Making small cups

I've been making cups the past couple of days. Handled cups. Sort of small coffee cups, quickly made with wonky cut rims and beefy footrings. I make plenty of mugs - bigger, flat-bottomed, more capacity - but a few weeks ago started making these small things, really not much more than small teabowls with pulled handles. I fired a few in the kiln a few weeks ago and sold some to Kathy at Cataumet's Daily Brew. Kathy uses my mugs to serve coffee to her customers; she also sells them.

She liked the new smaller ones and told me she'd like to see some in the copper red of her own favorite mug. I use the red, but sparingly. Scares me a bit, like any kind of blue. But Kathy pays cash for mugs and cups, so that set me off on a couple of days of throwing and handling these smaller cups.

There's something a bit more personal about them than the bigger mugs. The handles are one-finger, once in a while two-finger. Smaller in capacity, easier to cradle in the hand, they feel less formal somehow. One that came out of the kiln a month ago was perhaps my favorite all-time cup. It had exactly the right curve to it, fat-sided but coming in a bit at the uneven rim, two-finger handle, a pale white Shino glaze with traces of light brown where it's thin. I drank coffee from it through the whole Arts Alive weekend and spent a lot of time looking at it to figure out why it appealed to me so much more than others. Sunday evening, rushing to pack up and get away from the show, I knocked the cup on the pavement and destroyed it.

You know, that happens more than I'd like to admit, and I usually don't care for much more than a minute. Stuff happens. But I really liked that cup. That may be part of what's driving me to make the 40 or so of the past couple of days. That and a couple of shows coming up.