It's been a while

I've been neglecting my poor, poor blog for a while. Life seemed to keep getting in the way. So what have I been up to? Well, I am rather pleased with how my yarn bowls have come out recently. So far I have made 4 and a 5th is waiting for the kiln. One had an accident as well but we won't dwell on these things. So here are some pics showing the new yarn bowls. Enjoy! 

My signature on the bottom, CAW.

Again, with signature.

Thanks for reading,
Cath xx
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A little treat for me

I've been making a few little things for me recently. These all wall pockets! I'd never heard of them until someone asked me if I made them. A quick google search and I now know what they are. Isn't Google wonderful! So I got busy and me and my daughter had a go at making our own versions of wall pockets. 

This one has a sprig of a flower from my garden impressed into it and painted. I forget what the flower is called now though but I think it starts with a G! :) 

Now this flower I do know! Lavender! Also taken from my garden. 

This time I played with dots from my piping bag full of slip. I was thinking all the lines of a fern. What do you think?

I also have some photos of the stages of production. 

Here I have several wall pockets that I made with my daughter. She also impressed leaves into hers. I do love her butterfly on the far left that she created completely! 

A close up of L'il Miss' wall pockets. These were made for Nanny. They were finished in white with a pale green glaze painted on and wiped off the leaves to bring out the veins on the leaves. I'm afraid I don't have photos of them finished. 

The top wall pocket sadly met it's doom in the kiln but the bottom one is shown above finished. 

This is the brown wall pocket in it's greenware stage. 

So now that I have these wall pockets on my garden fence I need to think of a good hardy plant to put in them. I'm really not green fingered so I'll need one that can withstand my neglect! I'm thinking of ivy at the moment. Do you have any ideas for me? Answer in the comments and remember that the plant needs to be tough to survive me! 

Lovely to have you, as always. If you'd like to see more from Ty Siriol them you can follow us on various social media. See below. 

Thanks for reading,
Cath xx 

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Wheelie good fun!

As some of you know I bought a pottery wheel the end of last year and I now have to somehow teach myself to learn how to throw pots. I've found some really good videos on you tube to get me started and the wonderful Mr Ty Siriol bought me the Simon Leach book and dvds for Christmas. 

Even though it has been a tad cold for working in the garage over the winter months I have managed a few attempts with the aid of a fan heater. I really need to get that garage door bricked up! 

Anyway, I have a set of 3 tapas bowls that I made for Mr Ty Siriol as he does love his Mediterranean food. Here is what they looked like after the first firing and once the glazes had been painted on. This is before the final firing. 

A set of tapas bowls ready to be glaze fired.

 The brown glaze is meant to turn out green after the firing. 

Here are the final bowls. 

Tapas bowls after the glaze firing

Tapas bowls for Mr Ty Siriol

I am really pleased with how they turned out. I think the dark blue one is my favourite as I really love that you can see the circular marks where it was thrown on the wheel. 

As this was the first thing from my wheel that was worth firing I had to sign and date the bottom of the very first one. This little guy will now be my bench mark to see if I improve! In the meantime they are being well used. :-)

The underside of my first tapas bowl with my signature and the date. 

I'm looking forward to the weather warming up enough that I can throw on the wheel with the garage door open so I can see the woods opposite at the same time. 

That's all for now folks. Thanks for joining me. 

Cath xx


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Festive robins!

It's that time of year again when we dust off the festive ornaments and bring them back out to shine. A few years ago I made a robin and he comes back out every Christmas, in fact he never really goes away but is relocated to somewhere less prime. I like to rotate my pieces for display and I have enough of them now! Here's my faithful robin. 

This lil guy is a few years old now and one of my very first pieces. I still love him. 

This year I made a series of robins for the Christmas tree. All but one have been sent as gifts but this one is my daughter's robin and he hangs on our tree. 

This year's new addition to the robins.

I had fun making these but did learn a valuable lesson about glaze interactions. The breast was meant to be red but it reacted with the brown to give a golden colour. I actually quite like it even if it was an accident. The main thing is that my daughter loves him.

I hope you are all getting in the festive spirit and I wish you all a very Merry Christmas with lots of robins. :-) 

Cathy xx

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What to do when you can't do!

I know that is a really odd title, I must be in an odd mood or maybe I've been reading too many Ever After High books with L'il Miss! I do like Madeline Hatter, daughter of the Mad Hatter! 

Back onto track. I haven't blogged much in the last few months as my health has taken a rather swift downturn and I'm pretty sure no one wants to read all about that so I haven't typed much. As many of my followers know I have chronic illnesses, several in fact, they seem to like me! Recently though everyone in this household has been shouting at Arthur a lot. That's arthritis to most. You see, Arthur is systematically attacking me and has landed me housebound and in a wheelchair. Fun huh! Anyway, I'm not here to whinge, I do plenty of that at home! Rather, I'm trying to figure what to do when I can't do. Hence the rather odd blog title. 

Today I'm quite comfortable, the pain in manageable but boy, am I bored! I'm really having trouble with this sitting (as I can't walk very far at all) and resting thing. Surprisingly, I'm realising how active I usually am. Normally the day flies by and school is over before I know it. I really have learnt how to fill my time. Now I'm having to learn to fill it with other things, mainly things I can do sat down such as on my laptop. 

I'm rather proud of myself today as I've kept fairly good spirits and have invested my time into revamping my Etsy shop. I'm not making much in the way of ceramics at the moment as there's too much moving around and I can't get the wheelchair into my garage anyway. I do however, have quite a bit of stock so the obvious use of my time is to try and improve my shop and my customers' experience. 

Etsy are trialling a new layout on me, again! I seem to be picked each time, maybe because I always give feedback. It's taken a bit of getting used to but I actually quite like this layout. There are a few things I want back, such as my banner with my branding on (which I've told them) but overall I think it's a good change. The photographs are much bigger and seem to pop off the page more, and the organisation of the sections is more obvious. I would however like to be able to choose which item is my cover item for each section but again I've fed that back to Etsy. 

There appears to be new options now on the 'About' page and I've been adding some photographs of my shop members for you all to see. I think I'll have to get the camera out and take some more shots of my shop members doing their bit. I like that we can show everyone who we are and that we are real people who do actually work from their garages! I think I need to tidy mine before photographing it though! It's so hard to get a good workshop shot when you work with messy things like clay! 

I'd love your feedback on the new Etsy layout. My page is here. 
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I don't like to blog without a photo so here's one of the ones that I have added to my shop page. It's me in front with my parents, Chris (above) and Christina (right) and a friend of the family (left joining us for a leisurely coffee.

The Ty Siriol clan at Abergavenny Market

As always, thank you for following behind the scenes at Ty Siriol HQ. I'll try not to leave it so long until next time.

Cathy x

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New beginnings

As my regular followers will know, I got engaged last year. Well now things are getting going again with organising the wedding as it is, oh my goodness, 3 MONTHS TODAY!! It really has crept up on us as we've had so much going on. 

So we have sent out the invites and booked venues etc. I pretty much have wedding on the brain at the moment. As a result it became my inspiration in my pottery workshop this week. Let me explain. 

I was making a terracotta tile and I've been struggling for inspiration recently with the ongoing battle against my illness. I sat there completely blank and clueless as to what my tile would become. A fellow classmate asked me how the wedding plans were coming along and that's when it hit me. I am about to embark on a new life and new beginning with Mr Ty Siriol so that was what my tile was going to represent. 

Let me back up a little. I met Mr Ty Siriol online. I know, it's a cliché and I'd really rather not admit it but one drunken night I signed up and made a profile. I went with the alias Benu, which is the ancient Egyptian Benu Bird. It symbolises rebirth and new beginnings. It is in fact the predecessor of the Greek Phoenix. So the Benu Bird means something to me and Mr Ty Siriol as that's how we met and started our new beginning together.

I looked at my terracotta tile and drew the Benu Bird onto it. I then made the image into a deep groove. Here it is. 

Next I used a slip trailer to add white liquid clay (slip) to the grooves. Once this is dried I will then scrape it back to a flush surface to clean up the detail and bisque fire it. 

The beauty of terracotta and white clay is the stark contrast between the two colours so I will simply clear glaze it afterwards and fire again to intensify the colours. 

I can't show you the finished product yet as I haven't finished it! I did add two holes to the tile as I intend to hang this in my kitchen once it's finished as a reminder of my second chance at love.

I need to sort out the kiln now so that I can get firing again soon. Hopefully then I'll have some lovely pics to share with you. 

Thank you for reading.

Cathy x
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I said Owl be back!

As you can probably guess today I'm featuring owls! Sorry about the really obvious pun in the title but it really did have to be done! 

After chatting to a friend online before Christmas I set about making her a family of ceramic owls. I'd never done them before but she was happy to experiment with me. So out came the clay!

First I made 2 pinch pots and joined them to make a bubble. This was roughly squeezed into an owlie sort of shape taking care not to burst the bubble. 

An owlish sort of shaped bubble of clay. You need a bit of imagination at this point!

Next I needed to refine the owl features so the clay was smoothed off and some features were added. Now it starts to look like a lump of clay with attitude!

Looking a little perplexed maybe?

All she needs now are some wings and feathers. She looks like a she to me, all snuggled with plumped up plume.

Mrs Hoot!

As my friend wanted 3 owls to represent her family I pretty much repeated the above process to make Mr Hoot, who looks to be giving a lecture and baby Hoot who is smaller and has her wings out asking for a cuddle, awww. There is an extra one *just in case* as Kenny the kiln could throw a fit!

The Hoot family before firing.

This of course is what the owls look like before firing and glazing. So I begged Kenny to be good for me and set them cooking. Once they came out of the kiln they were all white as that is the true colour of the clay I use.

After the first (bisque) firing. If you are wondering, the other one is a mushroom house!

 My next task was to glaze the owls and my friend told me what each family member's favourite colours were so that their owl was definitely theirs. We went for black, purple and silver. I also painted one turquoise as I thought the glaze would work well. The colours don't show up before the second firing so it's a bit deceiving unless you are really familiar with them. For instance, the black one here actually ends up being the silver one and the grey one turns out black!

Painted with glaze and looking a bit dull before firing.

 After the second (glaze) firing it's cross your fingers time! This is when I talk very nicely to Kenny and hope he's behaved as he does have a tantrum now and again. On this occasion I opened Kenny and was horrified. The bottom shelf had cracked in two during the firing and everything stacked on the shelves above fell. The owls were on the bottom shelf so I couldn't see if they survived but you know what, they are tough l'il guys and survived intact. I was at least expecting a broken wing.

The owl family 'Hoot' after their ordeal in Kenny!

Do you have a favourite? I'm quite taken by baby Hoot but I think Mr Hoot and his deliberations make him my favourite. Here they are after a photo shoot!

The family 'Hoot' inspired by Georgia.

I hope you enjoyed 'the making of family Hoot'. I love to share my process with you. Also, a big thank you to Georgia who inspired me to make these and push me out of my comfort zone. 

I hope to see you again soon!

Cathy x
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