As a retired Elementary School Teacher, I am finally able to work full time on my passion, pottery. Not just summers, weekends and holidays anymore but any time of the day! I learned how to ‘throw pots’ from Charlie Blosser in his marvelous program at OCC in Royal Oak, Michigan, 30 years ago. I studied and worked in that studio using high-fire clay for several years. I have participated in OCC’s renowned annual Potter’s Market and have juried into various local art fairs and galleries in and around Detroit and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
As the years progressed, I branched out, developing my home studio here in Southeast Michigan while continuing to teach 2nd through 6th grade. During that time I sold occasionally on Ebay during the holidays, participated in art fairs in summer, filled relatives’ shelves with my wares, and set up shop on Etsy . I enjoying building a stock for my small home shop and the summer art fairs to come.
Through the years I have become irresistibly drawn to redware pottery at Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. I wondered at their impressive historical slipware patterns and worked on producing my own, being sure to stay true to the techniques used in their hand-built wares. I continued working on my own, searching through books from the mid 1800’s, questioning potters working in the village and taking workshops from Irma Starr of Kansas City, KS to perfect my techniques. I enjoy scouring the web for museum examples worldwide, to learn how to reproduce quality pieces as I master the historical techniques.
My specialty close to my heart is reproduction pottery. I love to search history books for museum pieces to reproduce mugs, chargers, penny banks, possit pots and even Leech jars! I use low-fire red clay and low-fire white clay with traditional colors of slip or englobe – dark brown, white, yellow ochre, green, red/brown, cobalt blue and black. I even purchased some shards from England from a collector to be able to hold samples that were circa 1700- 1800’s!
For 30 years I raised my own backyard geese and every year their molt of perfectly good flight feathers are a useful gift to use in the feather trailing technique. I am able to strip down to the main quill to make the main tool of this trade. It is where the name for the technique ‘feather trailing’ comes from. The delicate tip of the goose feather is drawn through the wet layers of clay to make the beautiful designs just through the top layers of wet slip that float together on the surface of a slab of clay. It is important to made sure the layers of wet clay just lay upon one another and not mix. The technique is a delightful effect, fun to perform and beautiful to see completed.
I have branched out and back into making art tiles, photo reproduction tiles and nature tiles as well as functional wares. Although my passion is to reproduce pottery which is an accurate representation of a bit of history, I enjoy all types of clay.