🍀 March 2026 (Full Letter)
Just past noon on Tuesday March 10th, I tiptoed up the incessantly creaky stairs above my toddler’s bedroom to the room we converted into my new studio while he napped. I crossed my fingers he wouldn’t wake up since he was recovering from the stomach flu that we all succumbed to like dominos over the weekend that delayed my first day of operations. I wanted to start on Monday, just for the tidiness of it, but spring germs had other plans…
Right before getting my husband Mr. E and son R ready for a Home Depot kid’s workshop, R shotgunned me with vomit. 🫣 Sorry for the visual, but that’s what happened. So with their Daddy/Bubba date cancelled, we all stayed home, and while R was a little logy the rest of the day and ran a low fever in the evening, he was otherwise fine. All was calm and normal during the day Sunday up til when I was suddenly taken out by intense nausea, sweats, and chills in the evening as I was finishing my shelves and ware boards. I knew instantly that plans had to change, like many things in art and business. I felt a little silly that I was disappointed to not start on a Monday, but after a month of getting through bureaucratic red tape getting business approval, insurance, bank accounts, and the like while also setting up a space and ordering supplies, I just wanted to start. I felt — and still feel — behind where I wanted to be for an April open-shop launch.
I’m choosing to think of this additional setback as an opportunity to practice wabi-sabi, a Buddhist principle of appreciating the impermanence and imperfection in/of life. While not fundamentally a pottery term, the idea comes up often in pottery and is frequently explained when describing kintsugi, a Japanese form of mending broken pottery with gold lacquer, resulting in art made more beautiful than before from experiencing hardship. (For more translated potter jargon, take a look at my Jargon + Lingo page!)
It was a relief to finally flip on the light switch in my studio with my shelves assembled, my ware boards laid out, my supplies neatly organized and ready for use, and, of course, the clay ready to be wedged. I lit an apple cider candle (I’m forever an autumn person…), took a chunk of delightfully smooth and weighty clay, wedged meditatively, and made about a dozen swatch tiles for incoming glazes.
Because I don’t have my own kiln, I use my initials to designate my work until I can get a custom maker’s mark clay stamp with my logotype. I ended up indenting my thumb into the top halves to see how glaze changes over curves and edges over many layers (not pictured).
Over the next few days, I built and shaped about a dozen forms (I won’t tell you how many I smooshed…). I solved unexpected issues and learned a little more with each shape and each setback. It would be easy to get hung up on the slow output, but little by little I’m shaping my own ease in my new space and confidence in my skills, and that’s kept me going.
So one toddler nap at a time, I’m building a studio. I’m crafting someone’s new favorite Monday mug, their next tea cup serving bedside lemon ginger tea when they’re sick, or the bud vase they’ll fill with handpicked wildflowers for their mom. (Mother’s Day (US) is May 10th, 2026!)
It’s strange to think of May wildflowers right now as I look out my window to a snow flurry in mid-March, but that’s Michigan weather for ya…
Pottery forces you to be patient. You have to wait for clay to become leather hard before trimming, wait for it to be bone dry before bisque-firing, wait for glaze to dry on bisque ware before layering or firing again, and wait for the kiln to cool before revealing whether your work survived at all. In all those stages, you could lose your work at any point to small technical mistakes (or straight-up clumsiness…), invisible uncontrollable factors in the chemistry, or to life’s unpredictability (hello, surprise leaky roof!).
Pottery also forces you to think as if those future moments are already here. Prepare your piece well for each next phase and have faith your work will make your vision worthwhile.
That’s the tension I’m living in while jumpstarting the studio: I’m building, and thinking of the person who needs a new beautiful vessel for those flowers right-then, right now. If a few smooshed lumps of clay teach me what I need to get that bud vase just right to hold water for those flowers or to keep tea from leaking when it’s needed most, so be it.
I’m not naturally a risk-taker, but the love of clay emboldens me to take a chance, hence how I started a business by jumping right in; and yet, I found once I finally was working on my wedging table and ware boards I was making familiar shapes and forms repeatedly. I asked myself “If I can make anything, why make something mundane?” So I added a charming lady bug to a vase, I made a mug into an appropriately-smug cat, I carved twinkling stars into plates. The vulnerability to make something I’m invested in and worry losing to the process is what keeps the craft interesting and retains its longevity. People don’t dream of walking away from their desk jobs to be an artist just to make plain corporate-beige mugs. To play it safe is to play it boring. I have to risk it for the bisque-it, or likely face running out of steam.
My shelves are quickly filling up with pieces getting ready for the inaugural firing. My son is sleeping soundly through each creaky step sounding above his head. The snow is melting and ice is thawing (and then returning, and melting again…). Seeds, both literal and metaphorical, have been sown and started to sprout. There is a frenetic energy in the evenings after toddler bedtime snuggles to get cheerful art into the homes of friends I’ve yet to meet. Spring is equal parts preparation and implementation, equal parts sowing and flourishing; so while it’s funny to think of May flowers right now with snow still dusting the yard, those flowers might as well already be here, and so will flower-filled vases.
