So, this one will become a pen and pencil holder rather than a mug. It’s one of two mugs whose form I liked and whose glazes were swirly in almost all the right ways, but which are both casualties of my learning curve with new glazes in a new studio.

I wrote in February about the final kiln at Nan’s studio. I’m about to embark on my third class in the new space, each with a different teacher. I’m still trying to get into a rhythm there, learning the routines of the studio, learning from new teachers, rearranging my schedule from semester to summer and back again while also trying to hit the open studio times just right. Summer seemed to hold the promise of extra hours and longer studio time but that didn’t pan out as I’d hoped.

Neither did some of the new glazes. I didn’t fire any test tiles so everything was an experiment. I’m mostly pleased with the results, including the colors and effect on the non-drinkable mugs. Next time I’ll go easier on this glaze combination so it doesn’t pool and bubble (into breakable glass pockets) in the bottom.

Here’s where you can see the modest take from the kiln so far, with thanks to my husband for the great photos. On to the third class!

I walked into Nan’s pottery studio the day before Easter four years ago.  Woody and I were eating lunch nearby, saw her brochure in the restaurant, and decided to follow the directions to her studio.  It was a lovely, rare, ambling afternoon, a little adventure of meandering the unfamiliar back roads leading to her long, sloping gravel driveway.

I knew I’d like her pots.  She had some on display in the restaurant, where I’d picked them up one by one and seen the same ”NR” stamp on the bottoms.  Even though we arrived as she was shooting a demo video she cheerfully stopped and gave us a tour.  I wandered through her cottage-like studio and showroom admiring the glazes and forms and bashfully saying, “No, I’m not a potter, but I’ve collected pottery for a long time.”

“I teach classes here.  I usually have a long waiting list but right now I happen to have an open spot, if you’re interested.”

That’s when things changed.  All the way home in the car Woody and I talked money and timing and how long the drive to class would take, but it was already a done deal.  I was doing it.

Becoming not just a potter, but Nan Rothwell’s student, has been one of the unexpected blessings of these past few years.  Pottery is a grounding and spiritual practice that gets me out of my head and back into my body, fully in the present moment.  I’ve written a few things about it here but this probably sums it up best.  I always knew, even before I held my first lump of clay, that I’d love working with it.  What I didn’t know until I became Nan’s student, was how much I needed a teacher.  Those of us in her classes said all the time how lucky we were.  We counted our blessings out loud, regularly.

Life keeps changing and one of those changes this past year was that Nan and her husband decided to try city living for the first time in decades.  In October, Nan closed her teaching studio and we fired the final kiln there.  Here are the last pots I made at Nan’s.

Nan’s teaching at a new place and I look forward to taking classes with her there.  It will all be different, but no matter how many places I sit down at a wheel and no matter how many teachers I learn from, Nan will always be my pottery teacher.  She’s the one who said completely obvious things that came from deep wisdom and forty years of throwing pots, but which were not obvious enough to me before she said and demonstrated them – things like, “Just because the wheel’s moving fast, doesn’t mean you have to.”  Nan has helped me move more slowly and deliberately at the wheel and in life.  She’s the one who let me become a student again and walked me over the threshold from admirer to potter.

When the kiln opens in June, reuniting me with objects that began in February as moist and malleable lumps of clay, there are always surprises.  Even when I’ve used a particular glaze combination many times before, this kiln firing may have produced a different effect.  Though I’ve been following these now-finished pots through each stage in the process — wet clay, leather hard, dry-and-fragile, bisqued, glazed, and now fired — I’m always surprised.  A piece I thought was inelegant has undergone its final transformation, the glaze smoothing over the least graceful spots to make a pleasing whole.  Sometimes it’s a surprise in another direction:  the form I loved in one piece now seems a bit marred by the glazes I chose and how they fired.

But the long process isn’t really finished the day the kiln opens, no matter how elated or deflated I am with certain pots.  All these pots end up somewhere, part of someone’s daily life, holding flowers or fruit or coffee or pasta.  That’s the abiding surprise:  something I made and tended over months and seasons now graces someone’s table and holds the things that sustain life.

Here are the latest pieces, wonderfully photographed by my husband, Woody Sherman.

Today would be a great day to hang out in the kiln shed while the kiln’s firing.  Alas, I’ll be bundled up and keeping warm in other ways.  I hope you’ll stay warm, too, and click over to my Potter page to take a peek at my newest pots.

This swoopy cut delights me.

Last Advent I was captivated by a friend’s picture post of her newly knitted Advent calendar.  She made 24 little red, green, and winter white mittens and hung them on a garland.  Inside each one was a slip of paper describing that day’s special Advent treat or excursion.  My friend is also a fantastic photographer, so the picture itself was gorgeous.

I kept going back to click on it again and drink in the colors and coziness of her creation.  When I finally asked if I could commission her to create one for me for Advent this year, she said, “Why don’t we barter?”

So I’ve been working on my first yarn bowls in pottery class this year.  They’re designed to hold a ball of yarn, so that when you pull on the end (fed through cool cutaway patterns in the bowl) the ball doesn’t roll away.

Unexpectedly, bartering my pottery for her knitting made me feel more like a “real artist” than selling a piece or two.  I love the exchange of art for art, work for work.  When I went to the pack and ship store yesterday to send the yarn bowl off to my friend, I paid attention to the cool weight of that blue bowl with the gorgeous swoopy cutaway.  And then I handed it over to make its way to another state and another home, where mittens are taking shape to eventually make their way to me.

Of course, in the barter age they didn’t have pack and ship stores or the internet. 

(Click on over to my potter page to see what else came out of the kiln this month.  I also tried making lamps for the first time!)