Small Ceramic Bud Vase, Handmade Blue Lava Glaze Pottery, Textured Wabi Sabi Tumbler

A small handmade ceramic bud vase with a deeply textured lava glaze — turquoise and cobalt crawling over warm copper, breaking into hundreds of raised droplets like coral, lichen or reptile skin. One of a kind, hand-built and fired in my home studio in Katwijk aan Zee, Netherlands.

About the glaze

This is a reactive crawl glaze, and it is genuinely unrepeatable. During the firing the glaze pulls away from itself and beads up, letting the copper-brown clay body show through in the gaps while the blue pools into iridescent ridges. Where it sits thick you get soft lilac and violet; where it thins out it goes to pale sea green. I never know exactly what will come out of the kiln — that is the point, and it is why there is only one of these.

The inside is glazed smooth in deep midnight blue, so the contrast with the rough outside is part of the pleasure of holding it.

Size & materials

Height: 10 cm

Opening: 6 cm across

Stoneware clay, high-fired reactive glaze

Hand-built · signed on the underside

Watertight, fully glazed inside

Two ways to use it

As a bud vase for a single stem, a few dried grasses, a sprig of eucalyptus or a small bunch of wildflowers — the narrow 6 cm opening holds a loose arrangement beautifully. Or as a tumbler, a brush pot on a desk, a holder for pens, make-up brushes or matches, or simply as a small sculptural object on a shelf or windowsill where the light can catch the texture.

Care

Hand wash only. Not dishwasher or microwave safe. The textured surface is best cleaned with a soft brush rather than a cloth.

Made by hand, start to finish

Shaped, textured and glazed by me — no moulds, no production line. Two firings, 48 hours in the kiln.