Let me start with gratitude and a big thank you to Simon Leach.

When we moved in 2010, I was searching for info about gardening so I could create one for my little boy to play in.  I was looking up composting, soil amendments, water conservation and then landed on a video of someone making an olla.  It is an earthenware pot with a wide belly and a longish neck. You bury it in the ground with the neck sticking out, fill it with water and cap it with a stone.  Then you plant around it and since the pot is unglazed the water seeps out slowly and does not evaporate.  It’s almost 100 % efficiency.  For larger spaces you can bury as many as you like.  I was also interested in permaculture so I thought about making a spiral garden with a pattern of ollas forming a spiral. With the stones on top it would look cool to have a spiral of floating stones.

Anyway with the way YouTube works and gives you tons of related videos for each one you watch I watched another pottery video and another…  Eventually I stumbled upon Simon Leach.  I instantly connected with his straight forward style with no music or fancy editing and text etc. He just let the camera roll and did his thing. It was natural and honest.  He let me see his moments of oops as well as offered a lot of detail about how he was doing what he was doing.  Since I was up in the middle of the night anyway with my son who was 1 at the time I kept watching while holding him in my arms and rocking him back to sleep.  I watched all the videos on his channel and at that time it was 600 or so.  Then I watched them again in order.  I had not even touched clay at this point.  I was obsessed with this business of throwing on the wheel. I was being entertained and absorbing all of it in a gentle almost passive way.  It was liking priming the pump, getting ready, or fixin’ to start.

This was back at the end of the summer in 2010.  I’ve come a long way in my pottery life since then and would like to express my most sincere gratitude to all those who have supported me and helped me along the way.  Thank you Simon Leach.  Your videos are inspiring, informative, and have helped me find this new direction for my life along the path of clay.

Thanks for visiting my blog.

C#