If you’d like to experience a little restful moment in the woods behind my house here’s a video for you.  I think it might sound a bit too much like the sounds that play in those little kiosks in the back corner of a kitschy store (you know, sandwiched between the smelly candles and the incense burners), but if you don’t like it, you can turn it off!   (Sorry for any wobbly blurry bits).  This is a creek that runs nearby, we actually get our water from it.  I thought it would be nice listening for those of you reading this blog entry.  Special cameo roles by my mum, Joan Beck and Lola the wonder dog (sorry, Lola’s scenes wound up on the cutting room floor).

Here are some pictures from our Christmas visit.  Mostly from our walks, but there is one of our good friend Mairi Thom and her beagle Lovat.  Mairi is originally from Scotland, but now lives in Baddeck, about 35 minutes away.  When we are in Cape Breton at Christmas she always joins us which helps it feel more like a family event.  Mairi is a vet, but she is also very artistic.  She sews and knits and makes jewellery.  (She knit the hat she is wearing in the photo) This past summer I sold some of her felted bags in my shop; they were very popular!  She is often my creative sounding board and I am SO happy and lucky that she is my friend.

My parents leave on Tuesday, but we’ve got one more event.  Tomorrow is our neighbour’s whisky party.  All sorts of lovely libations, most from Scotland, some from Ireland….Mostly single malts, but a few blended ones do sneak by.  Usually there are around 30 different whiskies present….and of course all must be sampled.  Aren’t we lucky that we can walk to this party?

I have posted new pottery items in my Wildfire Pottery Zibbet shop, so if you are in desperate need of a puffin, or a gnome home, you know where to go!

As the last photo says, Happy New Year!!

All the best,

Sarah

“I stopped in at your shop during Celtic Colours drawn, as I always am, to the promise of a book shop.  Had a nice chat with Paul, who I’d seen at the show at North River Community Center a few nights before.  Paul kindly let me use your lovely outhouse, and I bought a cd, a book, a magnet and a hanging star.  Sarah’s magnet is now holding the star on the refrigerator at my old, soulful cottage in New Campbellton; Paul’s cd helped me drive all those endless miles through Maine on the trip back here to the City; and the book, The Last Best Place:  Lost in the Heart of Nova Scotia will hold me till I’m back on Cape Breton next month. I’ve been telling my co-workers here about your wonderful outhouse, with the beautiful windows looking out at the trees.

I’m so glad I gave in to the temptation to browse a used books store and found your music and pottery as well, and look forward to visiting again when Wildfire’s open next season.”

I have to admit she’s right about the outhouse…it is the nicest one I’ve been in!  Except of course when it is raining and the roof leaks.  As a matter of fact it’s not too comfortable in the winter either, but in the summer it is tops! Thanks so much Pat for your kind words.

Can’t believe it is November already, (again!!) I’m starting to get ready for the Centre for Craft and Design’s Holiday Spirit event.  It is a fine craft market that takes place in Sydney (about an hour away from my studio) and this year they’ve added an extra day to it, which I’m quite excited about.  If you’re in Sydney from Dec. 1-4th you should come to the Craft Centre on Charlotte street to ‘Buy Local’.

I have a new little flying puffin that I think is quite sweet.

November is also Movember in our house.  Paul was diagnosed with prostate cancer 4 years ago, just before our wedding.  He had treatment and his checkups are all clean.  We feel, of course, pretty strongly about raising prostate cancer awareness, so this year Paul is growing a moustache for Movember.  If you don’t know about Movember (Mo is for Moustache) it is when guys all over the world grow moustaches to get people talking about prostate cancer.  Paul’s moustache is quite cheesy looking, so we’re hoping it creates a lot of talk!

Basically it goes something like this, “Hey Paul, what’s with the hairy lip?”, “Well, I’m doing this so you’ll go get your prostate checked” “What would I want to go through that for?!” “Well, it’s better than dying isn’t it?” “….well, yeah, you have a point”.  Or something like that anyway.  A lot of moustaches means a lot of conversations!  Lots of guys, called Mo Bros (and women, called Mo Sista’s) sign up on the Movember website and raise donations that go towards awareness and research.  I am a Mo Sista and have a Mo Space page to raise money.  Now because I don’t have an office job where I can hit up my co-workers for lots of dollars I need to come up with my own way of fundraising so, like this spring when I sold buttons for Japan,  I am selling buttons again and donating $1 from each button to the Movember cause.  You can see my buttons in my online button store www.theartfulbadger.ca

Ok, yes, I admit it, I am obsessed with buttons but I am getting so much pleasure from them!! I can’t stop and I love coming up with new designs.  Speaking of that, a number of people have asked me where I am getting my designs, as in, what website.  They are quite surprised when I say I am drawing most of them myself.  I love the creativity of drawing and also the photoshop work that I do.  I have learned a lot about photoshop over the past few years.

We now interrupt this button advertisement for a note from our sponsor….;)

I’m working on mugs in the studio at the moment….When my mum came to visit last spring she made me about 70 mugs and I glazed them.  I sold almost all of them over the season and I recently tested some new glazes which I tried out on the last few mugs that I hadn’t glazed yet.  Of course I want to keep playing with different combinations of glazes, but no more mugs left to glaze, so I’m going to make some myself.  I am handbuilding them and they are HUGE right now…I have to keep reminding myself that they’ll shrink down when they are fired….but they still might work better as beer steins.  Oh well, no point in having a dainty cup of coffee in the morning anyway, right? Gimme that huge mug!!

Keep Calm and Movember On,

Sarah

Enjoy!

Sarah

Oh and thanks to the Cape Breton Centre for Craft and Design for doing it.  Have a look at their website, all newly designed and fabulous looking.

When the earthquake and Tsunami hit Japan I wanted to do something to help.  My good friend and fiddler, Kaoru Nakajima (Carl to his Canadian friends) who visits here often, lives near Tokyo and I was so worried for him.  I got a few emails from him saying he and his family were ok, but he sounded scared.  I decided to sell buttons to raise money for the relief effort.  If you’d like to buy a button you can click either image below and be taken to my zibbet store to purchase one.  100% of the profits from the sales of this “I heart Japan” button design will be donated to the Canadian Red Cross.  I have sold over 70 so far.

I have to get back into the pottery studio.  I’m loving the buttons and they are making me feel really creative.  I was feeling a bit burned out over the winter, and actually wasn’t feeling creative at all.  Switching gears into button making has made me get all excited about designing buttons and has spread to designing in general.  I am already thinking about ways to turn some of the button designs into clay pieces.  My mum, Joan Beck of Beck’s Pottery is visiting right now and has promised to make me a bunch of mugs while she is here.  Last year she made the mugs and I glazed them after she went back to BC, they turned out really nicely and sold really quickly!  I think last year she made about 40 or so.  Now I want 500!

Well, bye for now and I hope the weather is fine wherever you are and please remember to live your life to the fullest and tell your friends and family you love them.  We are lucky to be here.

Sending love to all of you who read this,

Sarah

Happy 2011!

As usual I am SO far behind in my blog entries, but I’ll try to recap the last few months.  The summer was great! Lots of visitors from all over came to my shop.  My best season yet.   It was a busy fall for me too.  After the Celtic Colours Festival in October I drove across the US and Canada with my dad, who had driven out from British Columbia in early September.  We went down through New England where we visited with friends, crossed through Ohio, up to Michigan’s  Northern Peninsula (listening to The Polka Carousel on WRHC Radio), then over to Wisconsin, through Minnesota, then to North Dakota and up to Canada from there.  I found it pretty stressful.  The extent of my city driving has been Halifax, which I have driven in about twice.  One of those times I had to drive through a roundabout.  I think I just closed my eyes and went really fast.  I don’t know how people can stand driving on freeways that are so crowded.  Trucks and Trucks and Trucks and construction.  Ugh!  I guess I’m just a country girl.  I loved the time with my dad though, making jokes about road signs and place names, listening to audio books and just chatting.  We also stopped to visit my sister Karen in Calgary and went to the restaurant, “West“,  where she is the wine director.  The food was great! Tuna Tataki. YUM! It took dad and I about 10 days in total to get to Williams Lake.   I stayed there with my parents for about a month and did the Medieval Market with my mum who is also a potter.  I took my tools with me and about 5 boxes of the sculpture clay that I use because my mum’s clay is different.  We had a great time.  I cleaned out a space in her studio and we worked together.  I had hoped to bring a bunch of stuff with me from Cape Breton, but there wasn’t much left in the store after the Celtic Colours rush!  The Medieval Market is a craft fair with a….you guessed it (cue the fifes), Medieval theme! The vendors dress up in medieval costumes (see below for our version of medieval haute couture, ahem!) and decorate their booths accordingly.  There’s a lot of burlap and velvet.  It is really a great fair, 25 years old, I think and run by volunteers who were excellent.  We had  some articles written about us in the local paper in the weeks leading up to the market, so I think the hype helped.  I had a banner, magnets, business cards and rack cards done through Vista Print and they turned out really well!  I came up with the slogan “Potter and Daughter” and put it on the HUGE banner (6′x2.5′) that hung above the whole length of our booth.  I could easily get addicted to Vista Print, they have great deals and the site is pretty easy to use.  I have gotten quite a few good little marketing treats from them.  The cards and magnets were cool, I found some images of medieval potters to use and we got quite a few compliments on them.   (I am supposed to be the hot chick with the curly tresses.  Or maybe they are dreadlocks.  Can’t really tell….).

Our booth was really busy, on the first day we didn’t stop wrapping for about 4 hours!  They have live music for most of the weekend and I played my fiddle for about an hour and a half in the afternoon of the first day (leaving my mum to deal with the great unwashed.  What?! They’re medieval, nobody bathed!).  We finished the market exhausted, but really satisfied with how successful it had been.

At the end of November I went home for a few weeks and then my husband Paul and I went back to BC for Christmas.  It was nice to be able to spend so much time with my family, but good to get back to Cape Breton, just in time for a great New Year’s eve party with the MacNeil family.  Congratulations to Lisa and Boyd on their new house!

I am easing my way back into being productive.  Slowly, very slowly, I am cleaning up my studio.  Anyone who knows me will tell you that cleaning, tidying, or even thinking about making order out of chaos is not my normal state.  But I am making progress.  Today I threw out a bunch of stuff that I will probably need next week, but it sure feels great!  I kind of tend to ignore messes until they pile up around me and suddenly I wake to them and get frantic with the need to clean up.  So I’m in the frantic mode right now, but kind of enjoying it because it doesn’t happen often!

There is more going on (bookstore fun!),  but I’ll save that for the next entry.  You can probably expect that some time in April.   I think I’m kidding, but you never know!!

Thanks for visiting,

Sarah

As I said I’m happy.  It is also going to be kind of fun to display the book in my shop…yeah, I’m in a book, pretty neat eh?Maybe I will even sell them in my bookstore.

This summer has been mad!! So busy, my busiest season yet in fact.  I’ve basically been playing catch up since June, and haven’t caught up yet.  So really I better stop blogging and start glazing! But I just had to share my good news.

Bye for now,

Sarah

I visit her studio a lot in my mind.  I was glazing mugs the other day. Mugs you say?! Wait a minute, you don’t make mugs Sarah!  That’s right but when my mum was here this winter she made me about 50 mugs!! So all I had to do was glaze them…yeah, that’s all!! (sarcasm there) It’s different glazing a mug than a plate, but I think they’re turning out pretty well.  Anyway, I was glazing the mugs and suddenly had a strong memory triggered by the smell of the glazes  (kind of damp, mineral-y, earthy smell).  Again I was in my mum’s studio looking at all the mugs that she had glazed, lined up beside the kiln.  I love how  our memories can be triggered by a smell or a sound.  Pretty amazing the human brain.  Oh listen to me getting all introspective! I have WORK TO DO!!!!

If you want to visit my mum’s studio (not the one in the basement but the other lovely, bright and cheery one) you can go to Wells, BC where she is now open for the season.  Or visit www.beckspottery.com

Have a great day wherever you are.  It’s sunny and bright in Cape Breton and the Lupins are in full, exuberant bloom!

I’ve been so busy in my shop/studio the last few months, trying to be ready for the tourist season.  It is starting to pick up a bit now, but days are still unpredictable, sometimes lots of cars, sometimes only a few.  I like this time of the season because there are people around but it’s not too busy so I can still get things accomplished in the studio.  Once the full on busy time starts it is hard to get much work done because I’m too busy chatting with customers. (Not a bad thing!   One of the things I have accomplished lately is making some jewellery.  I have made some pendants and learned how to wire wrap them from my friend Gayle Bird.  Gayle makes awesome wire wrapped jewellery. I wear it a lot.  I also finally got my rings finished.  When I was a kid I used to pick up pieces of glass in the park behind the Community Arts portable and then I would make a little dish and put the glass in it and my mum would fire it.  I always loved seeing that rather drab old beer bottle glass turn into sparkling melted glass in the bottom of my creation.  That image has stuck with me and I decided to try and incorporate that sparkle into some jewellery.  I’ve made two different sizes of rings, one is HUGE! But it is fun to wear huge rings sometimes.  There’s a smaller size too, not really that small actually, about 1.5-1.75″.

Today was the first day that I had the rings in my shop and I sold 4!   I’m pretty happy about that because even though I might like a new product that I make it’s not always guaranteed that the public will like it.  Jewellery is such a different thing for me to be making, so it’s nice to see that people like it (other than me!).  I just listed the smaller sized ring in my zibbet shop.

Excuse the rough hand!  This is actually the smaller sized ring, although it looks quite large here.

Bye for now,

Sarah

MY WEBSITE IS MODERN!!!!

I finally did it!! The old, rickety, archaic looking monstrosity that used to be wildfirepottery.ca has been replaced by something that at least resembles a website made this century.  The rave reviews are pouring in (well at least one)

“Your website is very sophisticated but witha touch of whimsy so as not to be stuffy!”.

Ok, so that is from my good friend Brenda Adam, painter extraordinaire (she did the painting of me below), but who cares! So go and visit and press buttons and ooh and aah. (And if you find any glitches let me know, I’m still tweaking.)

FEATURED ZIBBETER INTERVIEW

I’m also so pleased and honoured to be the Featured Zibbeter this week on the blog at zibbet.com. (Really, I was jumping up and down when they contacted me for the feature!)  Every week they choose a seller out of the 1000′s on the site and do an interview with them.  So if you are curious (or plain nosy ) and want to know a little more about what inspires me, what my passions are as well as my reading habits then click the banner below.

This week I’m attending Cape Breton’s Women in Business Conference.  It’s a two day event held at a resort about 45 minutes away.  two other friends who have craft businesses in my community are going with me.  We’re going to attend a trade fair and make sure people in Cape Breton know about the St. Ann’s artist community and what we have to offer.  There are more than 10 artists with working studios all pretty close to me so we really want people to know that it makes a good day trip.  Retail therapy, don’t we all need that?!! I am really trying to make an effort to network these days.  I just came back from a business trip to North Carolina where we looked at the handmade craft movement.  It really helped to strengthen a belief I already have about the importance of group marketing.  I think the more we all work together the better we’ll do. So that’s why I’m going to the conference…of course a girls night out at a resort has nothing to do with it!!

Be well everyone,

Sarah

oh, I’m now on Twitter.  Follow me if you like for updates and web specials.  (I still can’t get used to that…follow me…it’s like begging for a stalker.  I feel like I need to look over my shoulder when I get that message…”Cape Breton is now Following you…” EEK!)

I thought I’d do a quick posting about how these Moose Bowls are made.

I roll out a large slab of clay and cut out some circles.  I use something called a “needle tool”, which looks something like a pen with a large, you guessed it, NEEDLE, attached to the end of it.  Hey diabetic potters, save your syringes, they’d make great needle tools!   It cuts cleanly through the slab of clay.  I then slap the circles onto the table, stretching them out a bit and changing their shape slightly because I don’t want them to be perfectly round, that’s boring.

I then stamp some designs on the non-circle, today they were all moose bowls.  I have a moose stamp and a hoof stamp that I have made out of clay.  Here’s where the knee bit comes into it.  I put some plastic over my knee (sometimes i don’t, it just depends if I care if my pants stay clean or not…they are never actually that clean…I am a potter!).  Then I drape the stamped, elongated, ex-circle over the plastic and press it around my knee.

(ps, if you recognize the sweatshirt I’m wearing it’s because you left it at my house after my wedding…that was two and a half years ago, you aren’t getting it back now…but thanks!)

Then I take the piece of clay off my knee, now it is bowl-shaped.  I even out the edges because they can be a bit crinkly sometimes and place it upside-down on the table.  Then I cut out a flat strip of clay with a beveled edge on one side.  I form that into a ring, joining the two ends, and place it with the bevelled side down, on the back of the bowl.  The contour of the bowl fits into the bevel in the ring. This ring will form the foot of the bowl.

I draw around the ring, outlining where the ring is going to go, then I take off  the ring and scratch the clay where I’m going to put the ring. (That’s “score the clay” for all you people who are already clay-lingo savvy). You can see that in the pic on the right. I do the same to the bevelled side of the ring.

Next I wet the scored clay and attach the two pieces. I flip the bowl over and press firmly from both directions to join the foot to the bowl.  I smooth around the outside and inside of the foot ring to make an attractive join.  I also make sure the edges of the foot ring are rounded a bit to prevent chipping from use.  (A sharp edge will chip more easily than a rounded one, you can keep this in mind when you are buying pottery….Of course sometimes sharp edges are part of the design of a piece.)  Lastly I sign my name inside the foot ring.  I will glaze the front and back of the bowl, but I don’t glaze that part.

Here’s what they will look like after they are glazed.  I’ll be listing them in my Zibbet Shop soon.

Tomorrow I think I might try some elbow sake cups…hmm….wonder what other body parts I could use? LOL!

Thanks for reading,

Sarah

ps, If you also are an artist or crafty person and are interested in selling online check out this link to  find out how to set up shop on Zibbet. Exciting times there as so many new sellers are joining the site.