Just you had enough terracotta?  If you are anything like us, you can never see enough.  We are nowhere near finished  presenting our excellent terracotta pottery to you. Our newest addition is from a manufacturer in Italy with which we have renewed a relationship.  You was in Italy, he saw it again, he couldn’t resist it.  The quality of the clay is beautiful and some pieces are already sporting a beautiful green/gray mold like beautiful Italian antiques.  Who DOESN’T want a pair of feisty terracotta roosters? Or a pudgy terracotta pig for the garden?  This company not only does terracotta animals beautifully, but wonderfully depicted terracotta cabbages, pumpkins,  pomegranates and fruit baskets.  There are also terracotta plaques of cherubs, horses, roosters and more.  Especially lovely are the birdbaths with doves balancing on the rim.

Trust me, there’s still more terracotta, even in this group.  But we want to keep surprising you.

It seems that the subject of terracotta is like an ever-expanding universe.  There is a giant store of information at hand just at Eye of the Day alone.  When we hear the word “terracotta” most of us imagine a a nice red clay garden pot, maybe planted with a geranium. Oh, how limited our mental vision!  The art of the Italian terracotta vessel has progressed far beyond the typical flower pot into flights of fancy.  Not only unusual, artistic shapes, but pottery inspired by the organic forms of nature: a single nimbus cloud or a melon.

Imagine.  It is possible that exactly what you imagine is available.  FREQUENTLY at Eye of the Day we have a customer looking for what they think is the impossible.  An Italian terracotta pot shaped lika a giant screw…?  A container needn’t be merely functional.  It can reflect the personality of the garden, architecture of the home, and whimsy of the owner.  One of these unusual terracotta pots, though fully functional as a planter, could easily be used simply as an artistic focal point even with no planting.  Made from the finest Italian galestro clay, these pieces will last for generations and carry your imagination well into the future.

“The days of the Gold Rush had long passed when the earth yielded yet another treasure. This time in the form of “potter’s clay” in Lincoln, California. In the fall of 1874 Charles Gladding of Chicago was visiting California when he read the news of the clay find. He traveled to Lincoln, took samples of the clay and sent them back to Chicago for testing by ceramic experts. The results surpassed his expectations.” …from the ABOUT US section of Gladding McBean’s website ()

It’s one thing to travel throughout Europe and find beautiful, useful objects for Eye of the Day, but its a horse of a different color when you find these objects in your own back yard.  In fact its a horse of many different, rich, vibrant colors. The garden pottery of Gladding McBean has been collected by generations of pottery lovers in California and throughout the country. Each piece of  pottery is individually hand-formed and glazed by expert  potters and bears the GMB artist’s Registered Seal.

At Eye of the Day we treasure our collection of Gladding McBean.  The tactile gloss of the objects.  The colors.  The voluptuous contours.  All of these are invitations to touch and enjoy the pieces.  As we learn more about this remarkable pottery, our eyes are always open to finding it in unexpected places: two blue oil jars at the entry of Montecito Union School, a dark green wonder of a giant planter on the top floor of an old antique store, a Reclining Nude in the bathroom of an old Hollywood Hills home.

Many items in Gladding McBean’s collection of Garden Pottery are available in more than one size and there is a great variety of colors available.  When you meander throughout our showroom, you are naturally drawn to the Gladding McBean section and know you are in the presence of The Truly Special.  I just want that little, floating Oil Jar.  It’s Daffodil.

OK.  It’s final and official.  We have completed the set-up of our new permanent showroom at the Dallas Market Center featuring the excellent Terrecotte San Rocco for Texas to see, touch and “kick its tires”. There is no question that this terracotta embodies contemporary as well as timeless classical design that will last until the next century. Best of all, Eye of the Day is the only company offering a guarantee against material defects in our high-fired terracotta products. We think the time is right for Texans to find out what our clients from Beverly Hills to Napa, California know about Terrecotte San Rocco handmade products from Italy.

January Total Home & Gift Market 2011 – January 19-25 at the Dallas Market Center.

If you have ever been to Paris in the winter (and we LOVE Paris in the Winter), you will see that all of the major and even the minor public fountains are drained and remain dry until the threat of freezing is gone.  Believe it or not, even some areas of Santa Barbara County experience temperatures below freezing.  Not joking…  Everything porous absorbs water: stone, cement, terracotta and just like an ice cube, when the water freezes, it expands.  The damage wreaked by this expansion when the item thaws ultimately ruins the piece.  Over a period of years and depending on the material, it will break down and fall apart.  The best protection for your garden products is common sense and our following tips and tricks for helping things to last.

1. Apply a high quality penetrating sealer to help eliminate the porosity of the item
2. Dry, cover or move to a protected area during times of frost
3. Do not allow pieces to become attached or fused to a frozen surface
4. Purchase frost-resistant products such as those sold and recommended by Eye of the Day
5. Maintain existing garden products just like you do your home on an annual basis
6. Send us your questions and we’ll send you our answers via this blog

Now you know.  Welcome, Winter!

Inventory at Eye of the Day in 1994:

1. Wine barrels cut in half

2. Wine barrels cut in quarters

3. Wine barrels cut in three-quarters

4. Whole wine barrels

5. Mexican pottery

6. Potting soil

Inventory at Eye of the Day in 2010:

Okay.  No lists.  But LOTS MORE than in 1994.  When we first started Eye of the Day our focus was (obviously) wine barrel planters and a few pots.  That’s a story for another time.  Not too long after the store moved to Carpinteria from Santa Ynez (yet another story) we made our first trip to Europe and our lives and our store changed forever.  Our maiden trip to the Paris Gift Show spun us off to the countryside of France and that of Italy and here the story lies.

Strewn about the grounds of a walled 14^th century medieval Tuscan village, now a beautiful inn, we began to take notice of burnished russet red oil jars, or orcios.  Many of them showed production dates in the 1800s, some even in the 1700s.  And, the terracotta from which they were made was rich and warm, displaying not necessarily age, but antiquity.  It was the perfect setting to see them – we could imagine them charming the gardens of California and beyond.  We were pulled with a new focus to locate some to ship to our store and so now drove the countryside in earnest.  During that first Orcio Locating Tour we became pro at catching a tiny slice of old terracotta color in a field, on a porch, in an abandoned barn.  Once we looked in a barn and found two fantastic old farm wagons, one with faint traces of blue, red, yellow and green paint and found that the wagons were older than the 1953 the faded color depicted.  That was the year it was RE-painted.  My birth year.  The wagons had once been pulled by horses in the local village harvest parade.  But not a soul could see them stored in the old barn.  Brent used his considerable intelligence and ingenuousness and lined the way for these, the first of our antique finds, to make their way to Eye of the Day.  You will be able to see them, stored in plain sight, adding to the rich and varied weave of old and new at Eye of the Day.