Week Ten

Hello Everyone,
What a windy, rainy week we've had here in Mid Wales! The same weather I described from last weekend persisted through the whole of this week. The fields are like soggy swamps with watery veins running through every wrinkle and dip of the hills. Small rivers appeared and the wind blew fiercely. At night the wind howled and pressed against the house. I told Phil it was a good thing the house had lasted over 500 years because that meant it could withstand some wind.A spectacular thing about all this rain is that I've witnessed the clearest, brightest rainbows I've ever seen in my life. You can watch them appear, dissolve and reappear in another spot within a matter of minutes. Since the sky is so open, one can see an entire panorama of the sky. Clouds, rainbows and sun create ethereal paintings which shift and morph all the time. The pictures I take don't do it justice. Sometimes when I come in from the workshop between 5-6 pm it is so dark outside I can't even see my hand in front of my face. There is no light pollution to illuminate the sky and the night is like a heavy, black curtain. The stars always look lovely though. Phil had a very productive week in the workshop. He made quite a few yunomis, bowls and guinomis. He even made some sizable bowls that he decorated with slip. He is a very determined guy and presses on working even though its clear he is in pain. He will have some physical therapy this week which I hope helps his recovery quicken. He still has pain in his shoulders and his foot.We partially loaded a bisque kiln which freed up some space in the workshop for new things. He has a new car getting delivered later on this week. He swears that his last car, a Honda CRV, is the reason he's still alive. He would not consider buying another type of car. It sounds quite posh with a leather interior and heated seats. I told Phil we should take a road trip when it comes. I tried a few new things this week with my own work. Faceting is a technique where you remove flat strips of clay off the pot with a tool like a cheese cutter. It makes flat sides all around the form. Although I learned how to do it in college, I never applied it to my own work. Phil facets a lot of his pots and I think being surrounded by them constantly made me more aware of the technique and the wheels started turning. I mentioned trying it out to Phil and he said, "That is one of the important questions- What if?" I tried it out on some small bowls and I quite like it. I tend to throw thin so it is a challenge throwing thicker. If you make the walls too thin, when you slice away the clay it will cut a big hole in the side. I also tried throwing with feldspar in the clay. I wedged (similar to kneading bread dough) feldspar gravel into soft clay and made some bowls with it. In the firing the feldspar melts creating white pearly bits in the clay. Some people who use this technique, throw with pretty big chunks of feldspar rock which I think would hurt your hands. It was fun to experiment with these techniques...we'll see how they turn out in the kiln. On Thursday Phil had to run some errands in a place called Leominster about an hour away. I walked around some shops while waiting for him. When he was done, we went in a charity shop (thrift store) because he always looks for old pots and glass bottles, etc. I had visited it before while waiting for him but did not see anything too interesting. The second time I went in with Phil I spied a small slipware dish with a cricket ball in it. I reached for it saying, "Oh, what's this". Phil said, "Looks like a horrible piece of slipware". When I flipped it over it had a WP stamp in it which stands for Winchcombe Pottery, a well-known English pottery started by Michael Cardew ( http://www.winchcombepottery.co.uk/). It is still in existence today. Ray Finch, one of the earliest workers there, still makes pots although he is over 90 years old! Phil said it was the first time he had ever found pottery from a renowned place in a charity shop. It only cost 99 pence (just over $2). It is not the best pot but it was very exciting to find it. It is a small, flat dish with cream and brown slip "quilling". Quilling is a technique kind of like marbling where a quill is dragged through wet slip to make a pattern. Phil guesses it may have been used for putting underneath a plant pot to catch the water. He thinks it was made by Sidney Tustin, one of the original potters at Winchcombe. It is said Tustin made over a million pots while at Winchcombe. What a great souvenir! When we got home I looked in the books he had about Winchcombe and I learned about Sidney and the pottery. It is so exciting to think about the history behind pots. Yesterday looked like it was going to be a nice sunny day so I went for a walk up the lane towards a trail I had seen during a morning run. I met some friendly horses who probably thought I had some nibbles for them. I think they belonged to the neighbors. It started off quite lovely with parts of the sky bright blue with puffy clouds. Other parts of the sky were dark blue like a bruise and quite menacing. Sometimes a little spot of sun would alight a single hill in the distance making it bright yellowy green. I saw a really vibrant rainbow, almost florescent, on a faraway hill. As I watched it, another appeared next to it. It was so beautiful. Slowly the bright blue sky got grayer and grayer and the rain came in. I kept walking because I thought it would pass. You know that saying "If you don't like the weather in New England, wait 5 minutes and it will change"? Well,that can be true in Wales as well. The rain drops got bigger and the wind became quite strong. I thought it might pass so I ducked into a small grove of evergreens with some sheep who eyed me suspiciously. The rain did not lessen and the path I was on had very dark clouds ahead. I reluctantly decided to head back. When I got back to the house Phil said it had not rained there at all. Oh, the volatile and dramatic weather of Wales... I learned how to make rice pudding this weekend. It is a very British dessert and quite delicious. I wonder if I can get pudding rice in America? I think Phil is over in the workshop so I'd better go and see if he needs some help! I hope you are all healthy and well. Until next week...

Take care,
Kari
http://picasaweb.google.com/nhthrower
http://kariinwales.blogspot.com/

PS- Words of the week are cookery book- cook book
Presi- Present
Post- mail something
Nutter- crazy person
A Tip- a mess
Mac- raincoat
Skip- big dumpster
Pensioner- old person
Bird- woman
Gibbons- scallions