Blocking magic

Sorry for the long absence, I’ve been a bit busy getting married and starting a new full-time job! More of the first of those another time but for now, here’s a picture of me finally wearing the shawl I made back in April and only just got around to blocking because it was already too warm to wear it by the time I finished knitting!

Little Arrowhead Shawl, pattern by Pam Allen

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Belated Making Monday – mixed makes

Welcome to 2012 – I’m still here, although still without pottery classes. I am finally getting round to making actual jewellery from my left-over beads and pendants, like this necklace made from emerald clouds glazed beads and silver effect spacer beads, which I just need to attach the fastener to.

I’m so pleased with it that I’m thinking I’ll get some more of the silver beads and do another one – I think I have enough blue beads for a chocker and the silver should set them off nicely.

Aside from jewellery making, I’ve been trying my hand at knitting, something that I can handily do at home unlike my beloved pottery. I’m making a little bag in King Charles Brocade stitch at the moment, to practice knitting and purling and reading a pattern. I’ve managed 3 pattern repeats so far:

I’m really quite pleased with how it’s turning out given I haven’t knitted since I was 12 and then I only made garter stitch squares for blankets.

This year looks to be a year of more varied crafts – I’m not going to be back at pottery classes before April at the earliest from the looks of things, I’m determined to master the knitting enough to make some wearable garments, I have fabric offcuts and want to learn to use a sewing machine, and I have a big event coming up at the end of the summer which is also calling on my crafty skills (these silk flowers may well give you a clue on that front).  So now I’m seeing the drawback of intending this to be a specifically pottery-based blog. I don’t know whether to give it a make over or just start again from scratch since I can’t change the name. If there’s anyone still reading this, what are your thoughts?

Check out what everyone else was making yesterday as part of Making Monday on Natalie’s blog!

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Apologies

Sorry for the lack of updates, I’m snowed under with my day job at the moment. I’m still around on email if you’ve seen something you like on my stock page though, and this blog has fan page on Facebook now so you can contact me there too (although I’ve removed the link box from my sidebar so you aren’t tracked when you visit because I’m not comfortable with their new sharing policy).

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Quick update

Apologies for the lack of a Making Monday post this week, check out everyone else’s contributions here. My stock page is approaching up to date though, so if you liked the look of the porcelain pendants or buttons in my last post, check it out. I haven’t listed all the 1″ diameter ivy leaves because I’m still musing attempting wirework again and making something with them, but if you had a project in mind for them, feel free to drop me an email and I’m sure I could be convinced to part with them 🙂

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Handmade in Britain

The BBC and the V&A announced a major new year-long partnership yesterday; a series of new programmes on BBC4 exploring the history of British craftsmanship, covering things like woodworking, textiles and metalwork. And it’s all going to kick off with a 3 part series on ceramics this autumn.

It should be fascinating and I’m looking forward to seeing what the V&A’s ceramics collection is like because I keep intending to go and see it but London is a bit of a trek from Dundee!

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Making Monday – a much used old make & a new one

I was going to post an example of my creative process today, from inspiration to finished product(s) but then I read a comment left by Sharon on my first Making Mondays post about how she loves using the pots her Dad has made for her, and remembered something Ros said in her craft debate post;

“I’d like to see crafting as a normal part of pretty much everyone’s life… it doesn’t have to be beautiful and it doesn’t have to be perfect. It has to be functional and personal.”

And decided to post about my teapot instead.

This is one of the first things I made at my college class back when I started evening classes in 2006. It’s slip cast (made by pouring liquid clay into a plaster mould, leaving it for about an hour and then pouring out the excess and leaving the mould to dry, before opening it and then trimming and smoothing) and ‘glazed’ in Norwegian Blue. As you can see, I hadn’t quite got a handle on how much glaze to use, so it’s patchy and mostly black where the glaze isn’t thick enough. But it’s perfectly functional as attested by the fact it gets used more or less everyday and, loose leaf tea addict that I am, I even take it on self-catering holidays with me (although we have yet to actually stay in a cottage that didn’t have a teapot despite the prevalence of tea bags). It might not be perfect, but it pours well and my tea making ritual is so much more special because of it.

The thing I actually made this week (aside from multiple pots of tea) was a Facebook fan page for this blog. You can find the link in my righthand tool bar now I have eventually got it to work!

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Making Mondays

My plan to post all the stuff I made before class finished kind of fizzled out as you may have noticed. It’s hard not to be disheartened by the lack of a class and people making comments about education priorities like pottery was just an excuse for a middleclass social club. I agree that colleges need to be helping young people but community hobby classes aren’t a middleclass luxury – we had retired people, people with learning disabilities, and people who couldn’t work due to other health conditions who came, and it was an important opportunity for them to get out and spend time with people.  One of the lovely things about pottery is that everyone can do it.

Anyway, enough politics. I’ve been inspired to return by ‘Making Mondays’. It  originated with this post by Natalie of the Yarn Yard, although I heard about it through my knitting friends. She writes;

We all make things. We knit. We sew. We bake. We write. We paint. We make a home for ourselves and the people we love.

So I thought that we could, collectively, make Mondays our day for blogging about it.

So my plan is to (attempt to) post every Monday, we’ll see how it goes!

Today’s make is these thrown bowls, which perfectly illustrate one of the things I love about pottery – it can be pretty and practical! They are stoneware clay decorated with velvet underglazes and then clear glazed, and one of them has already graced my table holding homemade apple sauce when my partner & I had guests to dinner a few weeks ago.

Handpainted thrown stoneware bowls

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Mixed news and mixed glazes

The bad news is that my college classes have fallen victim to the financial crisis so I’m missing my weekly clay fix until I find a new class. I do however, have a pile of pots, pendants, buttons and beads to post about so I guess that is better news for my readers (if I have any left by now, I’m such a bad blogger!).

I’ll start you off with these pots that I collected this afternoon in my final trip to college. I spent the last few weeks of term throwing in an effort to produce a whole bunch of different things fairly quickly, and also to practise my less than perfect centering technique. I glazed these slightly wonky pieces in blue-grey matt and albany because I’d never tried the two glazes together and thought they might work well. And they did, which is typical – if I’d put them on the least wonky pots, they wouldn’t have come out half as nicely!

Still, I think they look pretty good, although my photography hasn’t improved either

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Chemistry and ceramics

As some of you may have noticed, I’ve added a safety warning about the earthernware glazes to my stock page. I’ve been telling people when they emailed me about purchases anyway but I had one person who was particularly concerned and opted for a different coloured pendant using a lead-free glaze instead, so I thought I’d start pre-warning potential customers.

Stoneware glazes are all classified as ‘food safe’, which means that exposing them to acidic foods, even when hot, won’t leach any harmful chemicals out of them. However, some earthernware glazes including most of the crystal glazes and the dark red (sparkling burgundy) glaze I use contain lead and are therefore not classed as food safe. This is because acidic foods or drinks may cause the lead to leach out of the glaze, particularly if the container is microwaved with food or drink in it, and then you would be ingesting that lead when you consumed the contents of the glazed object. Likewise, your saliva might leach lead out of the object if you sucked it.

Wearing the glaze against your skin is perfectly safe because the lead won’t be absorbed through it. It’s no different to wearing pewter jewellery. However, because lead is toxic when eaten, it seems only sensible to minimize any ingestion risk by making sure you wash your hands before handling food after touching it.

I have a habit of being rather biase about this kind of stuff because I spent my PhD working with arsenic and heavy-metal contaminated soils, and having studied ecotoxicology I’m very aware that we get exposed to all sorts of chemicals throughout our lives. But while I probably don’t wear gloves as much as I should in the pottery studio, ingestion is a genuine risk that is easy to guard against.

So there you go; it’s all fine as long as you don’t put it in your mouth!

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Quick update

I’ve updated the stock page. There are probably a few more pendants to go up but I’m holding some while people make decisions so I’ve left them down for now. I’m almost out of gift boxes so you might want to get in sooner rather than later if you’ve been eyeing something!

I’m also starting to add more gallery pages so you can find pretty pictures more easily without having to scroll through these blog entries.

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