Valentine's Day Ideas

 

It's been a busy 2015 already - mostly with finishing a spill-over of Christmas orders and re-stocking on some essential pots (bird bowls are back in stock btw!). The kiln has been bisque fired once and glaze fired twice already before January had a chance to put its feet up!

I think the kiln was wondering what on earth was going on - especially as it had to contend with some chilly temperatures out in the studio recently. As a precaution I brought all my bags of clay indoors from the outside store, just in case they froze. One day I switched on the electricity to the kiln and the themocouple plummeted immediately to zero. I'm sure if it could display any temperature below freezing then it would have...

Anyway, enough about the cold studio conditions! Here's some new items I managed to make in-between all the other pots in January: just a few ideas for Valentine's Day. I made some very cute little bottles with cork stoppers which you can see in the photos above, and I made some ceramic heart tags to go with them with 'love potion' written on them. 

These bottles are small enough to sit in the palm of your hand and make a lovely gift. They can be used as a bathroom accessory to hold oils and salts for instance and because the glazes are food safe and dishwasher safe, they can be used in the kitchen too. The glazing is plain white so they can even be used as little bud vases without the stopper and tag. They are available in both my Etsy and Folksy Shop.

In the process of bringing in all the stoneware clay out from the cold, I also found some porcelain - so I made this pair of love birds. These are hand shaped and left unglazed to show the pure white porcelain body, while their eyes were picked out by brushing on dots of blue/black oxide. This unique pair of love doves is available in my Etsy Shop. Enjoy!

 

Tealights, Hearts and Valentine's

Making pots can be a fiddly process, especially when you start cutting holes into clay. You have to make sure the pots are wet enough not to bend or buckle under the pressure of cutting, but also not too dry or you risk cracking the clay. So when I decided to make these new tealight holders with a cut-out heart motif, I knew I'd be spending a long afternoon muttering to myself!

The hearts were made using a normal heart shaped cookie cutter - and the holes with normal hole cutters. Hole cutters are designed to make holes in clay of course, so they're fairly straightforward to use. But cookie cutters are generally expected to be used on a flat surface, cutting into dough or pastry. To use them on an elevated, curved wall - like a pot - requires a bit of care. But as long as you take time and put even pressure on the cutter whilst supporting the clay at the back, they cut quite cleanly. 

In a perfect world, the heart-shaped leftover cuts-outs could be used for making my double heart decorations (below). I've been making these little hearts for quite a few years now. They're popular as little gifts for people all year round; as gift tags, decorations, keepsakes and love tokens. But unfortunately the leftovers from the tealight holders were just too distorted (after all they'd been through) to re-use; so instead they had to go in the recycling!

But I'm pleased with my new tealight design. You may remember I made an earlier version a few years ago which was essentially the same, except instead it featured a series of different sized round holes. I think this new version with the heart motif gives them a different character: and it's always nice to give customers options. From my point of view it's also good to keep developing an existing design by returning to it and re-freshing it. Then you don't feel like you're making the same thing forever!

Luckily all my new heart motif tealight holders came out of the kiln safe and sound - just in time for me to put them in my Folksy and Etsy shops for Valentine's! Hope you enjoy them.

UK Handmade Tutorial

Just a quick blog today to mention that I had a tutorial published on UK Handmade site this week! It’s a tutorial for making my ceramic heart decorations which you can see in the picture above. I’ve been making these little decorations for a couple of years now. At first I made them especially for Valentine’s Day, but they proved popular all year round and so I often make small batches for my Folksy Shop or for sale at shows and at my local Arts Centre - where they do quite well as little gifts for visitors.

I chose these hearts because I wanted to do something that was easy enough for beginners and people new to ceramics to try out – although I think the tutorial also demonstrates just how many stages are involved in even the most simple of ceramic ideas! (Pottery is always more complicated than it looks.) But I hope people enjoy the tutorial and maybe find inspiration for making their own designs in ceramics and in other media too.

I had good fun doing this tutorial actually. In fact ‘the making of’ the tutorial could be a whole DVD extra in itself! I decided the best way to illustrate this Make was to show photos of me making ‘in action’. This required positioning my tripod at a precarious angle to get in close enough and then using the ten-second time-delay on my camera. So imagine lots of running backwards and forwards around a table cleaning my hands each time and checking the camera for focus, battery life and to make sure everything was in frame. Add to this the fact that I was in my un-heated studio back in January and that might explain why my hands look absolutely freezing! Oh the glamorous life of a potter…

Anyway, just to say many thanks again to Charlotte Hupfield at UK Handmade. And here’s a link to my Make and here’s a link to the hearts in my shop.

Is it Valentine's?

(buy these little ceramic hearts here)

I've been photographing these little ceramic hearts in the past couple of days. Here's one hanging up on the edge of the door in my studio. I started making these back in September but somehow things conspired to get in the way of me listing them in my shop until now. So I've been making a mad dash to get them ready before Valentine's Day next weekend. I'm hoping though - since they're so pretty - they'll be the sort of thing that people might like any time of year and for all purposes: not just as little love tokens but as gift tags on special presents, for accessorizing, for crafts - or just for hanging up on a door and looking pretty!

I'm also in the process of re-organizing my Folksy shop at the moment: doing a bit of spring cleaning and changing stock around. I recently sold some items 'off-line' to a lovely local buyer who came to my studio and I also gave a large consignment of stock to a local arts and crafts gallery/shop. So it's been quite a hectic and exciting beginning of the year already - but my poor shop has suffered for it. I hope to add more items soon though.

Anyway, just a quick catch-up today...