I started to write a blog because I knew that my June month at Medalta would be interesting every day – for me, for other potters and for my friends and family. It was!

Now that I’m back at home in Port Moody I have started back at my usual pottery but I’m also giving myself permission to try to control my garden and enjoy the Summer. Now that my husband is retired from teaching Archaeology and only occasionally consulting or writing reports we want to take the long-anticipated chance to travel. The Residency was partly a time for me to consider how much pottery I still want to do. There is plenty to keep me fully occupied and interested in the maintaining of our 1914 Arts and Crafts heritage house and its generous-sized garden. But no, I must continue to juggle my priorities and make time to be in my studio. I still love throwing, the all-absorbing time assembling 3 or 4 parts into a new whole and the painting. Handle-attaching is satisfying but so time-consuming!

I also have found that I enjoy keeping a journal so I shall write my thoughts on the daily juggle of priorities. Photos of what appeals to me will appear too. Sometimes you will see that I haven’t been in my studio at all. After 40 years of working in the same studio I know that with the lovely college pension Al worked so hard for I don’t HAVE to make pots. But I don’t want to stop, the galleries on Granville Island are both asking for more jugbirds now and the best, cover-of-Ceramics-Monthly piece is still waiting to be made. And of course if there comes an opportunity to make more stoneware pots for a salt firing well, nothing will be more important than getting them made!

It’s a somewhat cloudy day, Al has gone for a bike ride and I am off to the basement/studio to insert 5 extruded spouts into miniature jugbirds. Then I will start on slip-painting 6 others which were finished and dipped in a background slip yesterday.