Last week I pulled my potter’s wheel outside onto my studio porch to throw in the perfect the end of the summer day gentle breezy warm temperature.
Mostly I make tile and throwing is a love that I don’t indulge more than a few times a year when I need to make some gifts, or have an idea to pursue. Right now I have both. August is big-time gift season for me with at least 10 birthdays of family and friends and my idea has been to make some cups to commemorate the historic full solar eclipse that’s passing through Oregon later this month.
As you may have gathered from the excited chatter floating around, here in the U.S. we will witness the rare occurrence of a full solar eclipse on Aug 21, 2017. This will offer us the first total eclipse of the sun visible from coast to coast in the United States since 1918, so it is indeed worthy of note. Furthermore, those who have witnessed full eclipses report that it is an extraordinary experience to behold.
Personally I’m pretty excited about the eclipse! A friend from college is coming here from Baltimore for a visit and to view the eclipse together. Our plan is to take a chairlift up on Mt. Hood where we can view the eclipse from 8,000 ft on this magnificent mountain through our special NASA protective glasses.
Anyway, back to the cups…so at the end of each of my work days I’ve been immersing myself in the bliss of making pots while the sun sets. I started with some espresso cups as gifts but quickly moved on to these limited edition “eclipse cups” - the small porcelain tumblers I made in the spirit of celebrating this momentous eclipse. They are perfectly sized for eclipse toasts of spirits, wine, tea, port, whatever and I plan to use them up on the mountain!
Above I tested out how to use glaze to show an eclipse which helped me decide how I wanted to do this on the cups. All in all these cups have been a fun little project, and I’m tickled that I sold 30 of them the first day I put them out for sale.
2.75" x 2.75", glossy blue glaze with the eclipse rendered in cobalt, white and silver luster Want a pair?
Eclipses come in pairs…yesterday’s full moon was partially eclipsed and it’s said that this 2 weeks between the lunar and solar eclipse is a super-charged powerful period of time during which we can all soak up that extra energy to see ourselves more clearly and shine brightly!
