I’ve spent the day unloading the bisque, waxing, glazing and reloading the kiln. Now it’s drying out and I’ll turn it up before I go to bed. It’s been a dreadful last-day-of-November type day here in the Lower Mainland – just cold rain and misty. Luckily my kiln shed is warm and I have a radio out there.

My Turkey post today will be a selection of photos of our visit to Cappadocia’s pottery village, Avanos. I half expected to bump into Katie Janyk who lives on the Sunshine Coast near Vancouver but who works in a workshop in Avanos a couple of months each year. We haven’t met but she gave me some information about the pottery community there. She blogs at:       http://salamanderkatie.blogspot.com/

I happened on the first pottery, chez Mumtaz, after we’d been walking around some carved-in-the-cliff houses. The young guy posed nicely for me with a pot he’d just made.

The bottles in the next photo are old ones in an antique shop – certainly Cappadocia clay. We were taken to a carpet shop of course and I fell in love with this silk one – quite priceless so a photo is enough!

Next day we were entertained at the Omurlu Ceramic workshop. A potter demonstrated throwing Cappadocia red clay on a kick wheel. Everything else featured a white clay, probably from Iznik. We saw a bowl/platter being made over a plaster mould, an array of slip-poured forms and women painstakingly painting plates. The over-the-top overglaze colour designs are the distinctive design for this workshop. In the showrooms there are expensive, probably high-fire pieces in more traditional Iznik designs and then there are hundreds of more affordable white earthenware pieces – vases, bowls, plates, jars. We chose one plate to bring home like the ones in the last photo.

The women did amazingly fine work. There isn’t much light as the whole workshop is carved out of the mountain. There are no windows.

The pots on the right are ready for glaze firing.

I think I will make one of these characteristic jugs, a donut form, but it won’t be decorated like this! I think terra sig would be good, or salt glaze….

I want to make one of those Ankara jugs too, shown in yesterday’s blog.