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Tiny little pitcher!

I have absolutely no idea what this is good for, tbh. One serving of milk for your tea, if your mug isn't too big? Using as a vase for very small flowers? Just decoration? idk! Would love to hear if anyone has any ideas -- I use small bowls a lot, but I'm curious what people might use tiny pitchers for, if anything!

Anyway I was on a kick of making tiny things last month, so I ended up making a bunch of little bowls and jugs in both white and black clay. Expect more posts with 'em!

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My piece for Asidian for the 2025 @fandomtrumpshate Craft Bazaar!

This was my first time doing pottery for a charity auction, and I had a GREAT time. Asidian liked the style of my fossil pots and is into Dead Boy Detectives, so we tossed around a couple of options and came up with this design.

...And then due to various life and studio delays I didn't get it completed until late May and didn't get it back from the kiln until early June. At which point I hastened to get it mailed off before I left the next day on a trip, which is why these pictures are in poorer light than usual: I had to take them at night and then get the package ready to go out in the morning, rather than waiting for good sunlight. Sorry about that!

Anyway, I'm honored and delighted to have gotten the chance to make this in thanks for Asidian's donation to a good cause!

Progress pics below the readmore:

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My piece for Asidian for the 2025 @fandomtrumpshate Craft Bazaar!

This was my first time doing pottery for a charity auction, and I had a GREAT time. Asidian liked the style of my fossil pots and is into Dead Boy Detectives, so we tossed around a couple of options and came up with this design.

...And then due to various life and studio delays I didn't get it completed until late May and didn't get it back from the kiln until early June. At which point I hastened to get it mailed off before I left the next day on a trip, which is why these pictures are in poorer light than usual: I had to take them at night and then get the package ready to go out in the morning, rather than waiting for good sunlight. Sorry about that!

Anyway, I'm honored and delighted to have gotten the chance to make this in thanks for Asidian's donation to a good cause!

Progress pics below the readmore:

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My latest piece, as in just fired this past week! I was experimenting with this one, and I'm quite pleased with it.

Pretty much everything I make is thrown on the wheel, but this is an exception. I pressed little flattened balls of clay into a plaster mold to make it, then cleaned up the inside and the rim after it had dried leather hard; the idea was that it would have a sort of scaly effect on the outside, but it turned out subtle enough that it looked more like cracks in an old concrete wall rather than scales. So I decided to lean into that and go for a sort of industrial/decaying look.

It's a fairly small teacup, only 3 or so inches tall. That's pretty much inherent to the mold I used and the shrinkage rate of the clay in question, but I like the effect enough that I might try it again sometime on a larger piece. A full-sized mug, maybe, or a cereal bowl, or a cup-and-saucer combo.

This one is also going in my studio's cup sale. (I debated putting the details of that here, but decided I wanted this blog to exist for a while longer as a separate thing from my main online identity before I put quite that much info into a public post. But hey, if you want specific info about an art festival with a whole big lot of cool cups for sale, shoot me a message! Seriously, I saw the collection today and a) there are SO MANY, and b) so many of them are SO PRETTY. )

Process pics under the readmore:

The original clay was white (b-mix) and the "cracked" texture was pretty subtle unless you were looking for it. So first, I covered the whole thing with black underglaze, let it dry, and wiped it back with a damp sponge to bring out the texture.

Then I used a stiff brush to spatter on red iron oxide...

And then I dipped the whole thing in a grey glaze, sponged on a bronze-green in splotches, and dotted it with clusters of yellow that I hoped would look like lichen.

And I think it does! The oxide is pretty subtle, which I don't mind, but next time I might try to figure out how to bring that out a bit more. Otherwise, though, I'm really happy with this experiment.

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Wow, it's been like a month since I posted here, huh? Sorry, folks! (Also: hello, new followers!! Exciting to see you!)

I'm queuing up more posts, sheepishly -- more cups! a plate! a platter-and-tiny-cups set I submitted to an art contest! soon another round of tiny bowls, once I trim them and so on! -- but in the meantime, here's a teaser: a bunch of cups I'm contributing to a cup sale my studio is doing as part of a local art festival.

With the tiny mugs in front, I was aiming for espresso cups. I had fun with it, but what I've mostly learned is that as someone who doesn't drink coffee, I have no idea how small is too small for an espresso cup, lol. I need to buttonhole some espresso-drinking friends and inquire, I guess.

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FTH 2025 Donation Totals

Friends, this has been an extraordinary year for the auction. We know how and why this happened: like in early 2017, everyone is scared and upset and looking for a way to do something meaningful.

And—just like in 2017, and every year since—hundreds of us have stepped up to support our most vulnerable neighbors and the organizations working to protect them.

Except this year, we did it on a scale we've never done before.

Last year, our donation total was an incredible $67,776.28

This year's donation total...

are you ready for it....

(you're not ready for it. we weren't.)

This year's donation total is:

Yes, you're reading that right. $127,204.11

We're flummoxed too—and deeply grateful to everyone who has poured their time and effort and money and love into participating in the auction this year, and into the fanworks that will come from it.

If you're curious about how those donations were distributed across the different organizations, here is the breakdown (this breakdown doesn't include employer match donations, which is why the total is a little lower):

Bellingcat: $2,636.19

Congo Leadership Initiative: $2,842

Crips for esims for Gaza: $4,762.60

Disability Law United: $3,835.39

Environmental Integrity Project: $3,712

Fight for the Future Education Fund: $3,108

Freedom to Read Foundation: $7,139.50

Global Project Against Hate and Extremism: $6,473

Hope for Ukraine: $12,613.93

In Our Own Voice: National Black Women's Reproductive Justice Agenda: $3,626

Middle East Children's Alliance: $13,572.43

National Network to End Domestic Violence: $4,999.95

Never Again Action: $4,555

News Literacy Project: $3,745.16

Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights: $10,072.56

Umbrella: organizations serving vulnerable LGBTQ people

Brave Space Alliance: $2,558

Kentucky Health Justice Network Inc: $2,636

Sherlock's Homes: $7,780.77

TransFamily Support: $5,387.01

TransQueerPueblo: $2,949

Other local LGBT organizations: $10,696.71 Yes, you're reading that right again. Three orgs AND the cumulative Other local LGBT orgs broke five figures.

We're especially delighted because, for the first time, the umbrella category worked the way we've always hoped it would! As you can see above, significant numbers of people used the umbrella category as a way to connect to an organization local to them.

As we learned through people's comments on the donation form, some people donated to organizations they were already familiar with (and in some cases had already donated to, or even volunteered at); others used this as a reason to learn more about their local organization and support them.

We'll share more about the "other umbrella" donations over the next few weeks—some more detailed stats, as well as the names of some of the local orgs that people donated to—and we'll invite those of you who connected up with local orgs to share your stories. We love that so many people took this chance to support groups working in their own community, and we hope that we can keep that going next year and beyond!

And speaking of the future!

Now is a great time to follow @fth2025fanworks. We'll use that blog to share any auction fanwork that gets posted to tumblr.

We urge you to keep up with the organizations you supported this year (and the others on our list!) Follow them on social media, subscribe to their newsletters, whatever works best for you. It will enable you to keep an eye on the good work you've helped support, and to find out quickly when these orgs need some extra support, financial or otherwise.

And if you're looking out at the world and feeling the itch to do more, here are some possibilities:

Follow @fthaction, the meatspace activism wing of FTH. We relaunched this project in the weeks between the end of signups and the beginning of browsing period, sharing some reading lists, an individualized activism bingo card, and an AMA with activist and organizer Kat Calvin. (We also did a test-flight AMA with ourselves, talking about the auction.) We'll probably need some time to recover from this year's auction, but we'll be back soon with more resources to share, more AMAs, and more tools for exploring all the different forms that meaningful activism can take and for figuring out which ones are right for you.

Organize your own auction! We've put together a detailed playbook that contains that contains as much information and as many resources as we can provide for getting an auction off the ground, including detailed guides. Almost everything in the playbook is fully public; there are a few forms that are access-locked because google has stupid ideas about sharing forms, but we're happy to give you access to those, too: just drop us an email.

Over here at FTH headquarters we are all in need of a long nap. But we'll be back in a couple of weeks, as promised, to share more about the umbrella orgs and to dig back into @fthaction to see what's possible.

Looking forward to a whole bunch of new fanworks! <3 your FTH mods

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An assortment of tiny bowls from the last round of glazing! Some of them came out more as intended than others, but I still like looking at the whole collection of them clustered together.

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Here they are, glazed! The insides are shiny enough that it's hard to photograph them well, but I'm really happy with how they came out. One of them got a tiny chip knocked into its edge at some point after firing and before I picked them up, which is a bummer, but so it goes. (Besides, I'm giving them to my mother, who will use them to hold teabags and tea strainers, and a little chip won't be a problem for that.)

More works in progress! Three tiny bowls, painted with sashiko patterns.

Turns out it's hard to do a grid on a small curved surface!! These bowls are so small and they took me FOREVER. But I like 'em. Gotta figure out if and how I'm glazing the outsides (the insides are obviously getting transparent glaze).

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the video version of the mesozoic marine critters bowl, as promised!

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the video version of the mesozoic marine critters bowl, as promised!

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extremely pleased to report that the glaze treated my mesozoic pals quite well indeed

More fossils! We'll see how the glaze treats these little critters, but I'm pleased with them so far...

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Last day for this auction, and also for the 2025 Fandom Trumps Hate Craft Bazaar stalls in general! I don't know exactly what time other stalls are closing, but I'll be leaving mine open until 11:59 pm (eastern US time).

Birch Shark Art Pottery Stall

Offering 1 custom handmade ceramic dish for the Fandom Trumps Hate Craft Bazaar (auction form here)

What: a custom glazed ceramic piece made by me to your specifications

Cup, small bowl, mug, set of 2-3 tiny bowls (those would count as 1 piece for this)

Potentially open to discussing other types of dishes (plate, cereal bowl, perforated berry bowl, etc)

Food safe, microwave safe, dishwasher safe

Will ship: anywhere in the US; international is negotiable

Style: see the pictures above for some examples, and my pottery tag for more!

I can do a wide range of glaze colors – happy to discuss options. I can also do painted designs in underglaze, sgraffito (carved designs) and incised/cutaway/texture decorations. And, of course, these can be combined.

My underglaze painting and sgraffito style tends to used limited colors and relatively stylized designs; I’m going to be better at motifs than realistic portraits. For example, see this or this. Happy to discuss until we find something that works for us both!

Any fandom, ship, etc. is an option for design. If I don’t know it, I’ll ask for some references or more detailed description of what you have in mind.

Non-fannish designs, words, cool glazes with no designs, etc., are all options too!

What I won’t do:

NSFW stuff (explicit sexual content, drug references, etc) – I make and fire my work at a shared studio, and this is their rule.

Please note that this is a custom ceramic piece, and I have limited studio time. Please allow 6-8 weeks for me to make it, fire it, glaze it, fire it again, and get in the mail to you!

Again, the link to bid is here! You can see the current top bid here.

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Canada geese! Make way for goslings?

Really pleased with how this one came out. Painting and glaze both -- I've tried that dark blue a few times and this is the only one where it came out as even and saturated and rich as I'd been envisioning.

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YEAH. I really think this is part of the appeal for me, and why it's ended up as a creative habit I've stuck with so consistently. (I have a lot of creative and artistic hobbies, but usually unless they're something I can do while watching tv or similar, I pick them up for a project or two and then drop them again for a while.)

I've been telling people that it's a three-hour block a week when I can't stare at a screen or scroll the internet and all I can do is play around making physical objects out of earth, and that's absolutely part of it too. But the whole nature of it where you have a rolling succession of steps with only somewhat flexible deadlines for each piece -- and, if you're working on multiple pieces, as I usually am, they might be at different points in the process -- is a big part, too. Plus, the various steps involve different angles of creative expression (what do I want to make this time? of which clay, how big? how am I shaping it? how am I trimming it? am I adding any texture or underglaze before it's fired? am I adding any decoration after the bisque fire? how am I glazing it?), but each decision constrains what makes sense to do afterward without totally limiting it.

It's just really satisfying as an ongoing set of different-but-related projects to noodle around with, both physically and mentally, at least for me.

Yknow, pottery has really fallen into an ADHD sweet spot for me because it sort of has...built in deadlines? Dampboxes aside, once you start working on a piece, the natural drying process of the clay puts you on a timeline that you can slow a bit with careful wrapping, but not fully pause, which means that you have to keep working on schedule or risk loosing the whole project. It's not absolute--clay can be re-hydrated and you can slow drying quite a lot-- but it's enough time pressure to keep me progressing steadily, especially with multiple pieces at various stages of completion. On the other side, missing the drying "deadline" doesn't actually result in a loss of material, since dry clay can be recycled, but you do lose the time you spent working on the project.

I dunno. For me it's a nice balance of perceived deadline pressure without much actual loss if a deadline is missed.

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Another mug! No particular recipient in mind for this one (and we certainly don't need more mugs lol) but I had fun doing the thumb rest detailing.

My love of simplicity is always at war with my love of sneaking in little textured details. (And, you know, painted fish, but this one doesn't have any of those.)

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Reminder that, although the main/digital auctions for Fandom Trumps Hate have closed, the craft stalls (like this one!) are open until March 10. Check out all the Craft Bazaar offerings at https://fth2025craftbazaar.dreamwidth.org/ -- there's a lot of very cool stuff on offer!

Birch Shark Art Pottery Stall

Offering 1 custom handmade ceramic dish for the Fandom Trumps Hate Craft Bazaar (auction form here)

What: a custom glazed ceramic piece made by me to your specifications

Cup, small bowl, mug, set of 2-3 tiny bowls (those would count as 1 piece for this)

Potentially open to discussing other types of dishes (plate, cereal bowl, perforated berry bowl, etc)

Food safe, microwave safe, dishwasher safe

Will ship: anywhere in the US; international is negotiable

Style: see the pictures above for some examples, and my pottery tag for more!

I can do a wide range of glaze colors – happy to discuss options. I can also do painted designs in underglaze, sgraffito (carved designs) and incised/cutaway/texture decorations. And, of course, these can be combined.

My underglaze painting and sgraffito style tends to used limited colors and relatively stylized designs; I’m going to be better at motifs than realistic portraits. For example, see this or this. Happy to discuss until we find something that works for us both!

Any fandom, ship, etc. is an option for design. If I don’t know it, I’ll ask for some references or more detailed description of what you have in mind.

Non-fannish designs, words, cool glazes with no designs, etc., are all options too!

What I won’t do:

NSFW stuff (explicit sexual content, drug references, etc) – I make and fire my work at a shared studio, and this is their rule.

Please note that this is a custom ceramic piece, and I have limited studio time. Please allow 6-8 weeks for me to make it, fire it, glaze it, fire it again, and get in the mail to you!

Again, the link to bid is here! You can see the current top bid here.

[birch-shark-art]

Birch Shark Art Pottery Stall

Offering 1 custom handmade ceramic dish for the Fandom Trumps Hate Craft Bazaar (auction form here)

What: a custom glazed ceramic piece made by me to your specifications

Cup, small bowl, mug, set of 2-3 tiny bowls (those would count as 1 piece for this)

Potentially open to discussing other types of dishes (plate, cereal bowl, perforated berry bowl, etc)

Food safe, microwave safe, dishwasher safe

Will ship: anywhere in the US; international is negotiable

Style: see the pictures above for some examples, and my pottery tag for more!

I can do a wide range of glaze colors – happy to discuss options. I can also do painted designs in underglaze, sgraffito (carved designs) and incised/cutaway/texture decorations. And, of course, these can be combined.

My underglaze painting and sgraffito style tends to used limited colors and relatively stylized designs; I’m going to be better at motifs than realistic portraits. For example, see this or this. Happy to discuss until we find something that works for us both!

Any fandom, ship, etc. is an option for design. If I don’t know it, I’ll ask for some references or more detailed description of what you have in mind.

Non-fannish designs, words, cool glazes with no designs, etc., are all options too!

What I won’t do:

NSFW stuff (explicit sexual content, drug references, etc) – I make and fire my work at a shared studio, and this is their rule.

Please note that this is a custom ceramic piece, and I have limited studio time. Please allow 6-8 weeks for me to make it, fire it, glaze it, fire it again, and get in the mail to you!

Again, the link to bid is here! You can see the current top bid here.