Jane Wheeler's Blog 2010

crawling and running glazes

Posted jane -->on 1st Jul 2010

a daily chore – outside the kiln shed are my four tubs of potatoes; they need a bucket of water each. they have grown enormous and no doubt when the potatoes are ready they will all be ready at once.

I opened the kiln this morning rather expecting an over-fire – but cone eleven had actually fallen over halfway rather than melted quickly as I had thought, so the temperature was fine. the pyrometer said 1260 C, but with a reduction� firing the actual temperature that the cones – and therefore the glazes – react to can vary by several tens of degrees.

peering in while the pots are too hot to take out, things look interesting.

what I wasn’t expecting was the violent behaviour of my crawling shino. I did put it on quite thickly – the weather was hot, and the glaze thick and warm, staying in suspension.� it has thrown itself off this pot and onto the kiln shelf.

and on the underside of the some of the porcelain bowls it is hanging on by its teeth. the colour is interesting on the porcelain – brownish blackish tinges, whereas it goes a normal shino orangey-red on the stoneware.

a couple of the porcelain bowls got too hot and the glaze ran down the foot. I had to use the grinder to tidy them up.

where the kiln was cooler the same glaze is matt; I am pleased with this one, the matt glaze suits it.

and where it is hotter it melts more and the oxides burn off to an extent, leaving a paler glaze with lovely crystallisation patterns as on these spoons, which are rather distorted, as I made them quite thin.

here the copper/tin/dolomite glaze, related to the ones above, has also lost some of its copper, and what is left has a tendency to be pink, over the porcelain layers on this jar. I mended my flue chimney with clay, and had soot and smoke coming out of the front of the kiln; it seemed like heavy reduction. I also fired with a slightly higher pressure than usual, just to see how it would go. the firing finished in good time, and I think the results are good. there are plenty of greens and oranges, and there is some nice blue streaking over the stoneware, and the porcelain, from the version of the tin/dolomite glaze with cobalt and copper.

this little pot went in for its third firing – it was one of the failed saggar pieces. walking at Morston today the cracked and powdery mud reminded me of this glaze.

and here is one of the watering cans – it has some blue breaks, but mainly the green and orange still comes to the fore.

there are a lot of pieces I like in this firing, it’s hard to pick a favourite. so I won’t. but I’ll end with this porcelain stem bowl, glazed with the crawling shino, for a really good texture, a better version of something I was trying to do about five years ago.

here’s the link for all the pots

(2 comments)

tides and suns

Posted jane -->on 30th Jun 2010

a cool evening walk at Morston after the heat of the day, and the heat of firing the kiln – not quite the temperature of the sun contained in my kiln, but heat derived from the old sun, the one that shone on those forests and animals millions of years ago.

a sun-coloured boat, the yellow saturated by the slanting light. the summer evening enhances the bright colours beloved of boat owners, everything picked out in glowing primaries.

Tilda so much almost wants to swim, it’s so hot, she hates the heat, but swimming is not quite her thing. she does love to paddle up to her knees though.

this old boat, ugly thing, is always tethered here next to the footbridge; I have never seen it leave its mooring.

mudlark living up to its name – such a sweet little boat, and the pure reflection in the perfectly still creek.

and the rows of cockles – uniform except for their owners’ individuality stamped on their naming, and their colour.

a buoy is always a thing of interest – or is it her appetite for seaweed?

a Mirror, glowing scarlet, wish I could just jump into her and sail off.

now out on the salt marsh, the dogs mobbed by redshank and oystercatcher, the tide nearly full, a few boats out there on the little breeze. it has gone round to the east again and is dying.

boats black against the brightness of the water and the sun.

more paddling. she can’t get enough wetness, after rushing around on the beach trying to make Sal play with her.

swans are always out here at the freshes, where the river joins the sea; trying to count them, there are more every time you look.

golden bars, tiger stripes, hills and valleys covered with trails.

Sal is golden too.

the water is moving in

covering the mud banks

surging over the seaweed

time to head back.

(1 comment)

bird, books two

Posted jane -->on 26th Jun 2010

I was in love with my willow warblers; I say “my”, but I should say the willow warblers that decided my garden was a good place to forage for the thousands of small insects they needed to feed their babies this year. (they feed the nestlings fifty times an hour) I am not certain that they had never colonised my garden before, as I have only become aware of warblers in any clear sense since reading Michael McCarthy’s book “Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo”, about our African migrant birds, how they affect our perception of spring, and how we perceive them.

leaf warblers are perhaps the least noticeable of the spring arrivals – tiny grey-green-brown birds that are difficult to distinguish from each other except by little details only visible close up – chiffchaffs have dark legs, willow warblers pink legs – you have to learn their songs and calls to identify them for certain. chiffchaffs are easy, they just go “chiff chaff, chiff chiff chaff”, but willow warblers have a song that you could confuse with a chaffinch until you have heard them both. chaffinches seem to be the most common smaller singing bird around here. in May a quarter of a mile of hedged lane has at least two belting it out. one in my garden sang for what seemed like three hours solid from dawn one morning, “chink chink chink” followed by a rattling downward trill with a flourish at the end. compared with the willow warbler it is coarse, unmelodious and very loud, Wagner as opposed to the delicacy of Mozart. “Pweep pweep” (sadly) followed by a cascade of silvery notes falling to a rolling decorative “dibby dabby doo”, from the swaying top branch of my slender ten year old silver birch. the wild dogwood seemed to be a focus for their activities; they popped in and out of it, calling to each other with a soft two note whistle, “hueet”, and the other “hueet” back. I would imitate them, and they would fly up into the plum tree and watch me, answering my not-quite-perfectly pitched human whistle. the big sycamore behind the kiln shed must provide a wealth of bugs; they flew up into it and over the hedge into the paddock next door. they nest in banks and hedge bottoms, on the ground behind defensive barricades of bramble and thorn. working in my pottery or wandering around the garden I have suddenly become familiar with a hitherto unknown creature, and it feels like a tremendous privilege. I heard them on the edges of Bale Wood and Bulfer Grove too, but having them in my garden was completely different.

sadly they have been gone for just over a week; last thursday they were still calling each other around the dogwood – next day the sheep were back in the paddock, and no willow warblers. they must have reared their young, which would have been fledged about ten days by then, and maybe found the sheep a little too noisy and intrusive for a second brood attempt. there are still two or three singing away in the old overgrown water meadow – goat willow, blackthorn, ash, hazel – at the the far end of Cake’s Lane. whether they will come back next year is a moot question. willow warblers have decreased by very large percentages in the last thirty years in southern britain, and increased in the north and in scandinavia; climate change would seem to be affecting them. I read an article I was sent from the Sunday Times by Simon Barnes “the return of the willow warbler” which said there has been an increase this year in the south; they have been seen nesting all over in places they had disappeared from. so “my” birds may well have been part of this boom. they were even featured in Spring Watch, nesting at Pensthorpe about ten miles from here.

(3 comments)

rain in spain

Posted jane -->on 14th Jun 2010

it seems I brought my English weather with me to Extremadura last week – we had rain on wednesday, thursday, friday, and even a little on saturday. this had the good result of filling my pool to a point where the pump could work, although currently I am waiting for the plumber to come and connect the water to the new gravity fed supply.

there are still green patches on the finca after the long wet winter, and the vegetation is waist high in places, so tangled it is impossible to wade through it. it will be cut soon, for hay, exactly as a hay meadow in England, the next surge of growth will be impossible if the dead stuff is not removed.

there are some beautiful plants on the finca – pinky-purple wild allium, wild carrot as always, and the black centered yellow daisies are still flowering.

yesterday I walked up the camino to Montanchez, trying to photograph butterflies and listening for birds.

there are cushions of these little wild pinks everywhere, you can see huge ones all over the sierra, high up amongst the boulders.

in a few places, where the camino has not been opened up for access, the grasses and brambles are doing their best to close it. sadly we started the rot with the opening up, and much that was wild and only wide enough to walk through has been cleaned out and is bare paving and dry stone wall, often with more huge gates – not the pretty ones put in further up.

clouded yellow butterflies are quite common; their wings are much darker on the upper surfaces, almost yellow ochre.

big painted ladies everywhere, very suspicious and flighty, I managed to creep up on this one.

I have seen several of these small coppers on the finca, as well as when climbing up the camino.

here is the strangest creature hiding in the undergrowth, not a butterfly, almost invisible in flight, just a shimmering disturbance in the air. top wings a bit like a tiger moth, then something like a second wing which is a long wire with a plume on its end, hardly functional. it puzzled some biologists who stayed in the house a few weeks ago. it is nemoptera sinuata, a spoonwing lacewing; its larva is known as the ant lion, which buries itself in sand and catches other insects.

there are still nightingales singing in the sierra, rather abbreviated songs, perhaps the rainy weather made them think it is spring again. there was one down this gully full of trees.

beautiful purple flowers yet to be identified growing between the paving stones.

another nightingale spot. I saw a family of sardinian warblers in the rocks under a clump of ilex oak; very dark grey birds with white throats and chins, not very shy, I stood and watched them flitting about for five minutes; I was alerted to their presence by some odd churring alarm calls.

more nightingales below the moorish castle at the top of the camino, where there is a well-watered ravine full of orange groves.

a drink from the fuente, and then back down, harder work hopping from stone to stone securely than walking up.

a peaceful evening in the sun; by the pool a monster blue and green dragonfly and three dark crimson ones, about half the size, with forward pointing wings – identified now as sympetrum fonscololmbii – male red-veined darter, common in rice paddies in southern Europe. the enormous salamander lurks on the bottom like a mysterious dinosaur and occasionally surfaces for a gulp of air.

(1 comment)

boats, books and birds one

Posted jane -->on 5th Jun 2010

firstly a very pretty book I was given for my birthday, published in 1889 by Jarrolds; a description of a prolonged tour of the Norfolk Broads in a converted wherry.

the author appears to have been too much the gentleman to have his name published, although reprints available on Amazon reveal him to be Henry Montagu Doughty of Theberton Hall in Suffolk. he refers to himself as the skipper, and with him are four nameless daughters, who spend most of their time either sketching – they produced the illustrations – or sitting on a garden seat which is lashed to the foredeck, under a japanese parasol – and one son, “Dick the Wykehamist”1 (educated at Winchester College), indefatigable hunter of pike. the crew consist of one cook/steward, James, and “inside this one blue guernsey, stands our whole crew, whose name is Sam”. Sam is a wherryman, born and bred, as a small boy he slipped on an icy deck while quanting (poling) a wherry and fell into the dyke. he had to swim and run along the bank to catch up with the boat and get back on board.

the wherry herself – the Gipsy – is done up in a very luxurious style of home comfort; striped stuffed settees, curtained windows, and many books and ornaments in the saloon, with a big central dining table, seating eight, a four berth cabin for “the girls” forward, with every feminine accoutrement including a big cheval glass, hammocks slung in the saloon for the skipper and Dick, and mattresses on lockers in the aft, lower-roofed, cabin for steward and crew, with complete “kitchener” and well stuffed pantry. two bathrooms in the companion ways are not described very fully; one imagines a matter of tin baths, although cold water is laid on in the ladies cabin, I find from further reading. as for the heads … nothing is said ….. drinking water is provided by a “big filter”.

wherries were the big flat bottomed (with a moveable keel) inland sailing barges of the Norfolk and Suffolk waterways, transporting agricultural products, coal, reed for thatching, bricks, clay, in fact anything heavy or bulky. they had an ingenious system of lowering the mast by means of a weighted tabernacle, so balanced that a child could handle it, in order to get under the numerous small bridges, and the huge boomless gaff sail, high enough to catch the wind over trees, was easy for one man to manage with its system of blocks and tackles. by this time however they were suffering from competition from the much faster railways, and very sadly this lovely mode of transport, silent, clean, timeless, was on its way out. the first to be turned over to a burgeoning tourist industry was Blanche in 1863, so Gipsy is part of an established practice, only available to the rich. she was built in Aylsham in 1875 by Elijah Wright, and converted by Doughty in about 1885. when tourism on the Broads became a mass market, much smaller boats were needed, and wherries were too expensive to convert.

Gipsy’s voyage through the Broads is an indulgent, leisurely, and entirely benign passage through an almost unspoilt wetland landscape of reed fen, dyke, woodland, small lake and large, choked with weed or open to the elements, full of fish, birds, and characters – eel catchers, reed cutters, working wherrymen, poor tenant farmers (Doughty bemoans the terrible state of farming in the country), and gamekeepers. some broads are closed by chains at their entrance for their owners’ privacy and game preservation – some are kept clear as part of the wherry transport route.

I say almost unspoilt; already the wildfowler and the egg and bird collector had wiped out the bittern and the ruff, as is noted by the author. Gipsy had a flat bottomed punt, Snail as her tender, and a sailing boat too, Whiting, and many a pool and small dyke is explored in either of these craft.

the joys and vicissitudes of navigating and sailing are fully described, and H M Doughty is obviously an experienced sailor, indeed in his youth he served in the royal navy as a midshipman; during the Crimean war in the Baltic. I found his namesake of the next generation, his younger son, in the navy gazette, decorated after the battle of Jutland in 1916, captain of the Agincourt2.

the Gipsy penetrated far further than is possible now; they sailed from Aylsham down the Bure past Oxnead Hall to Coltishall, on the Waveney past Geldeston lock and Ellingham mill to Bungay, through Hickling broad and on past Horsey to Waxham, where the wherry could not get any further, but the Whiting took them up past the canalised Thurne river to its starting point, where Happisburgh lighthouse is visible over sand dunes that are the only protection from the North sea for a flat farmland studded with church towers.

here they are, moored near Irstead, “in a little woodland pool, which seemed the end of all things, the most sequestered spot in all the world.” Dick trolls for pike on the broad, but he has poor luck – “one pike ran out his entire line and then unkindly broke it; he was a monster – a leviathan.”

“the useful Snail pushed and paddled in and out among the reeds, discovering clear dark pools where waterlilies grew. these reeds, their leaves sharp-pointed, and heads feathery like pampas grass, are not in jungles, but grow here in clumps. Giant spears of blue green rushes stand thinly in deep water; and all among the rushes float round platter leaves and pure queenly flowers, white and golden crowns.” the prose is a little dated, of course, but this is a lovely description of a world long past. no cars, no lorries, no artificial fertiliser to destroy the watery environment, no aeroplanes to deafen or draw lines in the sky.

you can buy a paperback re-print on Amazon, and two companion books, “Friesland Meres”, about two trips through the meres, canals and rivers of the Netherlands, and “Our Wherry in Wendish lands: from Friesland through the Mecklenburg lakes to Bohemia” an account of Germany’s waters. both are illustrated by “the girls” but they mostly lack the naive charm of the Broadland illustrations, being more concerned with the complexities of the vernacular architecture of Dutch and German towns and cities.

footnotes

1 this same “Dick” had an interesting life, though tragically cut short in his forties – he was a professional soldier, serving mostly in the middle east; amongst his achievements that of protecting Armenians threatened with massacre during the modernisation of� Turkey, but he also appears as the lover of Gertrude Bell, the great Victorian/Edwardian woman traveller in Arabia.

an excerpt from “A Quest in the Middle East: Gertrude Bell and the making of modern Iraq” by Liora Lukitz. – The love of her life was to be “Dick” Doughty-Wylie, whom she described as “Gallant and fearless, duty-bound, courageous and loyal” – but later as “incoherent, vacillating …. sending double messages”. He wrote to her, “You shall walk in my garden – even ghost-wise and imperfect in this life …”.

Doughty-Wylie had a wealthy wife (Lillian Wylie, he had taken her name) whom he felt unable to leave. Besides, Lukitz hints that Bell was reluctant to sleep with him and that he was getting tired of her inhibitions. “And if you die,” she wrote, “wait for me. I am not afraid of that other crossing ….” He would reply in similar vein. It was as if they preferred an erotic relationship based on words alone. When he was killed at Gallipoli heroically leading a landing of troops and taking hill 141, she responded with a line she had translated from Hafiz: “And the wind of Death has swept hopes away”. he was awarded the VC posthumously; the details are on a memorial in Theberton churchyard.

2 oddly enough the Agincourt, a massive Dreadnought built on the Tyne by Armstrong for the Argentinian navy and then gifted to Turkey, was seized by the British on her sea trials, and this was probably a large factor in bringing Turkey into the war against the British.

(no comment)

a hot day on the water

Posted jane -->on 23rd May 2010

the most wonderful hot sunny day and a tide which allowed us to have a picnic lunch on the point. we all went in Elsie as MM’s mooring doesn’t give her much time out unless the tide is a big one.

we embarked before the tide was completely in, and found that the shallow banks of the creek got rather close.

setting up the outboard

following the Mary Frances, cockle number 89, out, but she found the wind just in the right quarter and sailed.

the tide coming in with a little chop and some scum

out by the pit sails up and engine stowed and we bore out rather inland of the channel. a boat called Soppi Annabel here getting her sails up; she looks a bit like a cockle, but I can’t be sure from this photo. some boats have very dodgy names.

the Wiveton Bell sailing single-handed. there was a nice breeze and I found myself in the shade of the sail and a bit chilly.

we were ahead of the crowd but by the time we got to the point we were rapidly caught up by several powerful motorboats and jetskis making a horrible row and rushing around like lunatics, so we headed back to the beach for lunch.

running up through the muddy shallows and anchoring

unfortunately we found there was a very very dead seal right in front of the boat. it smelt like very old mackerel barbecued. but the other side of the bushes above the little beach there was a nice breeze from the sea and the smell and sight was no longer apparent. there have been a few carcasses (fifty odd in fact over the summer) around this season, the rumour is that they are getting caught up in the ducted propellors of the boats which are carrying out work on Shoal windfarm, just out to sea, causing horrific corkscrew mutilation. or the other rumour is that greenland sharks, driven south by overfishing, are taking them, though these are usually scavengers. the jury is out on this.

a wayfarer beached and anchored just after us. it’s a popular stopping off point and the seal ferries drop people off to have an hour on the point from close by.

a much more pleasant view and the motorboat noise was a bit quieter.

lunch prepared by Eslie’s and MM’s skippers – crostinis

and tuna salad – most delicious, with paté, cheese and bread, elderflower to drink, fresh pineapple slice, grapes and a bar of 81% cocoa chocolate.

the cockle club were racing, a lovely sight.

plenty of paddlers; I have to say the seal would have had too gruesome an effect on the water for my taste.

as the tide started to ebb we pushed off and sailed back in an extremely leisurely way, as the wind was coming round to the north east instead of the north west and almost backing off to nothing as the tide slowly changed.

we passed almost under Juno’s bows

the conditions were practically millpond

very relaxing. I managed to change my camera setting to macro, so the following photos are very grainy –

MM’s skipper with his dashing cowboy hat looking particularly piratical

MM’s mate

Harvester, almost my favourite boat, the old Sheringham crab boat.

a boat load of those yahoos who make so much noise illegally speeding around the lagoon passed us and then their engine cut out, much to our amusement. we were being continually tossed by the wakes of these boats coming past us in the creek.

Elsie’s skipper waiting for the breeze

Elsie’s mate directing landing operations

cockles coming back from their race – Shabash towing Water Rat – a lovely sight.

and Elsie is sorted out before being pulled out to her position on the side of this wide shallow sloping bank of the creek.

we found it very hot walking back to the oven-like car after being out on the water.

a beautiful day – let’s hope we get a few more like this in 2010.

(4 comments)

firing – success and failure

Posted jane -->on 22nd May 2010

my first glaze firing for almost four months. it is so much more pleasant in the summer. I got up before five to turn the burners up – 617 C in spite of one burner being out – the spiders again, I suppose. I relit it and it was a bit noisy but no more trouble.

the sun was a big red disc at five, just up, but the camera read the red as white, not half as pretty.

my garden blackbird was performing as usual; the mysteries of a bird’s singing voice are explained thus:

“the syrinx, a kind of double voice box at the bottom of their windpipe, is two sets of membranes and muscles where the windpipe branches into the lungs. these vibrate at high frequencies as air is exhaled. In fact, while singing, a bird can alternate exhaling between its two lungs and thereby sing in harmony with itself.”

I have watched him singing more this spring – he fluffs up his feathers and points his beak to the sky, keeping a beady eye on rivals from side to side. sometimes he utters a fluting phrase while skipping along the roof ridge, spreading his tail like a fan.

the wild garden is a joy – I walk up and down to check the kiln every half hour, taking in the cow parsley and the red campion.

the trees are beginning to grow into a real but miniature copse in the corner, and the rowan is in full flower just now.

the early morning light picks out every delicate branching flower and stem and leaf.

moon daisies, I call these, but they are really ox-eye daisies.

after forty hours the kiln is cool enough to open. you can see I stopped the firing before cone eleven had done more than wilt slightly. the lower half of the firing was occupied by a saggar made of kiln shelves. I had trouble getting reduction after a thousand degrees – it didn’t start reducing properly until over eleven hundred. normally I like to get a heavy reduction between ten thirty and eleven thirty and then burn relatively clean , although still reducing. I think my flue is the problem here, it had started to come apart, so I couldn’t close it up as much as I should have.

pots allowed to cool slowly

the saggar firing was a failure, I had filled all the gaps at the bottom and sides, and it seems to have prevented the heat getting in, so that the shavings hadn’t burnt away and the glaze on the pots is still powdery. they will all have to be re-fired I am afraid.

this one didn’t have glaze on it, so I have to decide whether to leave it as it is or to glaze it and re-fire to stoneware temperature. the carbon will be interesting under a glaze.

the pots which were in the top half are fine but I think you can see the effect of the late reduction. this shino traps carbon with a lovely lacey effect of grey in the white if it is reduced early. I have christened this rather pure and feminine looking jar Snow-white.

I have never got this copper/tin/dolomite matt and slightly crystalline glaze to change from green to pink before – it must be due to late reduction, and the porcelain layer. usually I get green with orange.

this one is more typical, and it was just in a different part of the kiln.

I have recently mixed up a new batch of the ash-clay glaze and it takes a long time to settle down and become truly thick and glutinous, giving an almost cracked-off crawled coating. here it is over the bright orange extremaduran terracotta which I brought back from Spain.

this one was on the hotter side of the kiln, and it is a different version of the copper/tin/dolomite glaze with less copper and a dose of cobalt in it. the cobalt shows more on the edges, as a greeny-blue tinge.

I refired these three porcelain bottles; they had the barium carbonate glaze on and were looking a bit boring, so they got a thin coating of the same glaze as above. the barium makes the blue much brighter. I think I will give them a coat of something else and re-fire again.

this is a new glaze, basically an iron rich temoku with its alumina content much reduced. I did not expect this metallic plum colour, but it is rather beautiful over the porcelain. it came from some experiments in Ceramic Review showing how reducing the alumina content would produce a crystalline effect, a speckled mustard coloured matt glaze – my firings are a little high for this one really. seems there was not much reduction going on here though – iron should turn green in a reduction firing.

so, some frustration and some surprises, and another firing due very soon. you can see the pots here

(4 comments)

green leaves, blue flowers, pink flowers …

Posted jane -->on 11th May 2010

a cold dry, delayed spring, but plenty of sunshine. this speckled wood butterfly got stuck behind the glass of an open window in my kiln shed.

walking along the edge of the wood there are all sorts of new leaves making patterns against the sky;

alder

beech

hazels

new beech leaves are like little green translucent silk petals.

ash leaves erupt from those big black buds in sprays of pointy feathers.

stoical oak with their stumpy new leaves and yellow catkins

the bluebells are here at last

and the red campion, big clumps in the hedgerows.

oak in full leaf – a vibrant mustard – green,

a wild apple tree in full blossom in the wood,

cow parsley, delicately crisp,

and the bluebell wood, heavenly scent drifting in the wind,

a special sort of blueness.

and a big surprise, a huge orchid, an early purple.

(6 comments)

cold water and high tide

Posted jane -->on 2nd May 2010

a freezing north wind and a high tide this morning, as Miss Muppet went onto her mooring – rather reluctantly.

the tide still coming in over the marsh

the outboard had to be tested before she went in the water

down on the hard, two intrepid or mad sailors on the Shokanawe (I know) catching the tide before the seal boat trips start . rather them than us.

there are plenty of boats parked down here, spaces bagged early.

the water is high up over the hard and shallow for at least two car lengths.

first try the trailer is still too high out of the water to launch her

testing the depth

second run and the car is right in

hard work to get her off, and too deep for wellies

Sal and Tilda have a paddle; the salty water will be good for her cut paw.

the trailer is manhandled further in and she floats – Paul is in over his boots …

the car is practically floating too …

the skipper gets in

starts the motor and Paul casts off the painter

up the creek to the jetty

a very overloaded tender goes past

fishing out the mooring ropes on the flooded bank

Tilda has a silly five minutes

Sal getting out of her way, she doesn’t care if she bumps him

T cools down after her run

the mooring ropes are sticking and wind and tide pulling the cockle the wrong way

pulling on cold wet ropes is a horrible job in this cutting wind. imagine the crew of a sailing ship rounding the Horn two hundred years ago, it must have been agony for hands, and feet too.

a wonderful sky

at last she is near enough to be safely left.

Sal posing

Auntie Pam waiting to go out to her mooring in the channel

one of the old Sheringham crab boats in the process of restoration.

well, for me, I am quite happy to wait about another six weeks before getting Minnow out.

(2 comments)

new spring pots

Posted jane -->on 22nd Apr 2010

dry sunny weather in April brings out the flowers, and encourages me into my pot workshop.

the garden is a pleasure, plenty to do, but there’s time, I can spend from a few minutes to half an hour every time I walk up to the shed in the sunshine, birdsong accompanying me. there is a blackbird with a lovely series of tootles and trills who sits on the low hawthorn above the office. I don’t hear the thrush – I think I don’t get up early enough, but I often see them with beakfuls of invertebrates – the nest must be in the hedge somewhere. then there is the greenfinch with his jay-jay-jay- rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr song.

the blackthorn is about two weeks later than last year. I am attacking the hogweed straight away, squirting glycosulphate at close range on the new leaves. I hope I can really get rid of it for good and all this year.

plenty of damson blossom, if it gets fertilised there should be a good crop.

after a week’s work there is quite a good crop of pots. the dry weather means they will be ready for the kiln soon. I made a start by looking at the work of Mo Jupp. he uses sheets of clay to construct small female torsos, and I felt there was something I could learn from his work.

although these are similar to the small flasks and bottles I usually make, their shoulders are constructed differently, with a steeper angle, and made out of two or more sections, also the clay is rolled out thinner and softer. I tried putting wet porcelain on top of the stoneware clay, then covering it with powdered china clay. this gives a lovely soft texture, uneven, powdery and sometimes cracking and flaking off.

I used the terracotta crank as well, and mixed it with the St Thomas stoneware.

most of these pots are “feeding vessels” with the little spout and wider neck. some have a neck which grows smoothly out of the shoulder, on others the neck has a different angle from the shoulder.

one bigger piece, a kind of watering can shape;

and one shaped like a torso, more organic, made of more pieces, the clay soft, the porcelain powdery like flour.

I found the website of the museum of Cycladic art and printed out some images for inspiration. most of the vessels here are Bronze Age, carved from marble.

Tilda and Sal are hors de combat just at the moment; T cut a paw pad last week and has stitches, Sal ate too much lamb fat and has an inflamed pancreas.

So I am walking myself at the moment. on Tuesday I am convinced I saw a Bonelli’s warbler in Cake’s Lane. if this is true I am one up on the twitchers. a little olive grey bird, whitish greyish underparts, smaller than a robin, with no distinguishing stripes or anything special, a small robin type beak. I got very close, as it was perched amongst last year’s dry meadow sweet stalks as I walked by. if I didn’t notice the eye stripe of course it could easily have been a chiff chaff or a willow warbler. perhaps, what ever it was, it seemed stunned after its long journey north.

this evening the sun shone through the wood and illuminated the blackthorn blossom and the new leaves. there is a resident thrush in the wood, he always rewards my walk with a solo improvisation.

there were eight hares out here, cavorting in the low slanting sunshine.

the severe winter doesn’t seem to have had any effect on their numbers.

violets sprinkled on the bank in Clip Street, along with mounds of primroses. it seems like a good year for flowers here too. I must visit the secret wood, its wood anemones must be out by now. I have one flower in my garden; they are hard to establish, and they are a sign of ancient woodland.

and the chickens looking pretty at Clip street farm. another kind of bird made their presence felt – Hercules bombers out for their evening run, flying low and banking overhead, rumbling along like so many giant bumblebees.

(1 comment)