Extruded Vases

It's been a long time since we posted to our blog, but we promise we have been busy!

We've been making a large number of extruded vases lately. Square or round tubes are formed with our extruder. Then, we stamp the clay with hand-carved roulettes, or rolling stamps. For the square ones, we have cut some pieces of oak that just fit the interior contour so we can stamp them without altering their shape.

The finished vases hover between casual and elegant.
We keep them a bit loose as that suits our personalities.

We are hoping to complete a large number of these in the coming weeks to supply a couple of retailers and to prepare for an upcoming show.

Pen Cushions

I started off the day thinking about Ikebana in a pillow form. I wanted the form to be multi-functional so folks could decide whether to use them for flowers, pens, toothbrushes, or paint brushes.


Once I finished a couple of forms, I realized there was no way to get a pin frog into them. Duh! I did manage to put little divots in the inside, but there is no way to know how they will work for flowers until they are glazed and fired.


So, in my mind I went from ikebana to pen-kebana. Yeah, the term leaves a lot to be desired. As I worked on different shapes, they became more pillow-like and hence, pen cushions they are! This last one really illustrates my love of puns.


When the tufting didn't meet on the bottom, I created a seam. Hopefully I didn't take the pun too far!

I'm almost Embarrassed!

Seriously. It has been a long time since I added to this blog. I do have a good excuse, though. This year, the holidays season kicked our rumps and bled us dry! We are so grateful to all of our customers, but when New Years rolled around, we collapsed in two heaps.

We are just now recovered from the mass shippings and rushed custom orders. Did I say how grateful we are? Before we get back to REAL WORK (not that doing what you love to make a living is ever REAL WORK), we decided to revisit some old haunts.


Ten years ago, I did a series of rocking bottles. I only stopped because my exploration of them was interrupted by a wedding (ours), a house buying, moving, and shop opening. This year, we decided we really needed to go back and explore this form again while we have the time. The first in the series has come out of the kiln and we are in love. There are many more to follow - the next glaze firing is being loaded as I type!

If you love this, please give it a vote at the Etsy Mud Team Sweetheart Challenge. Please look at all the wonderful entries!

Just a quick peek!

Not much to say today, except that I love this!

Pottery Squared

We are starting off the new year with new work. While I have always loved hand building, we have concentrated on wheel thrown work. At least partly, this is because hand built work can be so time consuming and I tend to think people won't pay what the labor requires.

I am trying to let go of preconceived notions and realize that what we believe is true is not always actually so. So, on that note, we are exploring new ideas and allowing ourselves some time to stray from the bread and butter of wheel thrown work.

Our first wanderings are a line of square dishes. These are not as time consuming as other hand built work and should be reasonably priced. We are using slabs of clay and slumping those slabs into molds. When they are not quite leather hard, we are stamping the rims with our hand carved stamps. I had fun figuring out if Alex's cylindrical wave stamp could make the turn on the rim of a square bowl. It worked out so perfectly you might think I was confident it would work. After the pieces are leather hard, we are adding rather tall feet.


Also coming - perhaps photos tomorrow - are a line of Neti Pottery. If you are not familiar, they are used for the Hindu practice of sinus cleansing. I have recently begun this practice and I am a huge believer... Alex is not so enthusiastic. Our journey into sinus cleansing pots began because another enthusiast remarked, "Why can't Neti Pots look nice? A good potter should work on this." I took it as a challenge and went straight to the wheel.