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 ...

Hand-drawn mandala designs are my favorite way to decorate clay Hey, y'all! My first batch of mandala plates came out of the kiln last week, and I am so pleased with them. There were seven dishes and two ring cones in this latest batch, and they are all for sale! As of the original publishing of this post (Feb 2018), I haven't listed them on Etsy yet, but that'll happen soon. So, if you want to scoop one or more of  these beauties up for $18 a piece* beforehand (free domestic shipping!), details about ordering are at the end of this post. Rings not included. Blue #1: *This one is $15, due to the lack of mandala design Blue #2 Blue #3, deeper than the other two. The Celedon blue turned out really well on all three of these dishes this go round. It has been very thin lately, so I was careful to get two solid coats on, and well into those carving lines. Clear #1 Clear #2 Simple clear glaze never fails to disappoint on these hand-carved mandala...

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 ...