Valley potter has her hands full

April 1, 2005

BOB MARTINSON/Frontiersman reporter

WASILLA - She is probably the busiest potter in Alaska, and for a while she had to be.

Stephanie Peterson went through a divorce in 1997 and had full custody of her three children. She had been throwing pots since she was a fairly young woman and found herself needing to make some coin.

Peterson did the math and figured that if she could sell 15 of her popular moose or bear paw mugs per day, across the state, she could pay her mortgage and living costs.

She set out to do just that, with her wheel and kiln running day and night. Peterson said she worked 15-hour days for years and found time to work phones and coordinate her sales to tourism shops around the state.

She was also busy ordering clay, building up her studio and distributing her wares locally. During this time, she also held down a full-time position as a pottery teacher at the Job Corps training center in Palmer.

Peterson's trademark mugs started out portraying Alaskan symbols like a silhouette of a moose, a Christmas tree or a bear's claw and then, her pottery evolved further, getting added-on pieces of clay in the shape of halibut or salmon, each with intricate engraving for detail of fins, eyes and gills. Peterson does all the drawing by hand and etches out the details, including an "S" on the bottom for her copyright.

Her work began to sell. She was in all the Princess Cruise line shops and many shops in the Denali "strip" of gift shops. She also sells in Talkeetna, Seward, Skagway, Haines, Cordova, Valdez and Fairbanks, to name a few. Her business could only handle so much and Peterson kept working, but she alone was the machine.

She said she has one wheel and a spare, with three kilns cooking her pots all day, every day. Peterson soon had to withdraw from working with Princess and started to concentrate on filling orders she could manage.

Some clients were coming to her and saying they wanted seven thousand dollars' worth of product. Peterson's work started to gain more in value, for the simple fact that there was a statewide demand for it and a limited amount of production.

"I'm getting tired of working so hard and I'm not going to do the 15-hour days anymore. So unfortunately, I'm going to take care of just those shops I do business with now," she said.

That is probably good news for aspiring potters, because Peterson's work would be hard to compete with if it were everywhere. She is known for building a thin-shelled product, unlike most clunky and heavy pottery. Her works are useful things like pitchers, bowls or vases, and her mugs are a comfortable fit for most people's hands. Some have a hand-drawn design and a beautiful glaze of varying colors adorns all her works.

Her talents came through experience, Peterson said, when she left her native Minneapolis in 1984 and moved to Butzbach, West Germany, 28 miles north of Frankfurt, with her first husband, Gary, who was in the military.

The couple had a choice to move somewhere and Peterson had wanted to move to Europe. She ended up getting a job through the military as an arts and crafts advisor, teaching to military and their spouses, because, as Peterson explained, "Being overseas, a lot of them are so homesick, they're lonely and everyone needs something to do."

She was hired to be a teacher - mainly for stained glass, but she also knew about watercolors, oils and acrylics. Her boss in Germany figured the more an employee knows, the more valuable he or she is, "So as soon as I picked up pottery while I was over there, boy, he had me teaching that too."

Peterson knew from the age of 5 that she wanted to be an artist. She had been a baby sitter from a very young age, wanted to learn art and was lucky to have two artists on her block.

"I knew my mediums, so whether it was calligraphy or painting, I mean I knew brushstrokes, colors and things about art that just come naturally to me now." she said. "I always knew I'd be an artist, like I could just sense it. I always knew that I wanted to do pottery, but I didn't even know what a potter's wheel looked like back then."

In Germany, she had her work displayed three times in international exhibitions at a 12th century monastery, and Peterson looks on that with pride as one of her most important displays.

She later moved to Kansas. Peterson then looked at her husband and said she was moving to Alaska, and asked her husband where he was moving. The couple decided to move to Alaska.

"We hit Alaska during Halloween of 1989 during an ice storm," she said. "I was pulling a trailer with two kids and I'd never seen a moose-crossing sign before in my life, and I was wondering, 'What did I get myself into?'"

Peterson taught pottery out of her home throughout the early '90s, so when Job Corps in Palmer first opened up, it had an empty arts and crafts room.

A woman Peterson trained told the director about her and she began teaching there in 1994.

"It was the best job I've ever had in my life," she said. "I got to work with young Alaskans and the quietest legacy in life is to teach and help a young person and to help form their minds and the way they think, to listen to them and to show them respect. I could tell when there were windows of opportunity when they would look to me for guidance and I was always honored to guide them gently and quietly."

The administration wanted to know, at one point, how many awards its students had won at the Alaska State Fair and other events and Peterson said she couldn't keep track of them all.

"They had blue ribbons, red ribbons and trophies - it blew the students away and it blew the faculty away," she said.

After her divorce in 1997, Peterson began the stressful challenge that soon became her successful business - Mudslinger Pottery.

The stress of running her business by herself changed recently. Peterson had a best friend, Julie, back in Minnesota, who was going out with the twin brother of an boy Peterson dated in high school.

The friend told Peterson she needed to give him a call, so she did and the couple rekindled their romance, marrying in Alaska in October. Her new husband, Richard Peterson, was very eager to come to Alaska and is now helping Stephanie out in many ways.

A welder by trade, he came up to Alaska and recently got a Coast Guard license to haul passengers. He has homeland security clearance, so he plans to run tour boats in the future. For now, he is busy working with Stephanie and her business.

"Richard does all my wax-resisting, wedging, glaze making, maintenance, kiln repair, he picks up the clay and the glazes, he does everything but throw and design the pieces, he does 100 percent of the support work around here - not to mention the grocery shopping, the cleaning and he's a great cook!" she said.

Contact Bob Martinson at 352-2269, or bob.martinson@frontiersman.com.