Your Clay ProjectHome of wayward amateur pottery

This precarious but delightful goblet (is it the chalice from the palace, or the vessel with the pestle?) is formed from two pieces: a rolled-out flat circle formed into the cup, and then a columnar tube that’s been smushed at the bottom to form the base. Not surprisingly, it tipped over while I was standing at the checkout station at the thrift store. The woman running the place was very apologetic, and gave it to me for free. It stands about 9 inches tall and the cup is about 4 inches in diameter. Sadly, although this piece survived its tip-over at the checkout stand, it did not survive the Flood of 2008.

This hefty kid-made roll-method piece has a beautiful deep brown glaze and measures just over 5 inches tall and 4 inches across. It’d be easy to call it a pencil cup, but in fact it really defies characterization as there’s a very purposeful slot in the wall of the tallest side which suggests it could be a wall pocket, or possibly a coffee mug gone astray. It is marked “124 Kena West” on the bottom.

This little pinch pot has bright blue and yellow stripes, a deep blue rim, and a deep green glazed center. It stands about 3 inches high and is about 4 inches wide.

The initials “R.C.” are etched in the bottom. It’s always the ones with just initials that make me so curious about the maker. (And names like Twatty. I admit to being a bit curious about that, too.)

This thrift-store find is very heavy-duty, as it’s at least half an inch thick in most places.

If you were a kid and were asked to name your favorite animal, what would it be? Dog? Lion? Giraffe? Salamander?

To be honest, I’m not even sure how the salamander might make the short list of suggestions for a favorite animal. And I do not say that to slight the salamander – they are really interesting creatures, as evidenced by this brief bit of description found on Wikipedia:

They are typically characterized by a superficially lizard-like appearance, with slender bodies, blunt snouts, short limbs projecting at right angles to the body, and the presence of a tail in both larva and adult… Unique among vertebrates, they are capable of regenerating lost limbs, as well as other damaged parts of the body…  Some salamander species are fully aquatic throughout their life, some take to the water intermittently and others are entirely terrestrial as adults.

But a “favorite animal”? It is just not a choice I would expect to even occur to a kid. But that is no matter – my very own precious daughter did choose the salamander as her “favorite animal” in second grade, and so made this clay figure for a class project.

I did ask her about it at the time – “How did you come to choose the salamander? I don’t recall ever hearing you talk about them…” And she said, “There was a list, and all the good ones were already taken.” At that point I shifted gears and tried to build up the poor slighted salamander in her eyes, but it was no use. She had felt pressured to choose him, and so he was not really her favorite.

But her clay figure, although his little feet have chipped off and not, apparently, re-grown as promised… is spot-on “totes adorbs,” as James Earl Jones might say.

And treasured, at least by her mother.

… was this little finger-pinched monster guy. The blobby lump of his body has a pretty parti-colored glaze, and some sort of tool has been used to make the round, tooth-filled “mouth” in front. I’m amazed his little pinched arms have survived at all; his pencil-poked eyes give you a woeful look. He stands about 4 inches tall.

I was walking around a thrift store one day – and not just ANY thrift store… this was the “last stop before the incinerator store” – a warehouse where our local Salvation Army took all the stuff that hadn’t sold in their network of stores, set it out in bins and boxes, and let you come in to dig around and maybe find just what you didn’t even know you were looking for. Stuff in here was dirt cheap – a clerk there sold me lamps, bicycles, and really good stuff for $1, $2, and even less.

Anyway, I was digging through a box of cast-off household stuff when my eye caught a bit of shiny yellow clay. “Hello…” and I pulled this little guy up and out of the box.

Well being the softy that I am, I was immediately overcome with the need to adopt him. How had this object – obviously a child’s art creation, for goodness sake – ended up in the almost-trash at the thrift store?

I might have been the teensiest bit hormonal – at this time my own daughter was still pretty young and I had a couple of her clay projects at home, and I couldn’t imagine parting with them. It made me quite sad to think that someone had likely died, and their childrens’ art had been donated along with – most likely – a houseful of other belongings.

Anyway, Little Ricky here came home with me for a quarter, and after that I started purposely looking for children’s clay projects in the thrift stores. It still amazes me how often I find them.