Bud Vase Workshop | Heath Ceramics Open Studios

Over Mother’s Day weekend, my friend Tiffany and I got to check out Heath Ceramics’ open studios event by participating in a workshop at the San Francisco store. We got to learn about their bud vases and try our hands at pouring one from a mold and also glazing one to keep. It was tons of fun indulging our arts & crafts desires and getting an insider’s perspective on these iconic pieces too.

Below, a look at the bud vase mold and an example of a different kind of mold– mug handles.

Step one in making a bud vase: pouring the slip (liquid clay) into the plaster mold. We fill it past the top of the bud vase shape so that the extra can sink down as the plaster pulls the water out of the slip and it creates a wall along the inside.

We let the vases sit for about 20 minutes (while we did a different part of the workshop). Then we agitated the inside with a chopstick and turned the mold upside down to pour out the extra liquid on the inside.

After a little more drainage and drying time, we opened up the two parts of the mold to see the little bud vase inside! Then you pull it out gently with the sides of your hand.

Perfect little Heath logo on the bottoms of these raw vases.

We didn’t actually keep these bud vases; they were just for demo purposes. But they gave us pre-fired vases that were ready for us to glaze instead.

First we poured some glaze into the vase to coat the inside. Then we decided how we wanted to dip the vases to glaze the outsides. Tiffany and I basically did inverses of each other’s patterns with white and lavender glazes.

Here’s Tiffany smashing her demo vase that we oh-so-carefully made. And some of our finished vases from the class!

A gorgeous space and a wonderful workshop too! Thanks for coming with me, Tiffany!

And finally, here’s the bud vase, shipped directly to me! It’s definitely imperfect, with lots of bumps and bruises, some asymmetry, and lots of “character.” But it’s kind of cool! I’d definitely do this workshop again!