I recently took a trip to Hay on Wye and whilst my companions were browsing crime novels in the Murder & Mayhem bookshop I popped across the street to visit the Brook Street Pottery and Gallery.

I can confirm that both the bookshop and the pottery are well worth a visit. I was lucky enough to chat to Simon, a fantastic potter who manages the pottery. He makes impressively large pots for the garden out of beautiful terracotta and also displays and sells the work of many talented potters from across the UK. I was even lucky enough to be given a quick tour of the studio space and see the enormous brick kiln.

Here are some pictures of the pots on display:

The pottery holds regular exhibitions and you can follow their work and exhibits on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Brook-Street-Pottery-and-Gallery/184612508248243 

Simon Hulbert is a member of the Craft Potters Association: http://www.cpaceramics.co.uk/gallery_detail.php?member_id=223

2. Gravy jug
The glaze on this one came out brilliantly. The pictures don’t really do it justice. I glazed the outside white and the inside of the jug ‘surprise blue’. After firing, the colour inside became a very deep blue with a marbled effect. It’s really beautiful. I like the remnants of the blue glaze around the spout as well. Definitely the most successful glaze of the term.

3. Flower Pot
I had a few problems applying the glaze to this one. I was also running out of time towards the end of the class. In my haste I ended up washing the pot under the tap to remove the original glaze that I had applied way too thickly. When re-applying the glaze the pot was still damp so the glaze didn’t stick as well as usual. I probably committed a cardinal sin of glazing, however, it has given it a really suitable thin shabby glaze which suits its ‘potting shed’ vibe!

4. Small Penguin Pot
This one didn’t turn out so well. The shape of the pot was irregular anyway as I had tried to make it rectangular and the glaze was too thick and dark for the pot. This makes it hard to tell that the sprig is a penguin!

5. Space Pot
This was an interesting shaped pot from the beginning. I glazed it in the normal blue glaze with a brown stripe at the base. It looks a bit like a blue mushroom.

6. A selection of egg cups
I found it very difficult to make such little objects look the same. I think one of these may have even been an Espresso Cup reject. Anyway, that’s why they all look totally different! When I got home I tested the size of them with a real egg and the first blue one without ridges was the best fit.

7. Straight sided bowl
I quite like the shape of this pot and the green glaze has come up much better than on the small penguin pot. The white inside adds interest and overlaps with the green. It looks like a bowl for noodles.

8. John’s Mug
I promised to make my friend John a mug and this is what he got! The shape was good and I was pleased with the ridges I deliberately decorated on the surface. I’m afraid the glaze let this one down a little bit. I applied it too thickly and not particularly evenly so the effect is a bit sloppy. It’s a sturdy looking mug though and I like the handle.

9. Seaside Pot
This started life looking like a on old rum bottle that needed a cork. Now, with the edition of a shell sprig, it looks more like a seaside pot. The ‘mystery blue’ came out very nicely and you can still see the shell sprig clearly through the glaze.

10. Rounded Bowl
I was thrilled with this bowl because I threw it without any turning. If I was to be super critical it is a little heavy and unfortunately the clay bubbled slightly during the firing on the inside and the underneath of the pot. You can’t see that from the outside though and I love the shape too much for it to matter.

11. Arty Egg Cup
This one was an egg cup that went completely wrong but there was something about it I liked and I couldn’t throw away. After glazing it I like it even more, although it isn’t actually a functioning pot!

12. Shell
This shell was from a beach in Cornwall. It was useful for making sprigs but this one is too large to attach to any of my diminutive pots. I decided to glaze it as an experiment and it has turned out beautifully! If only I had added a hole when the clay was still soft so that it could be hung up on a wall.

There’s always a slight air of panic during the penultimate week. Any pots that aren’t finished won’t make the glazing process and any new ones that are thrown need to be done so without the need for turning. Due to my absence the previous week I have loads to catch up on and numerous oddly shaped pots to turn.

The bottle shaped pot I thought would be a nightmare to turn actually works out alright and I add a little shell sprig for decoration.

The pot I threw in week 6 is an unusual modern shape, kind of spacey. I nick name it space pot.

I decide to turn one pot by hand because it is a rectangular shape and then I add a penguin sprig to its surface. The final one left to do is an egg cup that doesn’t requires too much attention.

Feeling confident I decide to attempt to throw a bowl that won’t require any turning. I discover a nifty little tool I wish I had found out about before. It creates a neat base rim underneath the bowl, much neater than anything I could achieve. In the photo (left) you can see the base still looks a bit wonky despite the new found tool. In the photo (right) with the egg cup and the rectangular shaped pot you can see the bowl is a good shape and size, although it may turn out to be a little heavy. I shall have to wait and see next week when it’s glazing time.

It feels so satisfying carving great swathes of clay off a lumpy pot that it’s easy to get carried away when turning. In fact, I can find it difficult to stop, which sometimes leads to disaster, like last week’s ceramic tube and sometimes leads to something better than before . . .

This week, whilst trying out a new tool, I turn the bottom of one of my pots so much that it ends up with a perfectly circular hole in the bottom! I suddenly realise I’ve been meaning to buy a flower pot for ages to see if I can make something grow and now there’s no need to buy one at all because I’ve just accidentally made one. To make it look deliberate I add a broken flower sprig to give it a shabby potting shed feel.

I also manage to make a handle for my gravy jug. I am slightly better than last week at rolling out the clay into an even sausage shape (although it is still a bit chunky) and overall I’m really pleased with the final result:

So now I just tuck little notes to him occasionally into Mike’s Mail.  It’s a ceramic mail holder that I had made for him many years ago.  Mike loved to play golf so it had to be about golf, of course  Now it sits on my desk, next to my computer.

I just learned yesterday that one of his granddaughters, a senior in high school, took a few trophies recently for her school’s golf team.  I’m sure that whatever dimension he’s in, Mike is smiling on her.

The bottom photo is a collage I did of him about a year ago.  Mike loved to clown around and as you can see, was having a little fun sticking his head out through the sun roof of his car.  Being that he was a joker, sometimes it was hard to know if he was pulling my leg or not.  Playing Texas Hold ‘Em with him was a real challenge.  He had the perfect poker face, although I did manage to beat him a couple of times  Namaste’

2. Pot with lid
This was one of my favourites so I was a bit worried about messing up the glaze. I decided to make the inside of the pot white and to highlight the butterfly with blue. The outside I glazed a solid blue and the lid a combination of blue, green and brown:

3. Large bowl
This was a bowl I threw from a chuck at the end of one of the classes. It is by far the biggest bowl I made during the whole term. I began by glazing the inside and outside white and then on the outside I put a green stripe half way down, followed by a brown stripe below it. I painted a green rim around the top and dotted it with brown. I think it’s one of my more successful experiments with glaze!

4. Pot with very thin walls
I turned this pot so much that the walls started undulating. Impressively it didn’t crack and survived being fired. I put a bit of all the glazes on to this pot. Inside it is white and the outside is mainly blue with a little brown and green painted over the top which gives it a nice shimmery effect:

5. Penguin pot
I tried to do more uniform stripes of brown glaze on this pot by painting them on using the wheel rather than by free hand. The main glaze is green inside and out. I also used a little brown on the inside to highlight the penguin:

6. Pot with a belly
I was pleased with the shape of this pot when I first threw it and I was happy to see the glaze came out much better than I expected. It’s similar to the large bowl, mainly white with a green and brown band on the outside, a colour combination I think works surprisingly well:

7. Small pot
I kept this one quite simple, blue inside and out with a brown stripe towards the base:

8. Pot with decorative base
I went straight through the bottom of this pot when I was turning it so had to patch it up with some extra clay. I glazed it green with a little brown to highlight the decorative part. I like the way it looks quite seventies!

The others that didn’t come out quite so well . . .
1. I liked the pot because it was an unusual shape, however the glaze I chose was too dark and looks very murky:

2. The pot itself had sagged a bit but I was pleased with the decoration around the outside. With the glaze I went way too experimental on this one! Not really sure what I was thinking, especially with the green dots but safe to say it didn’t work!

3. This pot was a bit wonky to start with but then the decoration was even wonkier and the glaze turned out very patchy where I’d missed bits!

4. I also had a similar problem with this one in that my glazing was a bit patchy. I don’t really like the blobby patches of blue either, although for some reason they look a lot better in the photo than in real life!

We are shown a few new techniques of glaze application. For an easy way to do stripes you can place the pot in the middle of a wheel, spin it slowly and with a steady hand and a paintbrush do uniform stripes of glaze around the pot. Another technique is to fill a jug full of glaze and start pouring a steady stream back into the container. Once you are happy the stream is steady you then pass your pot through the glaze quickly and can achieve some really interesting free form designs. Then there is the splatter technique with a toothbrush which can be used to add flecks of colour over the top of a solid glaze. Here is my attempt at the splatter technique on the matching bowls (bear in mind that the colours will be very different after glazing and will melt and merge with each other, i.e. don’t be put off by the splodges!).

Having been a bit more experimental with this batch of glazing, the results could go either way and I can’t wait to see how they turn out. The next post will be a full before and after gallery of all the pots I made on this course so you can see what worked out and what didn’t. After that there will be a summer break from pottery classes so no more posts until September when I’ve already signed up for more!

First up I go for the bowl as it’s a more straight ahead shape to turn. After what seems like months I centre the clay to make a chuck and then get to work. I’m a bit timid due to past experiences of over turning but do a decent enough job and then decide to add a little decoration. My first penguin pot!

Next up is the pot with the lid. This bowl is too shallow to fit over the previous chuck so the teacher helps me to reshape the clay and then it sits snugly inside. The lid is turned separately upside down in the bowl, a clever technique. I go careful because it’s one of my favourites and it miraculously survived last week’s fall. Decoration wise I keep it fairly plain but add a little butterfly so that when the lid is taken off there is something to look at inside:

Finally I work on the last vase shaped pot. It fits over a funnel shaped chuck and I shave quite a bit of weight off the bottom. I decide to keep this one plain. I threw it a bit wobbly to start with (non deliberate) so it has a unique shape without needing decoration!