Come to my Studio Sale Saturday 9-1, a great chance to get a kitchen full of handmade pottery at a reasonable price.

This smoky white glaze is known in the studio as Shino X, for the happy accident when I left an ingredient out of my white Shino glaze and the whole load of pots came out perfect, a deep, complex white, lustrous, semi-translucent, crackling over the porcelain. It’s still a tricky glaze, and must be handled with extreme care to avoid flaws. The smoke patterns are achieved when the immature glaze traps excess carbon in the kiln atmosphere early in the firing. This effect can be achieved reliably, but is still unpredictable – the top and back of the kiln always get more smoke. No two pots in this glaze ever look exactly alike.

It’s my favorite glaze, so I used it on the first batch of dishes in the new Scallop style – I put the angles in with a rib tool when the clay is wet, then spin it back into round on the wheel. With use, Shino glaze develops a beautiful patina, much prized by collectors in Japan, where the glaze was developed, but this has no effect on the porosity of the glaze or the clay.

My bottle from the epic winter firing of 2008 is featured on designstyleguide.com, in their Americana section. What could be more American than a whiskey jar covered in Albany slip and fired with wood from trees grown in Upstate New York. Let us all sing the Battle Hymm of the Republic…

New shapes, new glazes. More pictures coming as soon as the light is right. Click on the picture to buy.

trying to figure out twitter. All these people following me and I never say anything.

nobody publishes a word that is not the cowardly robot ravings of a depraved mentality

is this big brother?