These days I don't bring flowers in the house much--the cats eat them, you see. I compensate by making my Vases as beautiful as I can. They're wheel-thrown and reshaped, some flare, some are straight-sided. I don't do them often, and when I do, I play around with the shape, the cross-section, handles or not. The one thing they have in common is plenty of surface to paint on. Smaller vases sell for $33; larger, elaborately patterned ones can go for as high as $45.
I didn't have much experience with stoneware, growing up. With six rambunctious kids, our dinner
plates were melmac or Corelle ware, cereal bowls plastic. Coffee cups and soup bowls were diner
weight white earthenware, and pie plates were either aluminum or pyrex.
About the only real stoneware pottery I saw before I left for college was down in the basement,
next to the potato bin: stoneware crocks, 10 and 20-gallon size.
These were no antique-store dainties, these were working crocks, filled with home-rendered lard,
cracklings, and my dad's sauerkraut. Straight sided, grey-white glaze, with the size stamped in
cobalt blue beneath the uranium-red Redwing Pottery logo. They were massive and thick-walled,
heavy but hand-thrown, and I still have a half-inch-thick shard from one of them in my studio.
I don't make anything like that size of crock myself. Even if I had the mad throwing skillz and
the giant kiln to make 50 lb. pots, there just isn't a market for them in these days of food-grade
plastic buckets and bottled kraut. (Though I have done a couple of pickled vegetable crocks,
complete with lid and weight disc, on special order.)
And every now and then I get a longing for the classic simplicity of those straight-sided forms
and crock handles, so I make some small crocks, table-top size, for pens or brushes or kitchen
utensils. I usually decorate them with bunnies, or hummingbirds, the running rooster and
his flock, or any of a crock full of other patterns.
Tool Crocks......$27-38