Thursday 26 August 2010

Ooo look at my flue

Well Hil and the boys enjoyed their trip to London. After getting the hang of London Transport during the day, Hil saw them onto the tube then went to watch a film in Leicester Square while the boys went off to the gig - my little babies, suddenly all grown up, travelling across the Capital by tube on their own. To a lot of kids, that's just normal, but we live in a rural place where there's one bus a day into the small local town and the majority of the traffic passing by is tractors. My boys are proper country boys, so for them to have done such a thing is a big step. They watched the gig from right down at the front, in the mosh pit, a few feet away from an attention seeking Amy Winehouse. A great adventure.

I by contrast was at work, alone in a shed in the countryside. The weather here was dreadful yesterday, torrential, so chimney building was rained off until today.But today, well, woohoo, what a flue, thank you Different Dave for your help today. This chimney should work a whole lot better, with its extra height and girth. Look how straight it is Alex! Dave's coming back next week before the firing, to fit steel strapping which will make it a lot safer, although I can't imagine it getting windy enough at Hollyford to blow it over, nevertheless, better safe than sorry/flat.

This evening Marky Mark came by to decorate his pots. He has quite a few in next week's firing.

I had decorating to do too, these have a base coat of slip

and here's one with its top coat

and a close up of the same pot

Some more freshly slipped pots that will(I hope) be various tones of green, amber, yellow and black. I'm a bit short of pots for the firing, I'd planned to make a number of very large jugs, but almost every one went wrong, my clay was too soft really. It'll be fine though, there are enough pieces, it'll just be a light pack.

Glaze to mix and test in the morning, then loading up our amps and instruments in the afternoon as we're off to Nic's in the evening to play our first Love Daddies gig for a year, the first ever with our new keyboard player, Daddy Steve. My boy Luke's new band, The Fritz, are going to be playing support - hey, that's my boy.

7 comments:

Hollis Engley said...

Best flue I've seen all day, Doug. Nice job.

Ron said...

Yep that's one nice flue! Cool to hear about the boys in London.

cookingwithgas said...

oh they do grow up. We raised our two in the county and now they are both city dwellers. Our son lived all over the place after high school and even lived a year in Korea and a year in Sada Arabia.
Use to make me wonder about this kid who talked about living at home with us forever!
Hey-I stole an image off your blog to use on my blog for Friday- hope you don't mind and I really hope you won't sue me!

cookingwithgas said...

PS- nice flue!

Monique said...

That slipwork looks sooo good!!
I would love to see how those colors worked out.

Unknown said...

Flue envy~ nice job!

ang design said...

weheyyyy gorgeous flue!!! all the best with the firing...

i must say the U/Ground experience in London was crazy.. we had some really nice guys help with the bags and the steps (i held on the the one with the pots in!! hehehe) and some really rude kids too...the nice outweighed the bad though :))