Dear All, Happy Easter, Happy holidays,
 We hope everyone had a good / fabulous first term of the year and have raised the bar for term two or the next stage in your pottery life. There is an extra class on the list now; Wednesday night with Alex as our tutor. Our Monday and Thursday classes are full with good attendance booked for Wednesday day and night. Our Tuesday club days are also well attended; wonderful chatter going on along with the occasional tip on a process, glaze or technique.

 WIFI 
in our room: this has been requested by our tutors, so pending final sign off for the funds we will have WIFI soon. It will be ideal for viewing You Tube films of potters showing their wonderful skills.

 Kilns and Firings
The controller for kiln No3 is on its way home from being repaired; it will be in place this coming week. If anyone has key to the kiln shed (that they're not supposed to have) would you please hang it back on the hook in the club room? Kiln shed keys should only be away from their hook for a couple of days at most. If you're in control of a firing you must come back to the kiln shed the following day to confirm the cycle has finished and then switch off the kiln. You'll need to hang on to the key for that period to get back into the shed to carry out the switch off routine; hang it back on the hook asap afterwards.

 Club exhibition
this is being planned for October, 2019. Full details coming soon. 
At our June club night Renate will discuss what we need to consider when producing and submitting works to our, or to any exhibition, so start putting your ideas together.

 Club Night in May
Glazes—starting at ground level, with Andrew Carran
A Tuesday Club night preliminary
In this session Andrew will outline two Sunday afternoon sessions (26 May, 2 June) in which we will make glazes from local materials and  fire them. The evening session will give information on where to find materials and prepare them as well as covering some glaze history and local geology and should be of general interest  to all - not just glaze makers.
There will be soil maps and samples to look at as well as pots with local glazes and  a discussion about how the glazes, we can make here, relate to classical Chinese glazes.
This is an exciting opportunity for anyone interested in how glazes are made, from the ground up, to be with Andrew Carran as he goes through the whole process. Not to be missed, no matter what level
Andrew would like a rough idea of how many people would approximately be attending the evening. If you are possibly thinking of coming along, please give Renate a quick txt (0211336620)
 
Good potting, everyone – Graham and the committee
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A wonderful demonstration by a master of his craft; Ly-Ming's use of thumb pots and coils had many of us thinking how long it had been since we had done work using these methods.

Ly-Ming began the evening with three large balls of clay and some examples of his small heads and an egg (ceramic of course), then proceeded to show how simply he could make them. (see heads 4 and 5 in the photo's below). Ly-Ming even brought his class notes from when he was a student in Dunedin many years ago. Quirky might describe the style of the heads Ly-Ming makes but his demonstration of his thumb-pot technique in producing them was delightful.
Then it was onto coiling; beginning with an oval three or four coils high, then he formed it into a  loose figure-of-8 shape and pressed out two slight bulges; another two or three coils and some tidying-up saw the bottom of a torso. (Enlarge the group photos to see the beginning of the torso)
Ly-Ming had a steady stream of information for us and answered questions as he went about his work. For those who came away inspired to attempt some hand work, Ly-ming has agreed to hold a weekend workshop later in the year.

A wonderfully inspiring evening shared by 14 of  us. We would love to see more members at the monthly demo evenings.
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