drain around the front of the building to carry all the excess ground water away from the front of the building, because another event will eventually be worse.
This is a start
Back at the kiln, I also need to fabricate a stainless steel firebox lid and a stainless steel chimney flame tube incorporating a spark arrester. I planned to have started this job already, and 3 weeks ago, I ordered the Stainless steel sheets and some Stainless steel wire mesh for the spark arrester. The sheeting is here, but the couriers have lost the SS mesh. The supplier won’t replace it until he knows what has happened to the first order. The courier company won’t pay out to replace it until they know what has happened to it. So I’m stuck in a catch 22 situation. I can choose to wait it out until the original order is found and delivered, or buy a second sheet of stainless steel mesh and get on with it, but it’s not cheap stuff, so I’m waiting and continuing to write emails of enquiry.
We had a great weekend with our friends laying the paving tiles. We also met two new people who volunteered and turned up all the way from Newcastle, who will surely become friends now. They were a great addition to the group. The stayed over night with us and we got to know each other over a home grown meal from the garden. I had previously made a big pot of tomato passata from the last of our tomatoes, so we had an easy meal of pasta. Dan and James are environmental campaigners and organisers, so we shared a lot in common. James took this image of Dan, Janine and me standing on the new paving.
Dan, Steve and Janine. image by James Whelan
This is all great progress and I’m really happy to see so much getting done.
Janine and I started the levelling and paving earlier in the week. As a trial run, to make sure that everything would work out the way that I planned. As we haven’t done any paving since we built the last pottery shed in 1983, I’d completely forgotten what to do and had to re-educate myself and get my skills back up to date. It’s not rocket science, but does need concentration and quite a bit of back bending work. I decided that at my delicate age, I should not do so much bending and instead get the knee pads on and work down on my knees to keep my back straighter. This worked out much better. But then getting up became a bit of an issue.
Starting the paving, getting our levels sorted out and learning how to space the pavers to allow for all the different sizes to fit together evenly.the courtyard paving complete
As we are in Autumn now and the weather is getting cooler and the days shorter, we have thought that we may need to light the fires in the kitchen and lounge room soon. The slow combustion heater in the lounge has started to wear through and rust out in the top fire box steel sheet. A crack started to appear at the end of last season, so I made a mental note to repair it once it cooled down, during the off-season, well that time is running out now, so it has to be dealt with as a matter of urgency. I decided to attack the problem by fabricating and new roof for the firebox out of a scrap piece of 2mm thick stainless steel sheet.
The new Stainless steel fire box roof sheet ready to installThe new firebox top bolted in place
Rather than try and weld it in place, which wouldn’t really work very well , as stainless and mild steel have different rates of expansion and contraction. I decided to bolt it in place with stainless steel bolts through over size holes and oversize washers. This should allow for the differences in expansion. The 2mm thick stainless roof should last as long as the 4 mm mild steel walls and whats left of the old top sheet. Time will tell. The stove is about 30 years old, so it has proved it’s worth. I’ll continue to work on it and preserve its life for as long as I can. We bought our slow combustion kitchen cooker over 40 years ago now and it was 2nd hand then. I’ve managed to keep it going all this time with home made adaptations and ingenious improvised repairs. I’m proud of that achievement and I’m hoping to extend it to 50 years if I can.
While I was at it, working on the lounge room heater. I also made a new front door frame seal. Afterwards, we went out into the paddock and spent an hour together with chainsaws cutting bushfire devastated and blackened logs. We cut them to stove lengths and stacked them in the wood shed ready for splitting. This will be about 1/4 to 1/3rd of the fire wood that we will get through the coming winter months.
Like everyone else on the East coast of Australia at the moment we are experiencing a lot of rain.
We are very lucky here to be situated up on top of a line of hills, on a ridge where the water table falls away on both sides. We at very unlikely to get flooded here. So our thoughts go out to all those who have been flooded and lost there homes and property. We’ve been there ourselves, but in a totally different way.
My partner Janine, who is from the North Coast area were the flooding is worst just now, has experienced this kind of flooding in her youth. She points out that at least after a fire everything is left sterilised. After a flood, everything is left putrid and stinking. Although the clean up takes just as long in both cases.
The rain came in horizontally and blew straight into our new kiln shed area through the open Eastern wall. i had to dig a drain to help ease the flow of water back out again.
If this is an insight into the future, then I will probably have to enclose some of this wall with polycarbonate sheeting. To let the light in, but keep the rain out.
Before
I’m somewhat amazed that water managed to build up like this here in the kiln courtyard, as it is elevated up on 1200mm. of crushed blue metal gravel behind the big stone retaining wall. At least it does drain well over night once it actually stops raining.
Our normally dry and sometimes barren back yard is now a small stream, with a creek running through it.
Here the small top dam overflow channel is not able to cope with the deluge and the dam is over flowing across the whole dam wall.
We have only ever seen this happen a couple of times before in our 46 years here.
We had over 185 mm of rain. We’ve had this much rain before. In fact the recent bush fires were put out finally when we had this same amount of rain 2 years ago.
But last time the rain fell onto, and soaked into, a dry parched landscape. This time it has fallen onto a saturated and sodden catchment and so instantly started flowing off.
We are fine and have plenty of home grown and preserved food in the pantry, and because we have solar power and a battery, we don’t know whether the power went off or not.
These extreme events are exactly what we have been warned will eventuate with the increase global temperatures due to carbon in the atmosphere. But our politicians refuse to do anything about it and those on the right are still denying that it is even happening. A pox on both their houses!
With 1 in 50, and 1 in 100 year weather events happening every other year now, I fear for the future of our kids and grandchildren.
Tonight my Fingers Smell of Garlic 
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