Makers Market At The Point Series Two
The episode starts out with Milly Welsh who is the owner and founder of Zwellyn Pottery. She went to school for animation and her full-time job is website design and development but her true passion is pottery. Her designs are unique and the ones I personally enjoy are inspired by horror flicks. She also shares her passion for pottery with her three girls and they all reside in Limington, Maine.
“I went to Cape Elizabeth for high school and, you know, it was definitely a culture change. There was one teacher I really liked and her name was Miss Hart. She was the art teacher at Cape Elizabeth High School and so I took all of her classes, and she did a lot with ceramics, so I learned a little bit there. I went to the Art Institute of Chicago, and I was an animation major, and animating is a really intense major. So this was like, early 2000. So it was like before everything went digital. So we were still doing a lot of analog stuff. It was a lot of drawing, like different cells and things like that. So I needed other classes to not have homework. And, you know, so in high school, you know, I dabbled with the wheel and stuff and I wasn't that great at it. But I took a lot of the wheel throwing classes because you couldn't have homework in that and I was really burnt down on animating. I then ended up working at Portland Pottery because I got pretty good at throwing because I took so many of those pottery classes,” says Milly Welsh, owner of Zwellyn Pottery.
Milly specializes in a process called Sgraffito which makes her pieces look very unique. Pottery has many techniques and Milly seems to enjoy this particular one as it brings out her passion for animated designs that you see in many of her pieces.
“I fire to like a mid-range, which is kind of good because of oxidation, so I just have an electric count, and you can get really good colors that way. So I have a lot of bright colors. I also do a technique that's called sgraffito, which is where you kind of like draw on the pots, but it's a little bit more like a print relief, you know, so it's like a block print… sgraffito is basically where you paint and then you carve through. And so a lot of times I'm doing that on a white clay body with black underglaze and I carve designs… so I like to draw, and I’m inspired by comic book kind of characters, you know, on pots. But then I also do some abstract stuff like a swirl design… I have a couple of different clay bodies I use I have one that's really speckly and has really nice effects with the glazes and yeah, and I do tend to make like these kinds of designs on, everyday pottery. So these are like things you're using every day. I make a lot of mugs, a lot of like large bowls, and, you know, different things like that. And, yeah, they're sort of interesting, but I think they're, you know, comfortable and easy to use also,” said Milly.
Courtesy of Zwellyn Pottery
The last guest on the episode is Liz Kirby with Good Jane which is now Betoken CBD. Liz was undergoing stresses in her daily life and was trying to find an outlet that could help provide her with some relief. She started formulating oral capsules with CBD which became very popular and she decided to keep expanding her product line to creams, body baths, and so much more. She is not only a maker but an educator behind CBD.
“The biggest issue that I had was around sleep and not being able to fall asleep very easily, because I was constantly thinking about, you know, day to day stuff. I, at the time, was doing freelance marketing from home, and I have two young kids. And at the time, my youngest was home with me most of the time, and so trying to work while having a one-year-old, and you know, just a lot of stress and anxiety. And that crept into my sleep and made it really hard for me to fall asleep. And then if I would wake up in the middle of the night as I could never go back to sleep. So CBD really has helped with my sleep. And then generally just, you know, work being a working parent and dealing parenting and working is pretty stressful,” said Liz Kirby, the owner and founder of Good Jane, now Betoken CBD.
Liz had to do a lot of research at first to figure out how to source the ingredients in her formula’s including her main ingredient CBD.
“It was really difficult in the beginning, at first I thought when we first came up with this, I thought that I was going to do it all myself. And I needed to do a little bit of it myself, in the beginning, to test the products to make sure because I worked with an herbalist to develop all of the recipes. So when she would develop a recipe, I would kind of make a small batch in my kitchen and test it out with my friends and family and see make sure it worked and we kind of tinkered with stuff. So I bought like we make two different types of capsules. So I bought a capsule filling like a tabletop capsule filling. You open up the capsule, put one half in like a tube, and then fill it and then stick the other top on. It's very time-consuming. I very quickly realized that there was no way I was going to be able to do this myself, right. So I started looking for a manufacturer and actually the herbalist found this manufacturer that was out in California, and obviously, in California, they've been doing this for a really long time, a lot longer than we have here and even on the east coast. So I had talked to a few skincare manufacturers and at the time, so this was in 2018 they really weren't working with CBD. I think probably all of them are now but they weren't at the time they had no idea how to extract oil or like any and definitely didn't know how to add other botanicals to it which all of our products have more than just hemp in them. So Cal this company in California was the only one I found that knew what I was talking about when I said what we needed and was able to do it and they were able to do it on a relatively small scale. I mean, not nearly as small as they needed, but more than like a big skincare manufacturer would have done for us. So we did that. We got the four products manufactured through them, we gave them the formulas we tested went back and forth with the products, and then once we had it good to go they just made it and bottled it for us and then we started shipping it out,” said Liz.
Liz’s CBD business has grown nationwide and is now expanding its product line to more self-care products such as creams that are geared towards PMS. CBD is a very educational topic that many folks are still toying with the idea of dipping their toes into. Liz believes her business will continue to grow especially in the midst of the pandemic where many adults are dealing with stress and challenges they are looking to overcome.