A New Flower Stand

My flower stand has a new home with a yard full of flowers!

The flower stand has had many evolutions since its first appearance at a Tiny Art Show in 2016. Now I’m happy to announce that it lives in Market, a shop inside of Vertical Harvest in Jackson.

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I picked a few icy cold blue flowers and made a little yard with a white picket fence to grow extra flowers.

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There are lots of tiny vases available and visitors can make their own bouquets or just select a few blooms.

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This is a great gift for those of us who are not so great at keeping house plants alive (or out of the mouths of our pets.) And a nice way to brighten these snowy days!

Market Update

Last week I showed a bit of the process behind the pottery I’m making exclusively for Market. I opened the kiln on Monday to find that for once, everything in the kiln looked great! (See last week’s post here)

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Garden themed pots: Swiss chard cups, cherry tomato salad bowls, plus a salt cellar and garlic keeper.

Before this load could be fired, I had to solve another problem. The shelves were in serious need of care, the bottoms of the pots had been sticking - leaving behind tiny shards of fired clay. Not only is it annoying to constantly clean the kiln shelves, but it meant that a lot of my pots had bits of clay missing from the feet and it just looked bad.

Fixing this means another step, but one that is worth it. I’m now coating the foot of each pot with a mixture of brushable wax and alumina. This ensures that nothing will stick to the kiln shelf and the foot of each pot will look how it should! I also scraped each shelf, and coated it with fresh kiln wash - which dried out in front of the space heater with a little help from Merlin’s studio water dish.

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I’m also making ornaments specifically for Market, with the Vertical Harvest logo on one side, and a ripe juicy tomato on the other. The logo is hand drawn onto the porcelain disk using an underglaze pencil. I found that I can go over the lines with a little water on a brush to make it look more painterly.

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It’s a few months away, but now I can’t wait until I can grow Swiss Chard and cherry tomatoes in my own garden, right outside of my studio!

New Work for Market

Lately these quiet snowy days have been helpful in the studio, where I’ve been working to design a new line of pottery to be sold exclusively at Market. This shop is inside Vertical Harvest, the amazing greenhouse that grows beautiful greens and tomatoes all year in Jackson, Wyoming.

This project has taken since last spring, working through sketches, testing glazes, and mostly just thinking about how to make colorful garden themed designs - while working on all the projects that kept me busy last year. My goal was to make garden themed pots for dining: cups & pitchers, serving & salad bowls, as well as helpful items for the kitchen: garlic keepers & salt cellars. It’s been nice thinking about garden parties during this ultra-snowy winter!

In January I finally made some actual pieces. New ideas don’t usually take this long, but this time the process is such a departure from my usual, and I was a little stumped. Usually I decorate the surfaces while the pots are still wet, using inlay and sgraffito techniques. But what was bugging me was that I wanted these images to have a gestural line feel, more like drawing. So I bisque fired the test pieces and ordered a few underglaze pencils.

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A neat trick when working on bisque fired pottery is that a design can be worked out with a graphite pencil - any unwanted graphite can be washed off with a sponge but it will also burn away in the kiln. So I worked out some of my drawings with a pencil first. Then went over them with the underglaze pencil. (Which is a very cool decorating tool - it looks sketchy like a pencil and yet will fire to a permanent line!)

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I drew Swiss Chard on the cups & pitchers, tomatoes on the bowls, micro-greens on the salt cellars, and garlic on the garlic keepers. Then started in with glaze - only using copper green and red right now; colorful, but not too colorful. Similar to the first colors of spring. The glazing is a bit tedious - starting with the greens, once the leaves are brushed on I went over them with wax resist. This way I can glaze with the second color right up next to the first color. Red goes on next, then wax over that, finally clear over everything.

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This is how the prototypes turned out and I’ve got a whole kiln load right now that I can’t wait to see. So stay tuned for an update!

New Pottery at Market

This week I delivered a batch of new pottery to Market, located inside Vertical Harvest in Jackson, WY. Just in time for fall: large soup bowls plus salt jars with little spoons.

Market features lots of locally made products, including a variety of my black & white pottery. And great produce! Be sure to stop by for tomatoes, lettuce, basil...

Pottery at Market

This week brought the opening of Market in Jackson, WY and I'm excited to announce that my black & white pottery is right at home among a variety of local products! 

This unique store is located inside Vertical Harvest. I have been watching the building of this incredible vertical greenhouse for a few years, the story is powerful and exciting with mouth-watering promises of year-round produce grown right here in the mountains of Jackson Hole. Find a tasty preview (the grand opening will be May 21st) at the Jackson Hole Foodie.

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Ready for glazing: porcelain wheel thrown plates with sgraffito designs.