Our Story
We, Larra and Dawn, were great friends for well over a decade before we decided to take things up a notch. Flourish Stonewear began in October 2018 on nothing more than a dream to create. Larra, who is from Vancouver, BC, has always been crafting, thanks to her mom. Larra had been making jewellery for about 10 years, enjoying the tool work and using her incredible sense of fashion and love of creativity to make beautiful pieces to share with her friends.
Around 2016, she explored pottery by taking a class. She loved it! But the thing was, she didn't love throwing the clay. I mean, she LIKED it, she just didn't love it. The part she loved was the cutting, trimming and glazing. BAM! The idea hit her. Turn pieces of clay, that involved cutting, trimming and glazing, and mix that with her love of creating jewellery! The perfect match.
In 2018, Dawn had just taken early retirement from the federal government. In one of our many coffee sessions, we decided to jump all in. Dawn has always loved marketing, digital marketing and photography and Larra had an extreme... distaste... for that aspect of a business. You can figure out the rest of the story and we'll add that it involves coffee, chocolate, plenty of sweet treats, spending time together at markets and more recently, lots of calls on FaceTime and quick visits in the driveway (thanks COVID19).
As far as our jewellery, its a lengthy process to complete each piece - approximately 25 hours, in fact. Each piece is individually crafted with hours of attention being paid to the finest details. Some of our designs are modern and sassy while others are sweet and classical but all are surprisingly light-weight. We use porcelain, speckled clay, black clay, a variety of glazes and overglazes (gold lustre and Mother of Pearl overglaze) and some seriously fun attachments.
Every time we open the kiln, it's like Christmas morning to us! We love seeing what the results of the glazes mixed with the extreme heat (1300 degree Celsius or 2300 degrees Fahrenheit) and gradual cool-down will bring!
We are still freakin' excited to be doing what we love, meeting some amazing people and sharing it with all of you. Thanks for helping our dream come true!
