Eric Metcalfe (whose birthday it was today!) invited Sally (Alison) Clay, Renee Van Halm (her first visit out here), Eli Bornowsky and Paul Mathieu to join him for another ‘painting raid’. Forewarned, I slab-rolled lots of oval plates and platters, applied background slips and allowed them to become bone dry.

I now have a good selection of jars of underglazes for my guests to use.

This series of photos will simply show how totally engrossed they all were and how different all their resulting paintings are.

I spent my day working on inserting and trimming spouts/bills on my next batch of jug birds.

The group turned up in Sally’s car bearing all sorts of deli goodies for lunch, and at tea-time we enjoyed a chocolate birthday cake with Eric. He kindly said that this is probably the happiest way for him to have spent his birthday.

We have wound up with 14 pieces to help fill my next kiln and all sorts of ideas of what they would do next time.

Al and I thoroughly enjoy having days like this when the studio is filled with concentration and then art chatter, eating together and having people here who enjoy our house and art collection.

Al took photos too so I’ll post them another day. And when the plates are fired I’ll post pics of them all.