I started making these gold honeycomb designs a couple of months ago. My favorite color theme is the deep sunflower yellow fading into the rustic autumn orange, but the ones with the creamy white background and sunshine yellow inside the gold honeycombs are growing on me as well.
I thought it was about time that I wrote something about the honeycomb mugs, especially because they are a lot different from the mugs that I’ve been making for the last three years– they are wheel-thrown!
I finally figured out a pottery wheel that works with my limited space– it’s called the “Shimpo Aspire Tabletop Potter’s Wheel” and it works great for me because it is so portable that I can lift it up onto my making table when I need to use it, and I can clean it up and put it away underneath my table when I’m not using it (it does weigh 25 pounds or so, so you can bet that I am getting a little bit of a workout each time I move it).
Honestly, I haven’t used a pottery wheel since the summer of 2015 until I got this wheel, so it took me a few rounds of mugs to remember all of the slick tricks that I learned in college, but now I feel pretty confident when I sit down to the wheel to make these honeycomb mugs.
I remember the first time I received real honeycomb as a gift. I was in college, and I was staying at a professor’s house because my dorm didn’t allow us to stay past the first week of May and I wanted to keep working in the ceramic studio. She gave me the honeycomb, telling me that she got it as a gift from someone else but that she didn’t know what to do with it. The honeycomb was beautiful– it was rich warm shades of brown, with perfectly aligned tiny hexagon-shaped holes in layers upon layers with dark brown honey oozing out of it. When I tasted the honey, it had SO much more flavor than any honey I had ever eaten before. It was definitely medicinal.
These honeycomb mugs have that memory ingrained in them in a small way, but I wanted to lean towards using brighter colors than the actual honeycomb was because I love colorful things!
Speaking of the honeycomb mugs, I have some in a kiln right now that I will be glazing later today and painting gold accents on them tomorrow, and if all goes as planned, they should be ready to go in my Etsy shop by Wednesday afternoon (mountain daylight time). If you are interested in snagging a honeycomb mug, check them out here:
https://www.etsy.com/shop/KiraCallCeramics
If you miss out on the mugs from this round, have no worries. There will be more! I am better about posting updates on my Instagram page, @kiracallceramics.
Kira Call Ceramics 