Making Saudade Coffee Mugs

   Though "saudade​" is hard to translate into English, it's quintessentially Portuguese.  Elusive but all-important, often used in the context of love and longing, the word makes a perfect brand name for coffee, that's roasted using Portuguese methods, by Los Angelenos Tiffany and Chantal Barlow.  Before Saudade, North Americans could only dream of returning to the "pastelaria" for "um cafe."
   As a potter, making mugs for Saudade ticks a lot of my boxes.  Though I reside on the opposite coast of Los Angeles, in Vermont, I celebrate my own Portuguese ancestry each time I center and pull the clay into form.  There are so few of us in the Green Mountains, throughout the process, even as February snow banks high, I can transport myself to the bronze coastline of Olhao, in the Algarve, ancestral home of my people or I can drift to where they resettled in the United States, in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and imagine I'm in the Portuguese Bakery with a morning "um cafe."
   There's no doubt that Vermont's weather sharply contrasts that of Portugal and Los Angeles, but my adopted state's non-industrial food ethic and my own ceramic practice squares well with Saudade's small-batch roasting.  I am not a production potter, so each mug that I throw ultimately disregards exact replication--the hard-to-convey essence of saudade.  You can order coffee and a mug by visiting the website here.