The NorthWesternBelle

This post has been a long time coming, considering this project was accepted in November and finished in December 2017. Better late than never, right? Right. (Edit 3/16/18: I did make a couple of videos about this project! Check them out here: Part 1 & Part 2 .) Spoiler! They're awesome. So, pretty much as soon as I lost my job at the end of October, my mother in law commissioned 30 mugs - 10 cat themed and 20 dog themed - to be Christmas gifts for her pet sitting clients. I'd never taken on such a large project, but I had the time to do it, so I was excited! And also seriously nervous about getting that many mugs through the entire process with enough time to ship them to NM before Christmas. To-be cat mugs. Dog mugs. The dog mugs were thrown to be 4" tall and 4" wide. The handles were all hand-pulled. Right about midway through production of all the cups, the studio hired me as a part-time office assistant. I went from spending two and a ...

It's probably not really a surprise that I have taken to zen doodling and hand lettering on clay. Exhibit A: the Pot Bellied Tea Mugs. They were nice and leather hard when I first cut into the, and the bodies are nice and thick, so I was able to get a really good purchase with my embossing tool.  This one might be my favorite. A lot of sponging and tracing goes into making the lines this clean. I've been told that using saran wrap can reduce that labor. I'll need to give that a try because it's time consuming, and I tend to get obsessive. The plates were a little bit too dry for carving, and I've lost a couple of plates recently to over-confident carving, so I think I was a little bit lighter-handed than needed on this one in particular. Carving is a little bit risky because details can get lost if you use the wrong glaze. I'm planning on using Yellow Winkur on these, which is a matte orange that, recently, has been pooling yellow on ...

The story behind the mugs I'll be blogging out about today actually starts way back in 2010, when I made a set of pot bellied beer mugs for my younger brother. Seen here, circa 2016 with said mug, and fleece-lined crochet wool beanie also made by yours truly. I had been doing pottery for two years at that point, and I haven't seen them since. I'm sure they're not completely terrible, but they're definitely heavy and uneven, and the feet are most likely very chunky.  They are, however, awesome enough to impress my lil sister when she spent some time at his house recently. The next time I saw her, for a girls' weekend in October, she asked me to make her some similar to them for tea. Being that I am highly in favor of drinking tea and encouraging others to do so, I wholeheartedly agreed, and I got to work on them straight away. The fourth one didn't get photographed, apparently. I'll have to get one of all four before they go ...