Throw It and They Will Come

We’ve been busy making some pottery (not on the treadle wheel, it’s still broken at the moment). I thought I would show some pictures of the work we have been making, all of the photos are of green work. This means that nothing has been fired in the kiln yet, so it can still be manipulated or broken very easily. This first photo is of some mixing bowls with spouts and a handle on the sides to make it easier to pour from. Also, there are some small condiment bowls with spouts on them as well (I usually use these to put salsa in or mix a couple of eggs for scrambling). Let us know what you think of the handles, we still aren’t quite sure that they are what we want (some of them have handles on the left side of the spout while others have the handle on the right side).



Next is a jumbled stack of what we are calling Milton Mugs (because a man named Milton asked me to make some for him, and I had never made them before. He’s bought like thirty of them from us, so we’ve dubbed them Milton Mugs in his honor). These mugs are pretty small, only holding about a cup of liquid. Milton likes them because he doesn’t drink that much coffee and these hold the perfect amount for him.




I am also working on making a couple of different butter containers. The first are called butter bells, with these you pack a stick or more of butter in to the part that is closest to you in the photo. Then you place water in the cup in the back, turn the butter part upside down and place it in the water. This allows you to keep your butter on the table so that it can stay soft all the time. The butter doesn’t go rancid because the water keeps the air from touching the butter (the air is what makes butter go rancid).



The next type of butter container is the classic butter dish. Here you can see about six butter dishes, this is a new way of making them. I throw them on the wheel (sans tops and bottoms, those come later), cut them off and alter the shape to more of an oval with flat(ish) sides. Once they are leather hard or cheese hard (dry enough to handle with out distorting them) I add a bottom and feet to the bottom part, and a top and handle to the top part. I really like these; I would like to know what everyone else thinks as well (so please let us know what you think).



In this photo are some large bowls that I have made. These are designed so that they can sit on a table as a center piece, fruit bowl, or whatever, but they also can be hung on the wall as a decorative piece when they are not in use. These bowls are made by rolling out a slab of clay (a flat thin piece of clay almost like rolling out biscuit dough), then laying the slab on to a upside down bowl shape to give it a curved form (bowls don’t do very well when they are flat). After they are leather hard I throw the foot (what the bowl sits on), you can see the foot in the bowls toward the back of the photo. When the foot dries to leather hard I then flip the bowl over and throw the rim of the bow, which you can see on the bowls in the foreground. Once again please let us know what you think of these as well (I believe these are roughly twelve to fourteen inches across).



My wife has also been working on some pottery. She throws mainly in porcelain, while I throw mostly in stoneware (more on this in a later post). Here are some of the pots she has been working on. The pieces in the front have been pierced and carved on so that they can now be used as orchid planters. The vase shapes scattered around the photo will be crystalline glaze, which is a glazing technique that actually grows crystals in the kiln (it’s a pretty cool process I think, I will post more on that later as well).



Thanks for making this far in to the post, I apologize for the length. Anyway, let us know what you think, and look for the finished pieces in our Etsy shop.