This week's kiln

A rather thinly populated kiln this week. A bunch of tallish, slab vases on the top rear shelf, which left lots of air at the top. And not many tall pots anywhere, even in the normally thickly populated bottom shelf, which left similar amounts of air all through the stack. Pretty good firing, though, in spite of some bloating on some very thick red stoneware slabs and some thermoucouple shutdowns along the way. Gotta spend some time with a paperclip, reaming out the thermocouple burner, I think.

But there were some good pots in the kiln. Top to bottom: Slab vases with multiple additions and stamps, poured Shinos and ash glazes; tall slab vase with poured Shinos and ash glaze; three-footed slab plate with Shinos; three medium juice pitchers; multiple-Shinoed bowl.

UK Potters tour is coming together

Doug Fitch and Hannah McAndrew touch down on U.S. soil April 5 at Logan Airport in Boston, a few days before the first of three workshops on Cape Cod, in Virginia and in North Carolina. I am apparently the welcoming committee and will be there to greet them and bring them to Cape Cod. Hannah tells me she's been reading about the Pilgrim Fathers, so perhaps we should stop in Plymouth on the way to the Cape and introduce her to a Pilgrim or two. Or perhaps a Pilgrim Mother ...

I'm only posting this now to keep people alert to the workshop here on the Cape or - if it's more convenient - at one of the other two sites. And Hannah was kind enough to send a couple of high-res photos for our graphics people, so I thought I'd post one.

Doug should have a photo or two coming in the next day or so.

Meantime, if you are interested in the April 9-10 slipware workshop here in Falmouth, sponsored by the Cape Cod Potters, let me know at hatchvillepottery@comcast.net. Two days of entertaining and brilliant pot-making, each day with a free lunch, in the clay studio at Falmouth High School. It will cost $145 for CCPotters members and $165 for others, $75 for a single day. Falmouth High School art students attend free.

Further teabowl information from Thailand

I received this today from John Toomey in Thailand, about the two teabowls he bought from me last year. John gave the teabowls their names:

Hollis: You are too modest. Your readers should know that my tea teacher in Yokohama, Japan, highly praised both of these bowls when I sent her the pictures and that my guests for New Year's Tea for Year of the Rabbit (including Korean, Japanese, Thai, and Chinese tea masters) found both your "Snowy Rabbit" Tea Bowl and your "Evening Cherry Blossoms" (aka "Octopus") Tea Bowl stunning in combination with the very rarely used utensils of formal palace drawing room tea of the 14th century. I can hardly wait to see how they will blend with rustic wabi-cha utensils when the formal period is over after today's Chinese Lunar New Year and we get back to Zen-style tea. Your bowls, I think, will fit the requirement of the 15th century master Murata Shuko that utensils have the quality of "chill" and "withered", expressing the inner essence of true beauty that we still idealize in rustic wabi-cha today. (You can find all this on the internet.)

Of course, there is every reason for people to use the bowls as they wish, the more often the better--for snacks, dips, soups, floating flowers and candles, coffee, incense burners, whatever they like. Just hold them in you hands and experience peace and comfort like only fine down-to-earth pottery can give.

John Toomey Sofu (Ura Senke Tea name)

Hatchville teabowls in Thailand

This past fall, John Toomey stopped here with a friend and bought two Shino teabowls. John is a tea master in Thailand and he told me he would take them with him back to Asia, to use when he hosts tea ceremonies in his teahouse.

True to his word, John did just that. And yesterday he sent a selection of photos of the bowls being used in Thailand. You can see some of them here.

I call these bowls "teabowls," though in fact most people who buy from me have no actual idea of what a teabowl might be, or how a bowl might be used in tea ceremony. And I am far from an expert, having participated in only a couple of tea ceremonies - one Japanese in Washington, D.C., and one Chinese at Anderson Ranch in Colorado. But I like to make the forms and I tell people their use is only limited by their imagination. Eat oatmeal out of it, or hummus, or coffee. Doesn't matter to me. Just enjoy the pot.

But it was flattering for someone like John, who does know about tea ceremony, to find my pots here on the Cape and take them back to Thailand for tea. And it was very nice of him to send me the photos. Thank you, John.

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 ...