For the 2022 Winter Art Festival, I thought it would make the most sense to create a Christmas set! My goal was to have a complete set of mugs and a popcorn bowl for my family, friends, and I to use for drinking hot chocolate and eating popcorn, while watching Christmas movies. I had this vision that we would all be under blankets watching Home Alone eating popcorn out of the Christmas decorated mug, sipping our drinks as Kevin McCallister roamed New York City.
In order to make my mugs, I chose a week to have a full working class on the wheel. Before getting my hands dirty, I would wedge three to five pieces of clay each day and set them aside my wheel. I would measure each lump of clay to 2 lbs. I did this so once I either completed a successful cylinder or destroyed it, I could go straight back to working on another piece. By the end of the week I had about 8 successful cylinders wrapped up in paper ready for trimming. At first, trimming was a challenge for me but when I got my wonderful teacher Ms Sanyour to show me her techniques I knew exactly how to make a proper foot. I had to have the cylinder not too soft to trim but not too hard that I couldn’t apply the handle to it afterwards. This was the problem with about half of my cylinders. Once I was happy with the result of the trimming and added a handle to it, it was time to have the mugs bisque fired into the kiln.
My bowl was definitely more challenging than most of my mugs because I could not perfect making a continuous curve at the bottom of it. While I wished to have created a few more, I finished with one bowl that could be used for popcorn or anything else.
I was hoping that these pieces of work would be super durable through the years, so we can reuse the mugs and the bowl in the many Christmases to come. I would like my viewers to think of their traditions in the holiday season, specifically Christmas as they glance at my collection. Every time I drink hot chocolate out of one of these mugs, I hope to remember my Ceramics 1 class and all of the memories that came with it.