Wednesday 20 April 2011

A message from North Carolina

Our great American adventure continues. We're in North Carolina now, sitting in the sunshine outside Ron's house. We didn't have internet access for a few days , so I'm only just getting caught up. Our Virginia experience was fantastic, with many sweet people, who made it a special time. Not least our wonderful host, Dan Finnegan, who looked after us so well. We're missing his company - hopefully he'll be in the UK in the summer and our paths will cross again. Thank you Dan, so much.


Here's Dan during our workshop, after we set him the challenge of making some red clay pots (the properties of the clay are very different from the stoneware body that he is used to throwing). I don't think we converted him.
These are some of the lovely group of people who were at the workshop, a number of whom are bloggers too. I'll put links to their blogs in a later post.
Dan drove us two hours further south east, along the blue ridge mountains of Virginia, to Kevin Crowe's pottery, nestled in the woods at Amherst.

Kevin makes beautiful pots.
Here we met up with Ron and after a tasty chowder, a tour and a pot swap, we said our sad farewells to Dan and headed onwards to a warm welcome at Meredith Heywood's home and pottery in Whynot, North Carolina, where a group of local potters were gathered for a social evening. It was another great pleasure to meet an old friend of blog and Facebook.



This is Meredith and her husband Mark. We stayed overnight, Ang and Hannah stayed with Meredith, Ron and myself with Ron's friend, potter and pizza maker, Tom Gray.

The next day, we were joined by blogger Tracey Broom(next to Ron) - it was a delight to meet her. This tour is full of wonderful surprises, meeting people for real, that we have communicated with for years in the virtual world through blog or Facebook - some people call it all a waste of time, but I think it's amazing that the internet creates the opportunity to meet so easily with like-minded people.

Tracey and Meredith took us on a tour of some of the many potters in North Carolina. There are hundreds, rows and rows of pottery shops, lining the roads. It was a great day. I'll post pictures later - I need to sleep now, as tomorrow morning we will be presenting our final workshop in Shelby, North Carolina. This blog post has taken several days to finish as we've been pretty busy - it started three days ago in the sunshine and now it's the middle of the night.
This is tomorrow's venue. We're nervous again tonight, it'll be good to get underway in the morning.




This poster made me laugh! I'm sorry to be missing it(click on the image to enlarge)

Goodnight all

3 comments:

Dennis Allen said...

So glad you are enjoying your visit.Everyone had a great time at Libertyville and I'm sure today will be just as much fun.

Anna M. Branner said...

Just being yourselves...you guys will rock! (Though I know Hannah needs an extra pat on the back in the beginning....;-)

Becky said...

From NC - They came. They conquered. But we all knew they would. :)