The other day I received a message with a photo of a familiar pot. Fellow Emily Carr student from 23 years ago, Beatrix Schalk, had recognized this odd jug in the window of the Burnaby Hastings Salvation Army store! $14.99! I said ‘I want it!‘ and she bought it and delivered it to me here in my studio yesterday. Thank you Beatrix, and it was lovely to catch up.

It is signed and dated 1993 and I know that I made it in the semester following a 3-week Summer workshop with Walter Ostrom. Most of the time we worked on the intricacies of maiolica but in the last week, he introduced the use of slips, to be applied on leather hard ware. It was a delight to schloop the paintable slips on my work rather than deal with the dusty, highly absorbent surface of unfired tin glaze on bisque-ware. Apart from the occasional departure into reduction and/or salt firing I have worked with red earthenware clay and my own brightly coloured slips ever since.

In this piece I was still experimenting with different ideas for handles, considering how they could be part of the main body rather than being a weaker, attached form. And the ease of throwing and assembling this very forgiving D’Arcy Redart clay allowed me to squish, dart and put together whatever I could dream up. So this slightly over-the-top jug has a large lid with a hole that matches the larger handle (both made by inserting a thrown cylinder).

The slip painting is rather random. I needed to experiment further to obtain more depth of colour, but I sure had fun with the surface. There are sgraffito scoops to accentuate the coloured shapes.

So it is a happy memory day to have this piece back and I’m glad to know that someone enjoyed it, perhaps to serve lemonade or margaritas,  for the intervening years. After a good clean-up it looks to have survived time quite well! What to do with it now?

Yesterday was a good day work-wise, broken up with Beatrix’s visit with the big jug. I was determined to get handles on all twelve of the jugbirds I’ve started recently, and I did. (Facebook friends will have already seen these, sorry to be duplicating the posting). Standing to attach them, in two stretches of time, left me quite tired. Damn getting older! I also started to make some new slab plates for the next Raid, scheduled for next week.

On the topic of found Thrift Store items, fellow potter Laura Van der Linde sent me this photo of one of my green and blue jugbirds, found last year. I gather she also owns a painted tumbler of mine, from the same source. I don’t mind that they find their way into these stores and then to collectors. They were loved for a while and now have new homes.