How Many Potters Does It Take To Make A Mug?

When Nancy and I began making pots together as Cold Springs Studio Pottery, the first order of business was to make mugs for our upcoming wedding. The plan was that we would make the mugs for the reception. We had washing stations so that as folks finished at the reception, they could wash their mugs, and take them with them as wedding gifts fro us.

We had a few glazes that we hoped would work at cone 6 and a kiln that wasn't happy getting that hot. While I could throw the mugs, it wasn't really a group effort... so we decided to handbuild the mugs for the wedding. Aurora was five years old and was trying to figure out her role in the studio. We decided on making soft-slab mugs with impressed/stamped decoration. Each of us designed stamps to decorate with, and chops to indicate who had made what pots. After a couple evenings of making mugs, Aurora went wild on this one, and used everyone's chops AS the decoration. From this angle you can see my AS chop, Nancy's bunny chop, and Aurora's killer whale chop. 

In addition to these handbuilt mugs, we made soupmugs and a few short thrown diner mugs. I think, for our 65 guests, we made a few more than 100 mugs. There were maybe 6 pots left after our wedding.Ten years later, there are only a few of these pots left in our collection. I think two soupmugs have survived the "pre-dishwasher" stage in our house. One of the last diner mugs from this time has a good sized chip in the lip. But this mug soldiers on.

Living With Pots

This soup mug was made by Ashley Kim. Not sure if you can make out the detail, but there is a line of red stitching around the waistline of this soup mug. Amazing feel in the hand. The recurved handle fits so incredibly well.  Ashley is having her holiday studio sale right now, so grab some pots before they are gone!

This next mug was made by Lynne Hobaica. My friend Sabra bought it for Aurora when she and I visited the Genessee Pottery in Rochester back at the end of Summer. Fantastic show! Just wish we had been there opening night so we could get more pots!

This last pot is one of my earliest bowls. Probably hadn't made two dozen bowls at this time. I thought of this as a BIG bowl when I made it. I had my daily lunch of ramen noodles in this through my second year of college. It travelled with me across the country so many times. It made the trip to WA state, to Florida, back to MA. Eventually out to UT for a long time. Finally it made it's home back here. The strangest thing about this bowl is its boring color. Honey Clear was a glaze I picked up from Vince Pitelka when I was at UMASS/amherst. It is a very VERY matte magnesium based glaze, but by adding 15% manganese dioxide to the glaze, it becomes a wonderful satin matte, with a gorgeous honey color. It feels almost like silk. Unfortunately the anemic color really killed sales. Nancy says it is quite possibly her least favorite glaze she has ever seen me use.

The other novel thing about this bowl is that is has red slate powder wedged into the claybody. A friend dug some up from the running track at Smith College... in hopes of making an oil spot glaze based on recipes from Nigel Wood. His glazes never worked out, but I used some of his red slate powder in my claybody. Shredded my fingers while trying to throw the stuff. Imagine glass in your claybody... slate is sharper! ouch.

Saturday's pots

That's right, if it's Saturday it must mean MORE pots.

Prices are posted under each image.
Call or email if you have questions:


607-387-4042 voice/fax
email: info@coldspringsstudio.com

Oval footed vase, $65
Med serving bowl, $70
Diner mug in lime, $30

In Butter Yellow: Med serving bowl, $70
Small serving bowl, $48



Med serving bowl, $70 Sunset red, Dinner plate, sunset red, $36ea.



Ruffled vases in Tangerine and Sunset $48 ea.
Sunset basket, $100



Butter or sunset teabowl (yunomi) $38
Lime oval pitcher, $70
Sunset and lime sorbet bowls, $24 each.




Butter yellow sorbet bowls, $24 each
Med serving bowl in Sunset, $70
Spoonrest $12


Dessert plate in Tangerine $24 (lots of other colors too)
Dinner plates in Butter, and lots of other colors $36
Oval footed vase, $65 tangerine




Tumblers in Tangerine and sunset $24 ea.
Spoonrests in lime $12
Diner mugs in Butter yellow, $30 ea.
Sorbet bowls in Tangerine (and cranberry in the back) $24 ea.



Small serving bowls in Sunset and Tangerine $48 each
Butter teabowl, $40


Lime oval pitcher, $70
Lime diner mugs, $30
Lime dessert plate, $24
Tangerine spoonrest $12

Glazing glazing glazing

This past week saw the reincarnation of our Lime glaze. For the past year or so, it has been finicky. Some days it is willing to lay down a nice clean layer. Other times it decides that it wants to crawl. NOT this batch. This batch of Lime is downright sweet. It goes on nice and thick and comes out silky and kind of juicy. Go figure.




So today and yesterday were all about glazing. Even with stuff to trim, glazing takes priority. With the humidity at 100% I am not terribly worried about losing any pots to drying out. On the other hand, once I get things messy with all my glazing paraphernalia, the last thing I want to do is clean up. Once we finish a BIG round of glazing, I like to bring in the garden hose and completely saturate the floor. Flood it with enough water to have a half inch of standing water. Then we wet vacuum it all out. Helps keep the dust down and also helps moderate the temperature a bit.