We shipped out a lot of pots last week, and it’s been really rewarding to see that my ohata kaki red pots have a solid fan base. I really like these pots and highly recommend them as gifts. A handmade mug or bowl with a rich glaze is a great item to give or receive as a holiday present. The eight inch diameter salad bowl (above) is a one of a kind and sells for $55.00 in my online store. Here are some more iron red glazed gift ideas:
Here are three great mug shapes that we have in stock right now. The “fancy foot mug” ($22.00), “morning mug” ($25.00) and “paddled square mug” ($25.00) may be purchased in sets, but be sure and email me first to see how many we have available. I’m drinking out of a morning mug this morning…. really!
These 5″ diameter red altered bowls sell for $20.00 each and are perfect for cereal, ice cream, or serving bowls at parties. The big red loop mug holds at least 14 ounces of liquid and sells for $28.00. This is a great gift for a guy!
The “red handle jar” ($40.00) started out as a holiday gift idea my wife came up with. She wanted me to make something to hold homemade fudge so I made a series of them for our friends. This is the item that launched the entire ohata kaki line! And I still have two of the “8 inch diameter serving bowls with handles” ($45.00) left. These would make fantastic gifts. We do “no frills” gift wrapping for just seventy-five cents!
And here’s a great combo for the “substance enthusiast” on your gift list: the ashtray ($18.00), beer stein ($28.00) and shot glass ($10.00) combo. Be sure and have a designated driver. Cheers!
Oh man, it’s the crazy season! I still have a lot of great pots available in my online store, but the stock on hand is limited. I’m almost out of some of our classic top-selling items such as the “Jesus is Coming” bowl and “Holy Shit! That’s good coffee!”, so if you have a specific gift item in mind, you might want to take a look to see if it is still available. This year I took on a lot of new consignment accounts and we shipped some big orders to them this week. Take a look at the “Find a Gallery” section of this site to see if there is a fine craft gallery near you that carries my work. Here are some of the items we still have in stock here at the Wallyware headquarters. All orders placed online will get a confirming email with the date the item is to be shipped. We also offer “super-cheap holiday gift wrapping” for just $0.75! It’s a great way to send out a unique gift with your holiday message taped on the wrapping paper.
Here are some of the items we have in stock and ready to ship:
The 10″ diameter red floppy bowl (above) is a one of a kind and sells for $55.00. You can find it in the “Ohata Kaki Red” section of my online store.
The “Holy Guacamole!” bowl sells for $36.00 and was designed as the companion piece to the ever-popular “Jesus is coming and he’s bringing the bean dip” bowl.
Here’s the best seller from last year’s “deluxe funny mug” series! When I made the “When I was your age we had to make our own coffee and it tasted like crap” mug, I didn’t realize its excellent birthday gift potential.
We’ve got dozens of Wally mugs in stock, and here are three that are still on the shelves as of Thursday morning (12/08/11): “Wally goes to a party and realizes that he is the only one who is not on anti-depressants and it makes him sad”, “Wally joins the Tea Party because the brain-eating space monsters prefer the taste of smart people” and “Wally wanders into Jackson Pollock’s studio”.
Within the last couple of years, I’ve collaborated with alternative comics writers Noah Van Sciver and John Porcellino. These guys are famous in the world of wacky drawing. Noah was nominated for an ignatz award (the comix equivalent to an academy award!) and John P. has a huge following to his work, which he has been publishing for over twenty-five years now. There is a section of my online store that carries a couple dozen one of a kind items by these guys. It’s REAL ART! Check it out!
And I’m totally out of this new Tim Tebow design, but as of this morning, The Evergreen Gallery in Evergreen, Co has a couple of mugs and a couple of plates. I should have made more!
I’m unloading the last firing of the year tomorrow, and it’s always fun to be shipping out lots of holiday orders to my wholesale accounts and my retail customers. If you are still in the shopping mode (as most of us are!), here’s some suggestions based on what has been selling well this year. The ohata kaki nesting bowls (above) are one of my favorite items in this line, and they make a wonderful gift. Last fall I made ten sets of these, but right now I only have one set left. So if you want to buy it, you should get on over to my online store ASAP to snap it up.
Here are three of our top selling mugs right now. “ELECTRIC CARS ARE GOOD FOR THE ENVIRONMENT BECAUSE ELECTRICITY COMES FROM MAGIC!” is really popular with engineers, eco-cynics and electric car fanciers alike. And it’s really funny. It’s a scientific fact: unicorn farts are funny. “Holy Shit! That’s good coffee!” is available in male and female motifs, and it’s still one of the designs we draw the most. This is practically the first cartoon I ever drew on pottery and it’s still a huge hit. Go figure. “WHEN I WAS YOUR AGE, WE HAD TO MAKE OUR OWN COFFEE AND IT TASTED LIKE CRAP.” is a new twist on a similar theme, and it’s turned out to be a great birthday gift for people with, how shall we say, a certain wisdom born from years of experience?
Did you happen to see the Broncos/Vikings game yesterday? I listened to the fourth quarter on the radio and at the end of it, I was saying to myself, “Damn! I should have made more of those Tebow pots!” We sold all of the ones we got out of the kiln last week in the Evergreen Gallery, and I only have six mugs, two plates and two bowls coming out of the kiln tomorrow. This will make an awesome present for that Tebow fan on your holiday gift list, so I suggest you snap one up if you still can!
“Jesus is coming and he’s bringing the bean dip” has been one of my best sellers for almost ten years now, but this year we produced more than any year ever! I’m pretty sure this is because of that crazy preacher who falsely predicted the apocalypse not once, but twice this year. Like the other items in this post, my inventory is limited so get on over to the online store if you want to purchase one this year.
Here’s a plate that just screams “HAPPY HOLIDAYS!” For some reason, my customers tend to love tasteless jokes, and every time I push the envelope in this department, my sales climb. This item is, of course, in stock and ready to ship so if you want to own the perfect plate for your holiday fudge, get over to the online store and snap one up!
The clock is ticking. Can you hear it? It’s telling everybody out there that there are just five days left for you to place your custom orders for the holiday season. On Friday we will load up the last kiln of the year, so if you have any intentions of placing a way-cool custom order or two, you had better do it soon. Over the past couple of years I’ve been actively encouraging my customers to submit these orders because I know how much fun it is to give someone dear something that was specially made for them. And due to the “anything goes” nature of my artwork, we have gotten a lot of strange requests over the years. One of my all-time favorites is a mug we did for a guy who was in charge of getting all the mold out of his lab/workplace after Hurricane Katrina:
Good ideas yield good custom orders. Another mug that was particularly fun to do was one we did for a woman named Sharon. I really like the affection the friend who commissioned the mug must have for her:
And last year we got an order that was a holiday gift for one of my all-time favorite musicians in the whole universe: Bob Weir of the Grateful Dead!! Take a look:
Do you have someone on your gift list who you would like to give something like this? If so, get over to the “Custom Orders” section of this website and read through the tips on how to place an order. It’s really pretty simple and it can yield some great gifts if you go for it. Don’t forget, anything ordered by Friday, 12/02 can be shipped out on Tuesday, 12/06.
If you live in Denver, it’s almost impossible not to follow the local sports teams because the media here has a tendency to beat you over the head constantly with sports news. While I’m generally a curmudgeon about pro sports, I have to admit that the Tim Tebow story is really cool. I love the fact that this goody-goody Christian kid who everybody said couldn’t win big is winning huge in the human cesspool known as the NFL. It’s the mirror image version of the Tonya Harding story. She was the bad-ass trailer trash girl in the rarefied world of figure skating and he’s the genuinely earnest and moral guy in the pantheon of thugs and jerks. Things didn’t turn out so good for Tonya, and they might not either for Tebow, but right now he’s on a roll and it’s fun to watch.
So to commemorate this blip on the sports radar screen, I came up with a new Wally design for all the Broncomaniacs and Tebow devotees. Seeing as I don’t want to have a bunch of these on my hands if Tebow starts to tank, I only made an initial two mugs and two plates with this design. You can find them at The Evergreen Gallery, while supplies last of course. And I’m doing the last firing of the year next weekend (12/4), so you can order as many mugs, plates and bowls with this design as you like at my online store and we can ship them out on Tuesday, December 6th. I usually don’t care much about the outcome of football games, but this Sunday when the Broncos play the Chargers, I’ll be hoping for another jaw-dropping Tebow victory in the final minutes because I’d love to see the magic continue. And I’d like to sell a bunch of pots, too…
And the winner of this year’s holiday ornament contest is….. A TIE FOR FIRST!!! I couldn’t decide between these two so I just picked them both. The “Occupy” theme was our top entry category, with ideas ranging from “Occupy Bethlehem” to “Occupy The North Pole”. The hook that worked for me was Marcia Hall’s suggestion that we put Wally under the tree. When I thought of a dog and a tree, it just naturally led to my favorite dog whizzing on a Christmas tree. And Anne Amerson sent in a slew of ideas, with radio evangelist Harold Camping’s over-hyped rapture predictions being the the one that fit nicely on an ornament. I also really liked her suggestion that we do one with Charlie Sheen singing “The Twelve Days of Christmas” (“Four call girls, 3 French whores, 2 illegal drugs…”) That’s very clever, but really hard to draw on a two inch diameter ornament. And honorable (huh?) mention goes to Pat Newman for suggesting I put the heads of Saddam Hussein And Osama Bin Laden on a pair of ornaments. I really should have done that and brazenly sold them to the masses, but for some reason I seem to have a sense of standards and ethics these days. I am such a wuss. Many thanks to all of you who sent in your ideas.
These ornaments are available for a mere $12.50 in the “Wally Pins and Ornaments” section of my online store. They are, of course, in limited supply!
Here’s something new! One of my top-selling mugs is now a plate. I’ve been drawing this design on mugs for a couple of years, and one of my accounts suggested I put it on a plate. Wow! Great idea! People eat cake off of plates, don’t they? Go buy it here.
Last week’s firing yielded a wonderful set of eight pasta bowls that went straight from the kiln to my family’s dining room. These bowls are nine inches in diameter and so far we’ve filled them with shrimp fettucini, penne pasta and bouillabaisse. I really enjoy using this dinnerware and am pleased with its style and durability. If you happen to be looking for a new set of dinnerware, I highly recommend it. We just added the nine inch pasta bowl to the ohata kaki section of my online store, but they are a dinnerware item so you’ll have to allow 3-5 weeks for delivery if you are interested in getting a set. Also out of the kiln last week: spoon rests! They are five and a half inches in diameter and in stock and ready to ship. Price: $15.00.
We have a lot of the ohata kaki red pots in stock right now and a porcelain vessel with this warm glaze could be the perfect item for someone on your holiday gift list this year!
