Dear Friends,

You are invited on November 28th and 29th to the Uhlick Pottery and Tile 36th Annual Christmas Sale. My first Sale was 37 years ago on December 17, 1978.

This has been a year of steady progress. Though things don’t go as fast as they once did, I am finishing this year feeling positive about my work and life. I will have a good supply of most pottery at this Christmas Sale but there will be some items that I didn’t get a chance to make. I will have however 4 sizes of casseroles and there will be lots of copper red mugs and bowls. I have some new glaze combinations and there are always some very special pots at a sale. This Christmas there are perhaps more of these show pots than usual, some pots that I’ve put aside over the past few years and two very special large bowls that were in a show at the Alberta Craft Council this summer.

I have been working hard in the workshop this year and I find peace in my work. I have continued to take more time for hiking, biking and x-c skiing, often in the company of my friend Pat Dunn, who has joined her path to mine as friend and partner. Thank you, Pat.

There has been new joy in my life this year. My granddaughter Sarah Antonia is growing into a big girl of more than 2 years. A blessed grandson, Jackson was born to Claire and Ryan Parker this summer. These two little children have created so much happiness for their parents and for me and for so many other people.

I hope to see many of you at this Sale, it is always a pleasure for me to see old friends. I couldn’t have a sale without help, as always, from my daughters, my sons in law, and friends, Hannah, Michael and Sue and Jim Speers, also my fine fettlers Lynn Zeigler and Gail Gates, and Janet Hammond who has done the floral arrangements for so many years, thank you all.

Best wishes and may peace be with you.
Sam Uhlick

Dear Friends,

You are invited on May 30th and 31 to the Uhlick Pottery and Tile spring sale 2015 and the first sale in a New Democratic Alberta! I am feeling, for several reasons very hopeful.

It has always been a pleasure for me to make pottery and I have been working hard this year. There are many large coffee mugs this Spring in some new glaze combinations. There are even some glaze combinations that were not intended.

Potters have always relied on their kilns for the ultimate success of their work. The beauty of the pottery glaze can vary from place to place within the kiln because of differences in the kiln atmosphere and temperature. The shape and volume of the kiln, the relationship between the flue size and chimney height and many more variables influence the way a particular kiln fires. The kiln god was a superstition that provided potters in the past with an explanation for the varying results of the kiln.

In the past 40+ years I’ve had some spectacularly bad firings! Mostly because of my own ignorance, carelessness or forgetfulness! I’m more efficient these days and I’d like to think that I’m not as ignorant and maybe not as careless as I once was. My car kiln has had its share of teething problems and some faults were corrected and there were repairs over the years.

The first firing was on November 23 in 1995. Back then when I built this kiln for the first time in my life I had the help of a retired professional refractory mason, thank you, Jack Williams! Old friend, I’ll want you to help me with my next kiln too.

Over the years I’ve had more than 600 firings in my kilns and there is still anticipation, excitement and still some unexpected and some unwanted favors from the kiln god. Last week some of the nice copper reds got so hot that they ran onto the kiln shelves! In spite of that there were some very nice pots as well. That was firing #222 and there will be three more loads of pottery fired. There are always some zingers and I hope that you will find some of these special pots at this Spring Sale. May 30th and 31st 2015.

Best wishes,
Sam Uhlick

Dear Friends,

What a year it has been! I have been taking time for reflection, travel, hiking, x-c skiing, kayaking and hoped-for renewal. And I have been mostly successful in that goal. I have missed (and am still missing) so much of what we once had, but I am making progress! I owe a debt of gratitude to my old friends and especially my daughters and sons in law. I have a beautiful granddaughter, Sarah Antonia to be thankful for. I also have a new friend, Pat Dunn, who has taken a big step to help me get ready for this sale.

After I’d sent out my “No Sale” letter last November I received many kind messages and letters in reply. Thanks to all of you who took the time to write to me. You can’t know how much that it meant. Thank you.

I am grateful for what I have and grateful that I can make pottery. Pottery making is a kind of therapy for me and I needed this and used it for comfort and to try to center myself over the past couple of years. I have been making pottery throughout 2014, not continuously, but I started in January working with porcelain and have made some very nice pieces, mostly bowls, teacups and saucers (very tricky to make!) and some fluted stem vases. I glaze fired a few of these pieces in February, but I haven’t sold any of them and most are being fired in these final 5 firings of the year.

I’ve spent the rest of the year, (excepting a trip to Paris and Iceland with Pat), making stoneware pottery, and trying to center. So, have I made the best pots of my career in 2014? Maybe not, but I have some very nice pottery now and as I write this there are still two firings to go. There are many pots that I would consider “show pots” and I have been surprised by some that didn’t turn out as I expected but did turn out unexpectedly well. Not by talent but by accident. Anyway, there will be more pottery than at a normal Christmas sale but certainly not as much as I make in a normal year.

I hope to see as many of you as can make it this year and please remember to get in touch if you cannot make it so that you can stay on the new pottery mailing list.

Best wishes,
Sam Uhlick

After making the clay, pugging and preparing the lumps, then throwing the pot, there are still many more steps before firing and fettling. I have posted photos of some of these steps online and two YouTube videos showing me throwing a 3 ½ lb casserole and a ¾ lb pitcher.

Customers are welcome at the workshop between sales; please call ahead (780-922-5061) to be sure that I am home. Uhlick pottery is also available at the Alberta Craft Council Gallery (www.albertacraft.ab.ca) in Edmonton. It can also be found at Bluerock Gallery (www.bluerockgallery.ca) in Black Diamond, Alberta.

Please note that I will be updating the invitation mailing list at the Christmas sale. I don’t want to lose you if you would like to receive invitations to future sales! If you won’t be at this year’s sale but would like to stay on the mailing list, please send me an email or give me a call.

Dear Friends,

For the first time in over 40 years I am taking a break. There will not be a Christmas sale this year nor will there be a Spring sale in 2014.

Most of you will know by now of our beloved Antonia's death on September 3rd. Many of you came to her memorial service and we have been grateful for the many loving and thoughtful cards that you've sent to me and my daughters over the past 3 months. We will always miss our Antonia. For those of you who weren't able to come to the memorial service we have posted my tribute to Antonia and those of our daughters Anna, Claire and Nicole on the pottery website www.uhlick.com. There will be a link on the main page with some photographs. Her obituary can be seen by searching the Edmonton Journal website.

Even though Antonia was too ill during her last year to make very much pottery, she always rallied to help with the pottery sales. This Spring after her stem cell transplant she still baked and priced and worked hard. She always wanted to make the workshop look nice. I can't yet bear to have a sale without her.

Antonia was able to participate in Claire and Ryan's wedding on August 10th this summer. The beautiful photo of her used on her memorial program was taken at the wedding when her hair was starting to grow back and she was positively radiant. But her cancer was so strong and she was able to see our first grandchild, Anna and Jeremy's baby, named Sarah Antonia, only once a few days before she died. Antonia was a wonderful wife and mother, she loved us and we loved her and we were with her until the end. We will always love her and she is also missed by many many friends.

Our sales have always been a joyful time for our family. The girls and I will miss seeing you, our friends, during this necessary 'sabbatical'. I have some plans for the workshop and my pottery production will continue at a slower pace for the next year. I need to make and mend some things that have been neglected during the last 2 years. I will do a little travelling and as much x-c skiing, hiking, biking and kayaking as I can. I have found peace in nature and I am lucky to have friends and family that I can share this with. And visits with Sarah Antonia bring joy and hope to all of our hearts.

One of the cards that I received after Antonia's death had this quote from a Robert Burns song, Ae Fond Kiss, "Had we never loved so kindly, Had we never loved so blindly, Never met and never parted, We would ne'er be broken-hearted"

Dear friends I hope that you will have a Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and a Peaceful New Year. I know that some of you will miss seeing us, as we will miss you, but we hope to see you all next Christmas, 2014.

Best wishes,
Sam Uhlick
November 26, 2013

Our world has turned upside down since our beloved son, Martin, died on January 29, 2012. He is very, very sadly missed by his family and friends. His memorial service was on February 4th and many of you were there. There were 400 people in attendance and we have been heartened by your kind words and thoughts. Sam's tribute to Martin can be read at www.uhlickpottery.com/martin.

Martin took his own life and although he said in his letter to us that he had been depressed for years, he never told us of his depression and neither did his friends know of it. We learned later that he had been taking the stop smoking drug Champix and we think that this might have contributed to his final depression. One of the adverse effects of the drug is suicide.

We hope that anyone who has feelings of depression will seek help, as we sorely wish that Martin had.

Sam & Antonia

We almost always like to have customers come to our workshop between sales (the exception is the month or so just before a sale). Making pottery is a quiet and sometimes solitary occupation. It is nice to see a friendly face and it is a more relaxed way to have a visit than at one of our sales. Almost everyone who comes through the door to our workshop for the first time, when we are actually making pots, stops and says with horror "What happened?" At its best our workshop has a ragged, jumbly, disordered and dusty look about it; at its worst it looks like a junk bomb went off. That pots that are being made are organized but everything else is piled up with a layer of dust on top! You may have thought, after coming to a sale, that I was a nice tidy person. This is one of the reasons for our new Uhlick Pottery & Tile facebook page (thanks to our daughter Claire for this 'innovation'). I have been posting a photograph nearly every day, to show some of the mess, but mostly to show the process of making pots and the progress from our normal disaster to the clean floor and organization of our sale. At this point, there are photos of throwing, trimming, slipping, decorating pottery, and of a young bull moose that was moseying around our pond. By the time you receive this there will be photos of our firings and finished pots too. The best thing is that you don't have to be on Facebook to see this page. You can google us, or go to Uhlick-Pottery-Tile to see our worst. These daily postings will be for this month only, with some occasional postings later. We hope that you will still want to come to our sale after seeing the truth revealed.

Sam
November 21, 2011

For the last 40 years I have loved handmade pottery and other tools and objects that are elegant combinations of function and beauty. Our world would be a colder place if we didn't have anything made by hand.

I think that handmade pottery and furniture, hand knit sweaters, quilting and hand weaving have different vibrations than machine made objects. For me, there is a warm glow from these objects, almost like the glow from healthy skin. Other people see or sense this too.

I was honoured by the Alberta Craft Council this winter to be nominated for a lifetimne achievement award. I would like to recommend someone who, at 80 years of age, truly is a lifetime craftsman and deserves much more recognition. The hand weaver Ilya Oratovsky, who sells his work at the Strathcona Market, is often overlooked because his craftmanship is so good that people mistake his work for machine weaving. Antonia and I visited Ilya and his wife Maria, who is also a weaver, at their home. We saw in his simple workshop, the looms and warping mill that he built himself. These are not the beautiful looms that are pieces of furniture, but functional tools for a man who knows exactly what he needs. Ilya and Maria were trained in the Ukraine and he designs and weaves beautiful wool, and wool and alpaca blankets. Japan is a country that has had a long tradition of handcrafts and a respect for the craftspeople that make them. If Ilya were Japanese he would be respected and nationally recognized for his skill and dedication to his craft, and his blankets would cost much more than they do here.If anyone has not had a chance to see Ilya's traditional blankets or to buy one (or a dozen like we have), please look for him at the Strathcona Market. You can find his table in the second aisle from the east and about 100 feet north of the main entrance. His work is also available at one of the only stores in Edmonton where nothing is made in China, the Alberta Craft Council Gallery at 10186-106 Street.

If handmade objects are the warm skin of our interactions with life, Ilya is one of the people who can keep us warm in two ways.