Choosing curiosity

a busy week in the garden and a studio update

physalis, September 2023

I’ll start by apologising for having skipped a week. My schedule got derailed again by one of my migraines (you can find out more about that here) and I was not able to finish writing on time to post last Monday. Deciding against posting later in the week, I opted instead for leaving it for next time. And so, here we are.

How was your week? Here, we’ve had a busy few days.

Work in the front garden started. The soil arrived and was spread, and the mix of grasses and clover was sown. It looks brown and bare now, and I suspect it will take me some time to get used to the new view, even after the seeds germinate and it turns green. For now, however, it just looks a bit sad. In Autumn, we plan to plant five new fruit trees where you now can see some sticks. Around the trees there will be flowers but that’s for later too.

Today, I read a piece by

S.E. Reid

Weeding and the Wild, and these lines express so well how I feel about our garden — I couldn’t have put it any better:

[…]there’s a fine line between “a little wild” and “overgrown”, and we have always struggled to walk that line gracefully. These days, the weeds usually win. And while my forager/herbalist’s heart doesn’t mind, the homeowner in me often feels the pang of broken responsibility.

And so I made my peace with this change because we are leaving the back garden to grow wild and free and we are also not touching our little piece of “forest”. At first, I was not happy we decided to redo the front garden. I was sure it would be a disaster, chase away insects and birds and basically look awful. But then, I started thinking that maybe it will be nice to have a part of the garden that is more ordered and “clean”. Now, I am looking at it and I’m thinking “I wonder how it will look like?” and “How we will use it? Maybe we will finally be able to properly set up the badminton net”. I suppose we have, most of the time, a choice between staying curious and giving in to negativity.

And I am relived to see that the birds have not left, in fact they seem to have taken a keen interest in all the newly spread seeds…

back garden and forest

The veg patch is going slow, as I mentioned before… The lettuce all bolted, but the carrots, onions, turnips and pak choi are coming along nicely. I also planted some cucumbers and small cherry tomatoes. Because I will be in Portugal in July, I had decided we wouldn’t have tomatoes this year, but Nature doesn’t care where I will be and my compost is full of seeds… so of all the self-sown tomato plants that decided to grow on the bed I kept five which are already about 20 cm tall. I have no idea what kind of tomatoes I will harvest (if any) but I cannot bring myself to pull them. I still plan to sow kale, more radish and more carrots before I leave, but for now there is still a bald patch in the bed.

veg garden area with the first bed behind the plum tree; the existing bed is a bit of a mess, especially on the right side, where I mixed a bunch of stuff rescued from the original veg patch

I wish I could post pretty pictures of my veggies but the truth is, the bed is a mess. One of the sides (on the right, if you’re looking at the pictures above) is a mix of plants, including some flowers, I rescued from the original veg patch, plus some self-sown borage.

Last Saturday, there was a fair for Children’s Day at the local school sports’ grounds and our daughter performed one song with her class and then also in a duo with a friend who played the guitar while she danced. Other classes had little acts too and so it lasted for a good two hours. After that, there was food and other activities. The weather was good, warm and sunny. Everyone was in good mood and had a fun time but when we came home I was exhausted.

And then there was Sunday.

Market day. I mentioned this in a previous post, my “great (ad)venture”. Well, it’s not going well, I will not lie. I sit there, watch people came and go… some will comment, a couple will ask questions, but I have been surprised by the general lack of interest. It’s not like I am a super seller, but I have done ok in previous markets. Not this one, not yet. Every week, I come home and question my decision to rent this space.

I have mentioned before I was reading Big Magic, by

Elizabeth Gilbert

. This short yet impactful book has provided me with one aha-moment after another. Simple realisations as they are, it takes seeing the words written by someone else for them to really hit home. It has helped shift the focus of my creative process. It has shown me the simple truth that I have no control over what happens after I make something and put it out into the world, that I am “only in charge of producing the work itself”. It has also helped me changed the way I am looking at the failure that is the market so far. Instead of letting myself drown in the pool of my own self-pity, I am taking it as prompt to ask myself why it isn’t working and go from there. Thank you, Ms. Gilbert.

This resonated a lot:

[…]Isn’t it funny how sometimes things work and other times they don’t? Sometimes I think that the difference between a tormented creative life and a tranquil creative life is nothing more than the difference between the word awful and the word interesting.

and

Don’t let go of your courage the moment things stop being easy or rewarding.

Because that moment?

That’s the moment when interesting begins.

In other words, I am choosing to stay curious about the whole thing instead of despairing that it’s not working out. I’ll keep at it for a bit longer, because I don’t want to quit too soon, before it might get interesting. And maybe it will continue to suck and I will still not sell anything. At the very least, I will know I did give it an honest try. And who knows? I might learn something.

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So, what’s been going on in the studio?

There isn’t much time left between now and our departure date. I must keep good track of how many days are left because anything I want to have finished by then still needs to be fired twice. So, although I want to keep making, I need to know when to stop in order to give the pieces enough time to dry. Firing pieces that have not dried properly can mean they will simply crack or it can mean they will explode, which is clearly bad, not only for them, but also for the pieces around them which would not benefit from the blast. So giving the drying process time is crucial.

One of the things I’ve been working on is the small order to take with me to Portugal: two espresso beakers with sgraffito decoration, like the ones I posted some time ago on Instagram, here.

For now, they look like this:

I was worried about replicating the design (I am not a very strict note-taker and sometimes it is difficult to reproduce a good result because I cannot remember the colours I used, for example, or the order in which they were applied), but I think they are turning out pretty nice.

I also made a tray and two sets — mugs, plates and espresso beaker and saucer.

sgraffito tray and black and yellow set, and set with pressed elderflower umbels

And finished a funny looking bowl. This bowl is a good example of how important the drying process is in pottery — it is wonky because it dried in a weird way, it wasn’t properly wrapped and one side was less protected than the other. So, allowing time for the piece to dry is as essential as making sure it dries as evenly as possible. And the larger the piece is, the more this is relevant. That being said, the decoration was fun to make and I quite like it. Not sure it will make the cut, what do you think? Should I fire it?

Next week, I will hopefully be loading the kiln and starting a bisque firing. Until then, thank you so much for reading, stay curious, and I will see you next time!

xx Sara

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This newsletter is HI-certified and I have the sticker to prove it 😉, thanks to the brilliant and talented

Emily Charlotte Powell

, who created it and kindly shared it.

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If you would like to see my work

I’m on Instagram, and have an Etsy store where you can find some pieces created in my small home studio.

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