Mina, Michelle and Cindy are waiting to see how their plates turned out so I'll show them to you as well. I just managed to get all the finished work into the glaze firing, along with everything that I had ready to go and a couple of plates which didn't make it into my previous glaze firing, painted by Philippe Raphanel and Elizabeth Zvonar. The…
The last few days illustrate how my life is a blend of pottery-related activities, household stuff and days when family is top priority. Last Thursday I finished applying terra sigillata to the undersides of all my pots, fast-dried some still slightly damp plates in my convection oven (on 'warm'), loaded the kiln for the bisque firing and turned it on. We'd set aside Friday for…
I finally decided that I had enough new plates prepared for another Raid and I sent the first photo to organizer Mina Totino. So she and her friends Cindy Richmond and Michelle Normoyle came out from Vancouver today. My own work seems to have taken forever to finish but with some new mugs, yunomis and plates now painted, and some more test pieces for the…
Last night Al and I braved horrid rain to drive over to West Vancouver. We grabbed an early supper at Park Royal South's Trattoria Restaurant before heading on to the West Vancouver Museum. Renée Van Halm's solo show 'The Shape of Things' was opening. The walls of the two galleries were filled with her large impressive paintings and some smaller works and aha! there were…
A reader of my blogs had wondered if the 'Raids' are workshops. No, they aren't. I trained as a teacher oh-so-many years ago, in London, but actually only taught in elementary schools for four years and then some time substitute teaching, but I have supplemented my pottery income by teaching wheel-throwing for decades. Then, when I became enamoured of painting with brightly coloured slips on red…