When we started making plates for restaurants in 2014, we also began to create custom glaze colors for our clients to help them flesh out the design of their spaces. When honing in on a color, we would often make seven or more variations per color to make sure we got it right. In glaze chemistry, things can be really unexpected and magical- you try to make a green but end up with pink, or end up with a green apple when you wanted emerald tones. 

We should introduce Matt Welch, who is important to Haand in many ways, but if you are going in chronological order of importance, he is the person who introduced Chris and I. My original home-room teacher felt I was a “handful” so I got moved into another homeroom mid-year. In that homeroom sat Matt, and we were sitting together in detention mere days later. We became fast friends when he felt guilty about getting us both Saturday detention for laughing in detention. 

Vespertine is a term used in biology to describe animals and plants that are active during the period immediately after sunset- not to be confused with crepuscular, which is the period immediately preceding sunset, and nocturnal, which means active all night. Vespertinus is Latin for “evening”, and Vespertine the album by Bjork is pretty great, too. 

“This glaze reminds me of a glaze we used in our high school pottery- maybe middle school. The depth of it reminds me of staring into deep water- the infinity of staring at the night sky. I spent a lot of time camping as a kid in boy scouts, you start to lose yourself in the shifting blue as the stars start to gradually come out it stops being a color and starts becoming something else- something infinite. You can start to lose yourself in the calm depths of this glaze- it’s amazing that a color can make you feel so much.”

Chris Pence, Co-Founder and President

It will be 10 years this summer since Chris and I started Haand. We have created many different styles and colors since then, but something that has been in production from the very beginning is Cloudware. Cloudware is unique to Haand- we blend a blue and white porcelain slip in the plaster molds while the piece is being made. This makes every single piece of Cloudware unique, in fact, we encourage our casters to put their own spin on the process. A trained eye can tell the difference between Nickolas’s Cloudware and Helena’s, or if it’s a very old piece, between Chris’s and mine.

I always loved Wedgwood Jasperware, my mom and grandmother had a few of the famous light blue and white pattern ware. Because it was either in a china cabinet or hung on a wall, I would sneak a chair over to stand on and run my little fingers on the surface- it was such a strange feeling! Similar to my plastic toys in its smoothness, but fused and mineral-y in a way that blew little mind (and continues to). 

We worked really hard to make sure that OUR tapered mug feels like a Haand piece, with a slightly wonky, wavery rim and a handle that feels very strong but is surprisingly thin and undulating. This is one of my favorite styles of mug, but a surprisingly hard shape to inject any “soul” into. Everyone has (or had) dozens of mugs with a similar form as these laying around from an Ikea shopping spree, and there’s a reason- they work really well! The tapered form keeps liquids warm longer because it has less surface area exposed to the air, they fit well in cup holders, and they have great leverage between the large handle and the body. The Cloudware patterns have plenty of room to play on this shape, as I look at a shelf of these I am delighted to see how each is completely different from its siblings but together form a panorama- like watching clouds scoot across the ocean on a summer day.