Photo Shoot - Small Vases

Recently I’ve been making a series of ‘one off’ vases - mostly ‘bud’ or ‘stem’ vases suitable for small table settings and little sprigs of wild flowers about the house. These are hand-thrown on the wheel in stoneware clay and measure about 10cm/12cm high. It’s actually been really enjoyable to throw ‘one off’ individual shapes for a change instead of repeating the same form in one throwing session. And so far I’ve been pleased with the results coming out of the kiln. I’ve kept the shapes simple (tubular or bottle-like) and mostly I’ve been using quite plain glazes to keep the pieces fresh looking. I’m hoping these will do well at my Open Studio (which is coming up very soon in July by the way!)

So yesterday I decided I needed to do a ‘lifestyle’ photo shoot to show off these pots ‘in action’. Luckily I have in my back garden a few pretty flowers: so I picked some lavender, some yellow cotton-lavender and a single bottlebrush bloom to use for dressing the vases. I also happened to have a couple of pears left in my fruit bowl and together with a wicker basket and some pieces of linen I went about trying to do some ‘mood’ shots. In the end I took about 400 photos, which means I should have plenty of images now for showing off these little vases! Here are just a few of those pictures - and also below I’ve added a picture of me on a day of throwing them…