What a satisfying day! I finished slip-painting the last of my current batch of jugbirds on Friday and left them drying all day yesterday while we spent the afternoon wandering around Vancouver’s East Side Culture Crawl.

So today I applied terra sigillata to the bases of the last jbs and loaded the kiln for a bisque firing overnight. I’m slightly horrified to see that I haven’t fired it since September, just before we left for UK and Turkey! Now I need to get these glazed on Tuesday (the kiln takes 24 hrs to cool), out on Thursday and delivered to Granville Island on Friday, December already..

But then it was lovely to grab the chance – no snow, frost or rain, just about 7degrees C – to join Al who was raking piles of cedar needles off the lawn. I cut off all the dahlias etc that had been finished off by serious frost over the last few days. Then I cooked a large wintery beef stew which even had a parsnip in it. Gotta make good use of leftover red wine!

And finally I continued the time-consuming job of uploading to picasa some of our photos of Turkey. I’ll put the link here rather than duplicating that job here. If I can find the time I’d like to continue commenting on some of the inspirations from that country – but not tonight.

If you open this link you’ll see several photos of our visit to a Cappadocia pottery.

http://picasaweb.google.com/jugbird/Turkey2#