"Eyes light up when people first see the houses; yours did," Jan Richardson said as she gave me a tour of Windy Meadows Pottery, her ceramic enterprise near Frederick, Maryland. We were visiting the showroom and Jan was talking about the houses of her miniature Victorian town in display there, an enchanting assortment of stone ware buildings, just a sampling of the enormous creative output of Jan and a dozen apprentices.
The name, Windy Meadows Pottery, comes from the windy location near the Potomac River on Jan's Maryland farm. It has become a thriving craft industry, employing twenty people as artisans, sales and office help under Jan's direction.
From small beginnings in her farmhouse, where she rolled and cut the clay on her kitchen table, Jan's artistic enterprise has expanded to numerous farm buildings, even spilling over into a trailer. And from being a hobby, it has become a full time profession, often with fourteen-hour workdays.
Jan Richardson's idea of building clay houses originated twelve years ago in a ceramics class as she was experimenting with the properties of clay. She was inspired by "spirit houses," small-scale versions of Shinto shrines (called yashiro in Japanese), found throughout the Orient in front of Shinto homes, where daily offerings of food are made. Jan modeled her first house on these.
At that point her repertoire included other kinds of ceramic work, which she showed and sold at dozens of craft fairs. However, the houses became those most sought after and Jan focused her energies on developing them further.
As the demand grew, she hired additional help, mainly from the local community. Many were mothers who could work only during the hours their children were at school. This required setting up flexible working hours and an arrangement where some mothers could work in their own homes. Jan also had to learn the art of combining a business with caring for her own two children, who are now adults.
In the workshop, cottages and houses were in various stages of assembly. In one area, clay was being rolled and cut by a "cutter" according to "blueprints" taken from a small cardboard filebox. "Preppers" were readying the parts for the building stage by imprinting the cut pieces with patterns of bricks, boards and other textures; with fashioning windows, shutters and doors in a variety of patterns.
The "builders," accomplish the more complicated procedures. They patiently add ornate and intricate decorations in colored clays around windows and doors then carefully assemble the parts, adding clay where necessary for structural strength, so that the roof is well-supported.
The finished pieces are then thoroughly dried in a small room lined with shelves, next to the main workshop. No trace of moisture could remain or the piece might explode during the bisquing of the clay in the kiln--which Jan said does sometimes happen.
The bisquing process takes place in two electric kilns situated in another small building, with an adjacent room available for the final glazing of the stone ware in a gas-fueled
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