Sketches on Ceramics

This week I have been:

Sketching scenes of my house onto ceramics for my upcoming solo show at the Brunswick Street Gallery in Melbourne at the end of the March.

Kitchen Series

These are scenes painted in underglaze - the next step is to glaze them with a clear porcelain glaze. Im a little nervous about this next step as the blue underglaze can run if the gloss is too thick... they're in the kiln as we speak. Fingers crossed they turn out ok

Window scene of my kitchen

Sewing some of my fabrics into bags ...

Pink Bitsa Bag www.madeit.com.au/kateward

 Experimenting making my own ginger beer from scratch. The recipe is really easy its:

1tsp sugar
1 tsp dried ginger
1 sachet dried yeast
1 cup warm water.

combine in a large jar and cover with muslin (in my case chux - new and unused)

for the next 8 days add 1 tsp sugar and 1 tsp dried ginger.
(Im still at this stage)

After 8 days you divide the liquid into 2 (its now called a ginger beer plant) and you can give one to a friend or use one part to continue feeding the ginger beer plant and with the other half turn it into drinkable ginger beer.

Ginger beer plant 

To make up the ginger beer this is what you do:

Mix together:

4 cups water

24 cups warm water (this is probably about 5-6 litres)

1/2 cup strained lemon juice

then add the ginger beer plant. Bottle and seal. It should be ready to drink in about a week.

I'll let you know how it tastes!

green tomatoes 

 Ive given up hoping that my green tomatoes will ripen this year. With the continuing wet weather I was afraid they would rot on the vine. So Ive just turned them into green tomato pickle using this recipe from the ABC. As is my way of cooking, Ive 'kate-ified' it by adding some stewed crab apples and my own homemade version of curry powder.

This is what it looks like......yum. I love all the tomato seeds scattered throughout the chutney.
I plan to eat this with chunks of cheese and bread.