Chrismas Craft Fair

The annual Christmas Craft Fair at Signal Arts Centre opened on Mon Dec 10 and will be open 10-5 daily (including Sundays) until xmas eve. The first thing one can't help but notice on entering the gallery is the beautiful aroma of handmade soaps and potpourri.

The galley has been transformed into a lovely craft shop and one is enticed to browse.

There is a great mix of handcrafts - ceramics, cushions, handmade notebooks, xmas decorations, tea cosies, hand decorated t-shirts, felted scarves, stuffed toys, handmade cards - the list goes on!

I contributed a number of things: handmade pocket note/sketchbooks (left), hand-painted tiles (left) and some handbuilt pottery (to the right can be seen two of my shamrock bowls), Also featured on the display steps are my husband's beaten copper tea-light holders (left) and a number of his versatile ceramic teabag/cooking utensil/key holders (centre to lower right).

Here is another view of the display steps.

There are a few more pieces of mine not on the step display - another shamrock bowl (shamrock in flower was embedded to print into the clay before bisquing) and one of my tile paintings.

As well as the terracotta blue-glazed draped vessels (which I don't have a picture of in this blog!) I made a few festive draped-slab serving dishes from grey buff and white clay.

This is a view down the hallway. The display steps are on the first white-clothed table.

This is a view of the corner of the main gallery space. Gorgeous felted scarves are on that clothes rack in the corner and copper jewellery in the centre. Best wishes to all who contributed their work to the fair. There are some real bargins here and the craft work is such a high quality too.

2019 ceramics workshop - one month in!

Last December I did some sketches of tree and stone imagery that I thought would be nice glaze-painted on tiles. When the ceramics workshop resumed in the new year, I was ready to do four small glaze paintings on ceramic tiles.

 When I was doing the "liminal" sketches of stones on the shore, I made the forms and colouring more complex than the more basic stick images.

With this in mind, I decided to paint the tree tiles first. Even here, I overlapped a few glazes anyway (reds & oranges, blues & greens) to see what would happen.

I was pleased enough with the results. I always lean towards Fauvism when I think of trees and colour at least one of them red.

Glaze painting is always a pleasant surprise as it is impossible to know how the pre-fired glazes will react with each other when fired. There is a certain amount of looseness when painting with glaze on a tile, but its exact colouring can never really be pinpointed.

The trees tiles were put away when I was painting the stones and I decided, in keeping with the sketches, to make the forms more complex. I did take pictures of the tiles before they were fired, but deleted them by mistake. I took especial care over the sand areas, as I did not want them to appear too solid. I glazed first with a bright orange and then, after the orange glaze had dried, took a smaller brush and dotted a bright yellow glaze overtop.

I am very pleased with the colouring and randomness of the glazes.