First edition of the new website ...

These mugs are the lead image on my new website, at http://web.me.com/hatchvillepottery/Site/Home.html

I've been working on it for the past week, using iWeb on my iMac and a brief but very helpful conference last week with a young woman named Mindy at the Hingham (MA) Apple store. Nothing like a 30-year-old to explain the world to you.

Please take a look. I know that crowd-sourcing a critique of something like this can be dangerous, but what the hell ...

A few things I know already that need to be fixed:

- The background of the site needs to be consistent from page to page. Right now, the home page background is gray and the other pages black. I am pretty sure I'll stay with black, but I need to figure out how to change the home page background. (Mindy apparently didn't tell me absolutely everything in the 10 minutes we were together.)

- I know there are editing tweaks to be made in the copy, but if you see anything scandalous, please let me know.

- I realize that the photos in Gallery 4, the "recent pots" one, have a generally yellowish cast to them, as opposed to the other three galleries. That's a white balance problem in my Nikon SLR, which has never been as good as my earlier point-and-shoot. I need to figure that out, and I'll probably have to re-shoot those photos, but at least I still have those pots.

- I'm planning another page, of images made around the studio and the galleries.

- I'm still not sure if I'll publish this through Apple, but I pushed the "publish site" button and there it is. So you might as well look at it. It needs to find a happy home, minus all the web.me.com stuff, and it needs to be set up so that you can find it through Google. None of that is done at this point.

So ... do you find anything confusing? Unhelpful? Too helpful? Please let me know.

British slipware potters workshop on Cape Cod

British potters Hannah McAndrew and Doug Fitch (whose blogs are available in the roll of blogs on the right of this page) bring their 21st century take on traditionally decorated slipware pottery to the U.S. in April.

On the weekend of April 8-10, the Cape Cod Potters will sponsor the first in a series of three East Coast workshops by the two friends. The event will be in the Falmouth High School clay studio, on the weekend of April 8-10. It will cost $145 (members) and $165 (non-members) for the full weekend, including lunch each day. (Scholarships are always available for these workshops, and art students and faculty at the Falmouth school can attend for free.) McAndrew and Fitch continue on to another two-day workshop in Fredericksburg, Va., and then a single day in Shelby, N.C., before returning home.

The two potters are well-known in the United Kingdom and have become familiar to U.S. potters through their blogs. Both were part of "Clay and Blogs: Telling a Story," an international exhibition of potters' work last fall in Southern Pines, N.C. McAndrew lives in southern Scotland and Fitch in Devon, England.

McAndrew and Fitch work with earthenware clay, making functional pots that are decorated with liquid slip in patterns, manipulated surfaces, or images and words. The style dates back centuries, but each potter has brought his or her own contemporary touch to the work.

We'll post more information about the workshop as it develops. In the meantime, e-mail Hollis Engley at hatchvillepottery@comcast.net for reservations, directions and more information for the Cape Cod workshop, or call him at 508-563-1948. For the Virginia workshop, e-mail Dan Finnegan at danfinneganpottery@cox.net. For the North Carolina event, e-mail Ron Philbeck at ronpots2@yahoo.com. Also, look for postings on the workshops in the March and April issues of Ceramics Monthly and the spring issue of Clay Times.

Photos above include, top to bottom: Hannah McAndrew's mugs, Hannah herself, a big Doug Fitch jug, Doug himself with a freshly-thrown cider jar.

Works in progress ...

One of the things I have to do every year for the holiday open studio event is clear off the little-used slab roller. It becomes the bagel-coffee-cream cheese-eggnog table. So once I cleared it a few weeks ago, I took advantage of the situation and began rolling out slabs, making roughly round and footed serving dishes, flat square plates, handled serving platters, and rolling slabs into slender and multiply-stamped vertical vases.

I'm waiting on one more bisque firing before these pots go into the gas kiln, but I thought I'd share them in their current form, given that I hadn't posted since New Year's. I'll get back on the wheel probably this coming week. More mugs. Always more mugs ...

I'm also putting together what amounts to a grant proposal, so I'm shooting pots for that. The image here of the finished teabowls is for that project.

Later, all ...