Black Dog Pottery owner Jessica Kinney discusses her shop and what she added when she took over the space Tuesday afternoon in Centralia.
Black Dog Pottery owner Jessica Kinney discusses opening her store Tuesday afternoon in Centralia.
Black Dog Vintage is seen Tuesday afternoon in downtown Centralia.
For the past 10 years, Jessica Kinney has had her own business that involves selling antiques, reclaimed items and crafts she makes herself. While she has dreamed of having her own storefront for a while, she didn’t anticipate it would be a paint-your-own pottery studio.
Eight months ago, however, Kinney opened Black Dog Pottery in downtown Centralia. The store is filled with blank pottery items people can paint themselves, bright blue tables with paint and brushes on them and a large red sign that reads “art” in the back of the store. Kinney also sells her own finished pottery items and crafts.
“I like to be able to teach people how to feel creative,” Kinney said. “It’s really just practice. (They) just come in and people who don’t think they are artistic at all pick up their items and are like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is so awesome.’ That’s kind of one of my things — I just enjoy helping people get the feeling that they are artistic.”
Every Wednesday, Kinney hosts a workshop where people can learn how to make more elaborate pottery creations. The next one is a “Mandala Mug Workshop.”
A while back, Kinney hosted a family get together in her shop and her cousins came to paint pottery. Tuesday afternoon, her cousin Elena Waite came to pick up a few pieces her children painted, including a seahorse and a little red house that serves as a candle holder. Waite told Kinney that her 13-year-old daughter has featured the new shop on her Instagram.
“They are really good about advising you and making your true artist come out,” said Waite of Black Dog Pottery.
About two and a half years ago, Kinney took a clay-throwing class in Olympia and began throwing herself. She said that while she enjoys throwing on a wheel, it is easier for people to walk in and paint pottery instead of working with the raw clay.
“I enjoy that part, but really when it gets down to it, it’s completely different types of pottery,” Kinney said.
When she began her business 10 years ago, Kinney mostly turned reclaimed and recycled items into new art pieces. She originally bought a kiln to do bottle slumping — shaping glass in high temperatures — but was too intimidated by the kiln to use it.
“It was kind of one of those things to have something fired to like 2,000 degrees in your house — like, that doesn’t seem normal,” Kinney said.
She overcame that fear after she took a kiln class in Portland and now owns several that she operates. She bought her first kiln second hand.
“It’s an older, like 1960s or so kiln,” Kinney said. “(It has) a kiln setter and you have to go set a timer, and every few hours you have to turn the knobs and stuff like that. So it would be like the middle of the night, my alarm is going off and I am changing knobs. Now I have digital kilns that I can set and they just do their thing.”
Even with the digital kilns, Kinney said, she keeps a camera in the shop so she can make sure they haven’t set her store on fire.
Currently, Kinney orders the pottery that people paint in her shop. While she has the materials at home to make pottery for people to paint, she is just beginning to implement it in her shop.
“Right now, I have some fortune cookies that I have made,” Kinney said. “Then, there is going to be just some little pineapple dishes, and I am working on some spoon rest type things that would be thrown on the wheel, and then the other stuff is mostly slab stuff.”
Once she makes a few more pieces of her own, she will bring them in for people to paint.
“We have only been open eight months, so I’m just now kind of balancing out having time to do some different things,” Kinney said.
