For many years I taught pottery at a group home for boys. It had both challenges and rewards - mostly challenges. My goal was to give the boys a way to express their creativity and hopefully have a little fun along the way and I think we usually got that done.
One of my students wanted to ‘do something’ with hand-dug clay. This was great, a project someone was going to be really interested in doing! I knew of a clay deposit so I dug some up and brought it in along with some other ‘dirt’ samples. We made each sample into sticky mud/clay, formed pinch pots and fired them. The clay made a little pot while the dirt pieces still crumbled in our fingers.
It wasn’t great clay to work with though, it cracked too easily when being formed. Clay for pottery is usually refined with some other ingredients and not used straight from the ground. So we decided to try and melt it into a glaze instead. We added a bit of this and a dash of that and ended up with the beautiful glaze I call Philo Green. Who would have thought that a classroom project would end up giving me this beautiful treasure?
What I love most about this glaze is that when I’m out in the forest and I look up into the canopy of the redwood trees I see Philo Green. When I planned to write about this glaze it was well before the fires started but now it seems so timely to look up and appreciate nature at its best here in our beautiful coastal forests.