Hello. My name is Andrea Brown and in 2014 I returned to pottery making after many years. Before that I made sculpture, am still working as an interior and decorative painter, and most recently a vegan cookie baker. It has been a wandering path and I feel fortunate to combine work and creativity.

Three years ago I was regular vendor at local farmers markets. My vegan with organic cookies were on the shelf at Whole Foods and other local natural markets. And they were some creative cookies with flavors like Orange Chocolate Chunk, Almond Carrotoon (an irresistible macaroon made with local carrots, citrus and almonds), Tamari Lemon Sunflower and the most melt-in-your-mouth, toothsome peanut butter cookie with local Teddie peanut butter. All made without eggs or dairy.

I can now say that an artist does not a baker make, due to the scientific discipline required for a consistent product; not something for which artists are known. Not to mention that the food business, with reason, has its many regulations, licenses and other hoops you'd think it was a circus. So I give great respect to all the local food vendors and farmers who come out year after year to the farmers and other local markets.

The final straw? As I saw it, I could either contract my product to be made and packaged by a commercial baking concern or I could replace most of the organic ingredients with conventional. Not willing to do either, and realizing I was not the person to pull this off, I closed the business at the beginning of 2014.

Those were dark days and I felt like a failure while in the thick of it. (One word of advice, perhaps obvious--don't go into business in a field about which you are not thoroughly familiar!) Taking a pottery course was an antidote. I had spent 7 years on the potters' wheel as a youngster and it was something I knew how to do.

Well it was like a light bulb came on! I got my hands in the clay and felt like I'd come home. My first mugs came out of the kiln March, 2014 and it was then I realized I am a potter. There is something so gratifying about making vessels for eating and drinking, for showing off some garden flowers or for any other reason. Fire Garden Pottery was born and my experience with the cookie business was not lost after all!

Please, enjoy my pottery. I am a fool for it and I hope you will want to take some home. I will make any useful thing be it the ubiquitous mug and cereal bowl, jewelry bowl, stoneware goblet, funeral urn, or bottle or vase--ethereal and ideal, resting elegantly on your table, full of flowers or on its own.

Andrea Brown, potter