From my column in today's South Wales Evening Post

We're working on it, honestly.  Timely moment for the SWEP to give a helping hand!

Generally speaking, high summer is not the time for ceramics.  Ceramic studios located away from the main tourist haunts often close down completely for July and August.  We’ve been doing craft fairs and school summer fetes recently though and our ceramic garden snails and Green Man masks have been very well received.  Also, it’s such good fun doing ceramics with kids   -  a licence to splash glaze around, plus the fact that they absolutely have to wait for the end product.   Like the old Supremes hit “You Can’t Hurry Love, You Just Have to Wait”, you can’t hurry ceramics.  Making, glazing and firing are all processes which take time, but every time you open the kiln, it’s a bit like Christmas …..

You’ll gather from this that we haven’t disposed of the kiln which is still making its presence felt in our front room.  In fact, ceramics is running a close second to book selling as the activity of choice this summer, in our house at least.

At one point, I got so excited about our hand crafted ceramic snails that I wrote half a poem about them. “The garden snail is fairly charmless, But ours are absolutely harmless  …” are the only two lines I can remember. Sadly, the rest of the poem disappeared in transit to a craft fair, although the tag line at the end was “P.S. We don’t eat plants”.

So, if summer is busy on the ceramics front, I suppose it would be safe to assume that autumn and winter will be even busier.  In bygone days, October, November and December were our mad months, when everyone in the world’s latent craft skills came to the fore and Christmas present planning and creation was the name of the game.  Guides, Brownies, Rainbows, schools and W.I.s all thronged into the studio to paint mugs, plates and a variety of other personalised ceramic gifts  - the perfect present for the mum, dad or gran who has everything.

Plates with handprints, Christmas tree plates, ceramic snow men and those kitsch but delightful Christmas tree lights were our stock in trade at one time, and by the look of it, may be again.  Life, it seems, is cyclical.  I thought our ceramic days were over, but not at all.  Have glaze, will travel is my new motto, and snails, mugs and snowmen jostle for space in the back of the car with gym kit and boxes of books, whilst the weekly shopping just has to fend for itself!