Already August

Well we're well into August already and the bank holiday is upon us. The weather has been feeling quite Autumnal lately but today at least was a good day. The blackberries on the bramble at the bottom of the garden are ripening now so I picked as many as I could and made the first homegrown apple and blackberry crumble of the year...and of course it was heavenly: proper comfort food.


As I know I've said previously, at this time of year my days off work are so incredibly precious as it gives me a chance to try and rest up and get my strength back for the next lot of four days.

My friend Julia is the most amazing ceramic artist and all through the Summer she's been running work shops in a friend's art studio, just outside Cahirciveen. I was able to go to the 'make an oil burner' one yesterday and I LOVED it!

The clay was already rolled out for us so all we had to do was to cut the shape of the oil burner (using a template), decorate it and roll it to form the burner and then create a base and a 'saucer' for a lid and then add colour. That sounds relatively basic and straight forward but it was a really absorbing process and the time flew.

This is the top of my 'saucer' - I really really enjoyed the design process of it all - choosing which stamps/stencils/cut outs I would use and then deciding on a colour of glaze. As you can hopefully see, I went for a marine theme - the blue will change colour to a sea green/blue I think (we'll have to wait and see) and the unglazed clay will be white with a clear shiny glaze over it.

 There were only six of us in the class, it was a nice sized group, so that if someone was using one of the stamps that you wanted, you didn't have to wait that long to borrow it. We all made the same basic shape of oil burner but they all were different in design and colour.

I took photos of a couple of the other ones too!

Julia took them away to dry out and when they are ready she will put a clear glaze over the top to give a shiny finish and then will fire them and let us know when they are ready.