Kirkwood Clay

The path to our small business has been full of surprise and serendipity. A long, long time ago on a long, Long Island, Scott took pottery lessons while in high school. This small experience planted a seed that would long lay dormant until ten years later. We met as middle school teachers in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. When Tiffany went back to grad school, we moved to North Carolina, fell in love with Gr

eensboro, and settled in. As a holiday tradition, we invest each year in something we can both enjoy. While we have gotten a lot of use out of our GPS and our iPads, the best thing we ever did was invest in pottery lessons at our local cultural arts center. We fell in love with pottery immediately. While our class was only once a week, we talked the other instructors into letting us attend their classes as well. We found ourselves in the studio every night after work and all weekend! Our lives revolved around open studio hours. We even moved downtown across the street from the arts center to cut down on our commute! After we got engaged, we decided to make ceramic favors for our wedding! Each guest took home a mug or tumbler, and this was the first time others were the recipients of our wares. We got amazing feedback and continued to give away pottery as holiday and birthday gifts. When our coworkers and family started requesting specific pieces and offering to pay, it just clicked! When we bought our first home, we immediately set up a pottery studio in our backyard. We drove ten hours round-trip to pick up a used kiln and wheel that we found on Craigslist in Charleston, South Carolina. We tiled and painted the studio ourselves late into the night, fueled by Cookout milkshakes and craft beer. Our little pottery studio (pictured above) matches our cottage home with its cedar shake shingle siding. You may recognize this siding as we use our home and studio in many of our listing backgrounds! Once our home studio was ready and our first few items came out of the kiln, we opened our Etsy shop. Our lives have never been the same! All our clays are sourced regionally in North Carolina. We use clay from Asheville and Star, NC (we’re happy to support StarWorks!). All of our pieces are made in our back yard by our four hands. Each piece is hand-thrown on the wheel and then dried for several days. All pieces are then bisque fired to approximately 1800 degrees. Then we sand and wash each item, allow it to dry, and apply glaze by dipping or brushing. During the final step, our ceramics are fired to approximately 2200 degrees, which strengthens the stoneware and vitrifies the glaze, resulting in a smooth, beautiful glassy surface. We absolutely love that Etsy gives us the opportunity to sell our handmade items on a global scale. Our ceramics have found their way all over the US and into Canada, the UK, and even Korea and Japan. We love drinking our coffee in the morning, and wondering who else might be drinking their coffee from our mugs and where they might be…