The Power of Local | Lillie Turner | Episode 659

The Potters Cast

Paul Blais

Visual Arts, Careers, Business, Arts

4.9 • 591 Ratings

🗓️ 1 September 2020

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Lillie Turner is in love with clay - not a guy named Clay, as her husband's name is Jeremy, but clay, as in pottery clay. Lillie's first exposure to pottery was in 2015, at a community club taking 6 nights of wheel throwing classes. Throwing on the wheel did not come easy and is still a struggle somedays to center the clay, pull up the wall, and make pieces that match in shape and size, but she does not give up easily!

The community pottery club in town allowed potters 24 hours access to the studio which was great for a newbie who was very enthusiastic. Many hours were spent at the wheel- but Lillie had a keen interest in learning all aspects of pottery, so she volunteered to load kilns, maintain kilns, which gave her great experience early on. The next big step was to learn about glazes, with the approval of the club Lillie organized a 3 day glaze workshop with John Britt from North Carolina, which was incredible, but quite advanced as Lillie had never even mixed a glaze before- but that did not intimidate her- she bought a kiln, and set up a small studio space in her garage- and started glaze testing. The more glazes Lillie made, the more she wanted to learn about glaze chemistry. Lillie found a fantastic online workshop for cone 6 glazes taught by Matt Katz of Ceramic Materials Workshop, which is an in depth course of over 50 lessons to work through at your own pace. Lillie jokes that she is now trying to learn chemistry at the age of 41 years old- as she was homeschooled from grade 6 onwards and never took chemistry.

Lillie's business is called My Lil Shop Canada- as she is not just a potter- she is an entrepreneur of many things, including soap making, and beekeeping which compliment pottery so well- the soap sells nicely with pottery soap dishes, and Lillie makes beeswax tea light candles for pottery candle holders, and honey pots as special gifts.

Recently Lillie has started to focus on making serving trays and dinner plates as cooking is a huge passion of hers. In 2009 Lillie left her career in banking to go to Culinary school, as she had always wanted to learn the tricks of the trade and become a better cook, as she and her husband love good food!

Lillie became a full time potter April 2020 after selling a wholesale skin care company she owned for the past 7 years, and is loving doing something she is really passionate about- being creative, and making pottery for people to enjoy for many years to come! She sells most of her work through ETSY, as well as sells her work wholesale to a handful of stores in British Columbia, and one in Nova Scotia.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is the Potter's Cast.
0:02.0	A podcast home for potters everywhere.
0:05.5	It's a community of potters dedicated to grow their business.
0:08.7	We're picking up where the art degree ends.
0:11.1	I'm your host, Paul Blaze.
0:14.2	Well, you've just landed in episode number 659 of the Potter's cast. And I just want to say welcome to the show. So stoked, we are hanging out
0:25.9	together today. And I've got a cool person coming on the show today, Lily Turner, who is a
0:30.8	Canadian potter, which I'm always, you know, slightly in love with those Canadian people because,
0:36.7	you know, I've got some very significant
0:38.9	Canadians in my life. So I'm always excited when I get to talk to another Canadian. I almost feel
0:45.6	like I could be Canadian. And if it were, if the laws were just slightly different, I could get
0:50.9	dual citizenship to be able to be a U.S. citizen and a Canadian citizen, but they just
0:56.7	changed about six years ago, whatever, seven years ago, eight years ago. I can't remember exactly
1:02.9	how long ago, but it changed where I wasn't able to file the way that I would have been able
1:07.7	to do just not too crazy long ago ago because my mom hails from Canada.
1:13.2	So anyhow, there you go.
1:15.6	But anyhow, we've got Lily Turner coming on the show.
1:19.0	And one of the things that we talk about quite a bit in the Potter's cast is about the idea of going online. In fact, that's kind of one of the things
1:29.5	that I think that all potters ought to be, you know, shooting for is this idea of get online. You'll
1:36.2	open up your sales base and you'll do great doing that. And, you know, there's some tactics and
1:43.2	some strategies you use to be able to do that well
1:45.7	that's all well and good but then every once in a while and this happens with with a few potters
	...

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