Arts on the Avenue

Hi everyone! I will be at the show Sunday August 28th from 10 until 4pm. The show is on the main street in the town of Ladysmith, 26 km north of Duncan. It will be a nice chance to see all the work that I currently have available. There are 45 artists at this year's event and it is such a well planned and well assembled, juried show it is worth some time.

Talk to you soon, i still have to pack the rest into the car and get at least some sleep before set up time!!

french butter dishes filled with wild blackberries

A moment of pure bliss washed over me today when i found a new patch of blackberries the size of golf balls close to the pathway that i normally take the dogs on. I had ridden over to the farm up the road to get some eggs and a few other veggies that they grow, when i thought it must be time to have a peak at the blackberry crop. I laid the bike down and called the dogs back and very carefully stepped through the treacherous barbed canes to reach the soft black fruit. My effort was richly rewarded.

When adventure dave and i came out here to look for a house from Calgary in 2006, i was gobsmacked by the fact that not only did wild blackberries pour out of every rugged nook and cranny of the valley but wild, unloved apple trees grew in the road allowances and plums fell off only mourned by the wasps that were eating their sweet flesh.

I made a promise to myself that i would never forget to see the abundance of free wild fruit to fill my freezer and jam jars and that i would not become too busy or preoccupied to take time to get out there and pick it. I have found that it makes the most perfect break from a day like today where i spent all day throwing highly specific (read frustrating) french butter dish halves that must fit exactly inside each other, to jump on the bike with a bag of tupperware or pails and go collect fruit and toss it in the freezer! The house might be a bit too hot tonight to make jam but in the rainy season i welcome standing in front of a warm stove simmering the bubbling jam in the amazing pot dave got for me.

Today is our anniversary. We have been married for 8 years and i could not feel more unconditionally loved, through all the enormous changes i have incurred, with all my battle scars and a clear obsession with pots that has grown over everything like the blackberries that I love so much, husband dave has gently fanned the ashes of my many incarnations and helped me find and rekindle my roots, the true self, deep underneath my ideas and self assessments. There is no greater gift.

Monday morning again. We are wrapping up coffee/underpants time with our new teen aged kitten who just showed up last week, and there is a pile of work staring at us this week. Laundry, (once the basket is completely buried a small alarm goes off that laundry landslide is imminent) a kiln full of bisque, gardens to weed and harvest peas, black currants to pick, driving to Victoria on Friday, errands in town, getting a book called "Thrown" that was reviewed by the BC Potters' Guild, cleaning the house, two markets (Sidney:Thursday and DFM:Saturday) and I am running out of time to throw work that will be ready in time for Arts on the Avenue. http://www.artonavenue.com/ The photo is last year's show poster, can you find my picture in there?? row two column four.

I also have to clean the litter-box everyday as the new kitty is in the process of de-worming. I had no idea such terrible.......enough said!!

The summer has finally arrived and plants are growing audibly in the swelter. I have a few huge tomatoes on one of the plants and the rest are working hard to catch up. The garden is a blend of soil and clay which has it's challenges but also needs VERY little water as it is held there for a long time. We are in sunlight management mode with open upstairs windows all night with fans drawing in the colder outside air and then shut tight during the day to conserve the coolness we collected.

In the studio today I am throwing a batch of my tiny bowls off the hump to fill in the kiln shelves amongst the chip platters and bowl sets that I am trying to fire efficiently.

Bike Ride and Last Week of the Art Show

Good day. Today is a studio day with a break at some point to go fetch groceries with the trailer and bike. I pack them myself so they can go in the crates just so and come home in one piece with useful bread and bananas! I spent the day, 9 hours, in the car doing ride support for training dave and 5 of his buddies. I brought as much water as I had containers for and still ran out just before we got to Lake Cowichan. Each person brought as much food and water as they thought they needed and I was driving all the food and water around so it would be there when they needed it.

We left Duncan at 9am and I set up a little aid station just at the Goldstream corner and then tried to catch up to them before they got to Sooke but they beat me there!! The team was really moving all day and kept a blistering tempo for all 236 kms.

Here is a photo of my pack up for taking my work to the Art Show in the Portals Gallery inside the Island Savings Community Centre on James Street in Duncan. We take down the show on Friday so pop in this week to see what we came up with and how the three artists work together.

Art Exhibition in Portals Gallery

Photo of 'day off dave' and the dogs at cherry point beach taken by me.

Yesterday, Franziska and Julie met me at the Island Savings Centre to build a show that shared the gallery space between the three of us. Franziska is a surface focused potter, she takes photos of the natural world and (using her mac) she can isolate the item she wants and then using magic she applies this photo to her pottery! I have NO IDEA how she does this, she has to fire the decal photo thingy in a lower firing after the piece has been done so her work is fired three or more (up to 6) times. The results are just beautiful.



Julie Nygaard is a photographer who starts with the photo and works towards a built image. Her work is strong with varied surfaces (some photos are printed on canvas) with a lot of interest added to the display with found objects.



The three of us have put together a risky show with lots of pots perched precariously on a wooden bridge and on the floor tipped off a log!! The background is made of old wooden crates and rough one side cut wood panels. It is a very cool show and it's free to walk through and have a look. The Portals Gallery is inside the Island Savings Community Centre right beside the Library in Duncan and in the same building that has the world's largest hockey stick and puck gracing it's east face.



We will hang around the show at different times over the next two weeks, the gallery is open from 10-5 M-F. email me for any details required trialbyfirepottery@hotmail.com

A Busy Sunday

This will be a very short blog post as today is a busy one for me. I have the bike shop friends over for dinner today and some riding before hand to enhance the appetite. I have to tidy the house and clean the bathroom, among the trimming that has to happen, i also have a lesson at 1pm.

Bike dave and i finally did the loop around Shawnigan Lake yesterday with an extra 10 km for him then he had to chase me down and we rode most of it together with the final tally at 70 for the new bike. It handles really well and is set up very well for me, dave noticed that i pedal with my right foot sticking way out for some unknown reason!!! You actually have to watch me for quite a while to see all the habits i have formed and he was able to correct the foot thing (which will take a million hours of self correction to change it) and also when i stand up i get into the hips a lot instead of keeping the same leg rotation. It was nice to spend 3 hours with bike dave and what a great guy to draft off of!! I just sat in his draw and got pulled along, what a blast.

The 30 mugs in the damp cupboard may be close to getting out of there to dry some more today. The 4 huge casserole dishes I threw mid-week need to be trimmed today and i am going to try putting some really simple handle lugs on a few of them. Normally i don't put handles on them because they are thrown so the sides are quite flared out and easy to pick up but it's time for an experiment.

The photo is of a public art installation in Vancouver, which can be identified in the picture by the city woman wearing all black and the overcast sky(clear from the lack of any shadows despite it being the middle of the day). It is a WONDERFUL piece and should be enjoyed if you are ever in Yale--town.

Back to normal

Well, things are back to normal around here. I have a customer coming this morning to find the perfect huge bowls for his wife' s birthday (he came to the Market but I only bring a few there each week) and tired, race dave and I are having coffee on the couch together. There is a bike downstairs built up just for my physical size andd special uses. It was an amazing process that was emotional, informative, and right down to the wire. Husband dave took the brunt of the emotional stuff as usual and was still able to explain bike tech stuff to me at length to help me understand the differences between the bikes that may have worked.

Dave and Sandy at Cycle Therapy did so much work getting me set up on the right bike for me. It's frame is a rocky mountain road bike but 'my bike dave' and 'bike shop dave' spent a good long time working out the best gears for my application. The problem is that 'road bike' gears are harder (to push) and in the past we have tried to make mountain bike gears work with the a road set up or we have bought the cross bike because it had a triple in the front (easier).

In the case of the new bike we(the daves) came to the understanding that the best way to go was to buy a drive train that was built to work together instead of frankenstein pairings. The problem was that I would lose the easiest gear when it was compared to my old bike. Andrew Kent came over to Cycle Therapy after the Market to help with advice on touring with a heavy load in relation to the gears required, it was very thoughtful.

The new gears, handle bars, pedals and stem meant that bike shop dave would have to deconstruct the entire bike down to the frame and build it up with parts that he had to order from off island. So we waited for parts and I drove (uggghhh) the car for a few days until I got the call that it was ready. I was at the Sidney Market and was a little surprised to hear that bike shop dave was finishing the build at 8pm!! (the store closes at 5pm)

I went in to have the bike fit tuned in for me, we had made a bunch of educated guesses during the planning process about the sizes of different things that would make the bike fit me just right. It turned out that when he started to build the bike for me with all the new components, he opened one of the boxes and found out it was the wrong piece AND it was broken!! The other mechanic, Anthony (who has recently acquired some sweeeet mugs) at Cycle Therapy phoned around to find out if any other bike shops had the correct piece in stock that we could go get and found one at Oak Bay Bikes in Victoria. Sandy (this bike shop is a husband and wife team) drove down to Victoria right then and got the new part and brought it back to Duncan so bike shop dave could get the bike done.

What amazing service!! Where can you find this these days!!

I went into the shop the next morning and had the bike dialed in for me and then took it home to haul the next batch of pots out to Cowichan Bay to the Salish Sea Gallery as some work had sold and the display was looking a little sparse. Ironically, I hit a rock on the road and got a flat tire and realized that my spare tube was a little too fat and I had lost the bike pump when they took the entire bike from me. So, half way to Cow Bay, flat tire, no pump, I called our good buddy Trevor and he was out there with a pump and tube in no time. You know someone knows you when he not only didn't offer to fix the flat for me (possible biting injury might have occurred) or to drive me the rest of the way as that too could have incurred certain wrath.

I had an offer of a 'borrow bike' from Margaret, Mark K. and Victor V and numerous offers of giving me rides in cars if that was what I needed. It was very thoughtful and sweet of people to see me as somewhat less able to do what I do without the bike.

The last step is to take the trailer hitch assembly out to Mill Bay and get it adjusted a bit for the larger seat tube that is on the new bike. Also, to anyone who would like to steal the new bike, I am having an armoured car stop by every night and pick it up then return it to my locked vault each morning.....that should reduce the options for people.

Thank you to everyone that went out of their way to support me through this process, now back to work throwing lidded casserole dishes and then tonight I am going to knit a bike cover out of pink lace...photos to follow!