'Tis The Season

The Etsy store is stocked for the holidays with great gifts like mugs, bowls, pitchers, yarn bowls and even a whole tea set! If you're looking for something unique, functional, USA made and eco-friendly, you can't go wrong with a handmade piece of pottery from Logsden, Oregon.

There are also pictures of new work in the gallery on the blog and even more new stuff in For ArtSake Gallery and Mossy Creek like large utensil jars, steamers, juicers, monks' bowls and altered bowls (below). Hope you're having a great holiday season!

The Butcher, The Baker, The Candlestick Maker

I have a friend who asked me to make something for her husband's birthday. This is something I had never before attempted to make. The first try ended in failure when I went to trim the piece during its leather hard stage. So, back to the throwing board for a second try. This time, all went just fine...

I totally dare Jack to try to jump over this.

Steamer

So one day I was working at the For Artsake Gallery and this person walks in whom I will refer to as, "The Hippie Chick." She is definitely giving off the vibe of being very healthy, very peace-filled and very close to all things good and close to the earth. She asks me if I ever make steamers. She said she doesn't own a microwave and she uses her steamer to heat up her leftovers and it's really fast and they taste really good when steamed. She described the bottom part of the steamer as, "It's sorta like a bunt cake pan with a cone in the center that has a hole in it and you just set it on top of a saucepan with some water in it, put the food around that cone and then cover it with its lid."

When I got home, I walked directly into the studio and threw what I believed she was describing. And Oh! My! GAWD, Magnum!!! Was she ever right. We have cooked in our steamer dozens of times as well as used it to re-heat leftovers. I put raw crab in that pot, set the timer for 15 minutes from the time I turn on the burner to begin heating and that crab is done by the time the buzzer goes off. Not to mention the fact that the juice created by the steaming collects in the trough and it's not diluted in water. The shrimp and crab juice goes into our fish stocks or you can just drink it straight from the pot. DELICIOUS!









I was able to fit two crabs in this smaller prototype version. I am making them a little bigger now. The pot doesn't sit directly on the burner, mind you. That last photo is sort of misleading. Don't do that with the burner on. Bad idea. Not good. Actually, I guess you could try it to see what happens and then just order another one from me.

Cast a roll? No -- I said, "Casserole!"

Here are some thoughts on a couple uses for handmade casseroles and how to avoid thermal shocking. We bake in our YOOOOOGE "Man Pot" casserole, but we also use it as a beautiful serving dish.

So, let's say you've made a dish that requires a saute of onions and garlic in oil and you just want to add ingredients (veggies, meat, etc.) to your favorite Dutch oven before tossing it into the baking chamber to cook the rest of the way. Well, you could quite easily zip up your presentation by transferring your cooked dish from the cast iron pot into a beautiful lidded casserole. Like this one, for instance:

We serve mashed 'taters and cold broccoli salads and all manner of delicacies in a casserole. Casseroles are NOT just for baking. However, if you do want to bake 'n serve, a handmade pottery casserole is a perfect medium for such. Here's what you do.

It's important to go easy on the properties of clay by making sure you introduce the pot to a cold oven and heat from room temperature. In fact, you might want to take a little more care to bring all the ingredients up to room temperature first by allowing the dish to "set a spell" to make that happen. Me? I'm rather reckless, knowing that if I torture my pottery, I can just go out to the studio and make a new one. You, on the other hand, are hopefully not going to be throwing caution to the wind and you will treat your pottery with some TLC. 

Common sense -- that's all this amounts to. Just let me say however, that after having tortured my pottery baking dishes and casseroles for many years, they have all survived. Except that one piece I made back in 1981 in Otter Rock out of that crappy clay that had no business getting used. But hey -- it worked for many years, even after it cracked back in the 90s.

As I was saying, just place your pottery casserole in a cold oven and let the dish come up to temp. You can cook safely into the high 300s, but I wouldn't go above 400 degrees F. When the dish is finished cooking, you would do well to just prop open the oven door and let all that heat slowly float away from the pot. Give it 5 minutes or so. Use hot pads to grab the lug handles for safe portage onto your favorite glazed pottery trivet.

Speaking of glazed pottery trivets, we discovered the hard way why I will never use a glue gun to adhere those little cork circles to the bottom of a tile. The heat from our serving dish - plucked straight from the oven - MELTED THE GLUE! And marred the surface of our wood serving buffet. Dang. (Frownie face inserted here.)

Whelp -- that's all you need to know. Just give the clay a break and the clay will be much less likely to give you a break. (Get it? Get it??)

Photos Of My Work

I've finally added a gallery of images to the blog. New images uploaded as soon as stuff comes out of the kiln. They're uploaded to my Flickr account, so if you're on Flickr, find me and send me a friend request!

All of these images were taken by my sweetie who cleverly made this photobooth out of a broken sink in the old studio. Neither of us had any idea how other people take product shots but this works really well. If anyone knows how other people do it, let us know, we're both really curious.

Stay tuned. My Etsy shop is launching soon. And my next day at the gallery is Saturday, June 29. Come on down!

Now at Mossy Creek Pottery

Last month, I called my friend Dan Wheeler, a potter who owns and runs Mossy Creek Pottery with his wife Susan, about selling my pots at his gallery. I was thrilled to get a call back and have a two hour phone call, reconnecting with my old friend. I sent him a few pictures and he said he'd love to sell my pots. So I got a load of platters, serving bowls, soup bowls, snack bowls, tea bowls, mugs, and small pitchers glazed and fired and took them up there.

If you haven't been to Mossy Creek, it's right off of Highway 101, south of Lincoln City, on the Siletz River. The gallery is in an old farmhouse and the surrounding gardens are beautiful and peaceful. Besides Susan's glass work, there's nothing but Oregon made pottery here so I love coming up and seeing what potters are making these days. Not to mention, Dan and Susan are hilarious and a riot to talk to. It's worth the trip just to chat with them!

It's really cool to see my work in the company of peers.  A dozen different styles of throwing, firing and glazing are represented in the gallery my pots definitely have their own unique style. Here's a sampling of what I took up there:

When I got home, though, I had a problem. I'm out of pots! With summer around the corner, I need to have inventory for fairs and festivals, the galleries, and to start a shop on Etsy for people outside of Oregon. So back to the wheel I went. This time, I made teapots, bud vases, salt bowls, mugs, and more snack bowls. My sweetie and I experimented with new glazing combinations and are thrilled with a few including these:

I'm currently selling teapots faster than I'm making them but hope to catch up soon. I'm really happy with how they're turning out and they look great with a couple of tea bowls, a bud vase and a snack bowl. I'm thinking about selling them as a set. Here's a sample:

And here's a teapot set I sold last month:

In other news, three new artists are joining the co-op I belong to -- For Artsake Gallery in Nye Beach, Newport, OR -- so if you're in the area, come by Friday night, June 7, we're having a party and I'll be playing guitar!

Teapots

I just got reprimanded by "the boss" for posting this on Facebook first. Dang. What do I know? She says there's a little button you can click to share the blog post on Facebook. Sure enough, there is. I think I'm going to try it now, so please forgive the redundancy. Actually, let's just say I meant this twice. Deal? Deal!

Here's what I said:

I'm making teapots again. Body, lid and spout are thrown, then trimmed and assembled when in the leather hard stage of drying. Knobs are compressed clay squeezed between the palm of my hand and the base of my index and second fingers, then attached to the lid. Spouts are cut and canted to the 5 o'clock position because - and this is quite interesting - the spout "unwinds" clockwise when the pots are firing. Hopefully, the cut is perfect and the spout unwinds to the 6 o'clock position. The pots are under plastic so that everybody can "get to know each other" in terms of moisture content before allowed to continue to the bone dry stage. Pottery lesson now over! :-)