The Secret Mug Project

I told a few people about my idea, my grandmother, my husband, my mom, and it is a sign of their trust that they didn't gang up and have me committed. More likely they didn't know who would take care of the kids. I wanted to make Knitted Mugs, I told them. Uh-huh. Okaaay. She's losing it ...


But today I opened the kiln,

and this is what I got. These are ceramic, lead free, food and dishwasher safe, and are both handknitted and handbuilt. The stitch pattern is called sugar cubes, which I thought was perfect for coffee and tea mugs.
Knitted mug in bluebell.
Closeup of knit mug, notice the amazing stitch definition.


Now for the process. I knitted a swatch, of cotton-acrylic yarn, 13" wide x 5" high, stapled it to a board, and cast it in plaster. Then I rolled slabs of a low-fire brown clay onto the plaster mold, and used those slabs to handbuild the mug body and handle. The pressed "buttons" are decorative but also function to 'rivet' the seams. I plan on making some real buttons with this same impressed texture for some future knitting project. The clay is glaze fired to ^04 (1940 degrees F.). It sounds pretty simple.


The problems -- stapling the swatch onto the board meant that it stretched weirdly in parts, and of coursethe plaster went through the knitting and caused some problems in freeing the swatch from the mold, which ended in me breaking a chunk of the mold. I plan on doing some things differently when I recast it next week. I also plan to make a cabled handle, but I wanted to get the mold issue ironed out, and see if these would actually read when fired and glazed.


I'd love your feedback, readers. What do you think? Would you buy one? Or four? What colors or stitch patterns would you like to see? The first person the correctly identify the "buttons" gets a free mug.