Woman makes pottery designs with horsehair

Rebecca Skow loves her classes so much that they have become her hobbies. Skow makes ceramic vases, bowls and cups and had them on display Thursday at Washington?s Farmers Market. She also displayed the decorative glass pieces she made.

Skow was raised in Winfield but has lived in Washington for 14 years. She is now enrolled in a community college where she studies fine arts. She uses the kiln at the college to produce her wares. The piece of pottery that attracted the most interest from customers were the pots that were white with wavy black lines on them. The lines were made by wrapping horse hair around the pot just after it?s pulled out of the fire.

?You can?t use human hair,? she said. ?Horsehair is different. It?s thicker.?

Skow said she takes a hair from under the horse?s tail. She said she likes the tail hairs because those are the longest. It?s important that she pick a long hair because that allows her to wrap the hair around the pot without burning herself.

?I try to keep my hands as far away from the pot as possible,? she said. ?The pot is probably 1,500 to 2,000 degrees.?

Skow said she has used white horse hair on her pots. She said the white hairs look fainter on the finished pot than the black hairs.

Skow said she didn?t so much choose fine arts as a career but rather fell into it. Two years ago, she was studying photography. Her sister in Indiana had just had a baby, so Skow missed the first two weeks of class that fall. She was enrolled in a jewelry class, and the professor informed her she wouldn?t be able to catch up.

Her ceramics professor told her not to worry because there was another ceramics class Skow could take in place of jewelry.

?Ceramics starts a little slower than jewelry, so I was able to catch up in that class,? Skow said.

She enjoys her ceramics classes so much she has decided to minor in ceramics to go with her major in photography.

?I love working with the clay,? Skow said. ?I don?t have ADD but I?ve been told I do. I like being able to jump from one medium to another. Photography is very different. You don?t get dirty and you?re not bent over a wheel crippled. Photography gives me a break.?

Skow said she is now enthralled with pottery.

?Whenever I see a pottery demonstration, the moving wheel draws me in,? she said. ?It almost hypnotizes me.?

Skow?s ceramics professor also teaches a class on glass, which Skow has also become interested in. Skow has made sheets of glass of multiple colors and glass that had been curved. She said each color in her glass pieces comes from a separate pane of glass.

Skow said her glass pieces can be used for anything. She said they can be used to hold candy or car keys. For one of her pieces, she took dozens of thin sheets of glass of different colors that were about an inch tall and melted them together.

?I did little strips of glass and then I put them all on end,? she said.  I had to put ceramic bands around them so they wouldn?t fall over and melt all over the kiln.?