A bit of history…

I thought I’d go back a bit and give a brief history of the creation of Big Hill Pottery…..cos it’s only been around a few months!
Until last August, there were 3 lovely goats living in what is now the studio….they were sweet but we thought it might be a bit too hazardous to try and make pots with goats wandering around….altho it would have given a very unique ambiance to the studio, and think of all the wild and wonderful names we could have called the studio….Wandering Goat Pottery, Goatta Go Pottery (sigh!), Dancing Goat Pottery, Goats Aplenty Pottery….and on and on I could go! It was either get rid of the goats or the ping pong room on the second floor of the barn….ping pong won out, so the goats were taken back to the farm they came from.
Terry had built this barn about 6 years ago so it is very good shape and only needed the very basic changes to be made.
So began the destruction of the stalls etc, opening the whole space up and laying down new floors (lots of plastic went down in the place where the goats spent most of their time!), new walls with insulation….by mid October we were ready to paint! We had the whole place painted and ready to go by mid November…..it took this amount of time because we still had bookings at the cabins, so that takes quite a bit time. We were also frantically putting away all the vegetables from the rather large garden! We are still eating carrots, beets, turnips, potatoes and squash that we harvested. The house, cabins and studio are all heated with wood so there was lots of outside work being done at the same time.
I was able to start production by the middle of November and we decided that a small show at the studio, just before christmas, would be a good goal to aim for. It felt like we needed to cement things before the end of the year. So I managed to fire 2 kiln loads and we actually had a few folks drop by and spend some money! It felt very good to have made that commitment to end 2009.