Handcraft a luxurious new home for your favourite herb or make a pot for precious things. In this pottery workshop with a twist, ceramicist Catherine Ball will guide you through the steps to create a beautiful yet practical pot from hand-rolled and decorated porcelain.
Catherine specialised in ceramics and embroidery in her Contemporary Applied Arts degree and in her own business – Stitched Ceramics – she now combines the two disciplines of stitch and clay.
If you’ve ever been put off trying ceramics by the need to master a pottery wheel, fear not. This is a relaxed workshop, suitable for beginners, in which you’ll use Catherine’s current favourite technique – hand building, using slabs of hand-rolled clay and imprinting techniques.
To build your pot you will use porcelain clay, which has a fine texture and holds the texture of imprinted fabric, creating a finish which is intriguing and intricate, yet after glazing and firing will be robust and water-tight.
At the end of the workshop, you’ll choose your glaze, and your work will be taken back to the Stitched Ceramics studio in the small village of Thursby, near Carlisle, where it will be expertly glazed and carefully fired, then returned to Manchester for you to collect.
All materials are provided – although if you’ve a special piece of patterned fabric which you’d like to incorporate into your design, you’re welcome to bring it along. (The imprinting process isn’t great for fabrics of course, so please be aware that your heirloom lace might not enjoy being rolled in clay).
This event is part of Manchester Folk Festival – an urban folk festival. It takes place from 15-20 October 2019, in and around HOME and the city centre. Over the autumn weekend, they present an exhilarating range of events, with the spotlight on contemporary and traditional English folk music.
