The Process of Handmade Crafts

Our love of nature has inspired our pottery work.  Each piece is lovingly hand build using slab building technique.  Slab building is basically using a raw clay body and rolling or pounding into a slab about .25 inches thick.  From there, templates can be used to cut and build each piece.  Leaves, blocks, forms and molds can be used to create impressions and organic shapes.  

 Tulip Tree shape using Tulip Tree leaf shape and texture on both sides of clay slab

 Molding clay slab with leaf impression on both sides.  Allowing to dry to leather hard.

 Leather hard leaf shape removed from wooden anvil prior to bisque firing.  Also showing glaze fired leaf tray.

We especially enjoy working with natural foliage shapes.  Ferns from our farm make a lovely reverse stencil.  We have used leaves from trees on our farm as well as some special trees in other locations.  

 Fronds are positioned on wet clay and underglaze is applied over the fronds and allowed to dry.

When underglaze is dry fronds are removed and tray is bisque fired.

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Process for making a mug  

Clay slab is rolled out to approximately 0.25 inch thickness.  

Using premade templates, shapes are cut from the slab as seen below.

The edges are mitered to facilitate joining edges.

Mitered edges are scored with a rough tooth tool and moistened with wet clay slurry that acts as a type of glue to join the edges together permanently.  Cup begins to form as seen below.  Edges are pressed together and smoothed out.  The rough edge tool is used to score the edges of the base of mug and the two are joined with clay slurry.  At this point the mug is typically put onto a turning table to be able to shape and mold as desired.

Once the mug has been shaped as desired, the handle will be added as seen below.

At this point mug is allowed to air dry overnight for carving the next day.  The mug needs to be leatherhard to be able to hold shape for handling.

The mug below has been carved and bisque fired and is now ready for glazing!