Locals Deborah K. Frontiera

Pinecones and needles, chickadees, maple leaves and thimbleberries are some of the local images that Peggy Eberwein incorporates into pottery that she makes and sells at craft shows.

to grow to the point where they were doing 35 or more shows per year, and were totally self-employed.

Peg’s unique designs are inspired by wildlife and nature. She started with a simple “bluebonnet” design (think lupine) painting the flowers and adding a clear glaze. But she quickly became bored with only that and began adding other wildflowers and pine cones.

For Michigan, adding chickadees was the next natural thing to do. Then a friend in Copper Harbor asked for thimbleberries. She made some plates with a thimbleberry design but had trouble getting the leaves right. Then she experimented with pressing thimbleberry leaves into the clay and painting the imprint of the leaves before adding berries and the glaze. But she had to pick the leaves while in the Marquette or Keweenaw areas and then be without more for months. Then one day while walking around her summer home, she found a patch of thimbleberries right there!

Then the real challenges began. Some of the shows she regularly did throughout the south during the cold months closed down. It seemed people didn’t want whole sets of hand-made pottery where each piece—while following the same general pattern— was unique. Not when they could get an entire set of dishes at a department or discount store for the price of one piece of hand-crafted pottery.

What hit even harder was the pain of goutinduced arthritis. Gout crystals began to form in her thumb joints—so essential to a potter—which were not going to dissolve. Livable at first, it grew worse and worse. She tried wearing special gloves, but the pain increased. Any work on her potter’s wheel left her in agony.

In December of 2017, she finally decided to “just do it” and have surgery to remove the crystals. Her right thumb was done in January of 2018 and the left in March that same year. “The scar looks like a Y. There is a stainless steel rod from top of my thumb down. The surgeon cleaned out the crystals and abnormal growth from the arthritis, and filled in the void with donated cadaver bones. It looked pretty ugly for a while but it worked,” she said.

Several months of physical therapy followed, during which Peg had to constantly message the affected areas to help regenerate the nerves. During those months that she could not work at her art, she felt as if part of her soul was gone. Her constant massaging, the other PT work and her persistence paid off. By July of 2018, she was back at her wheel, renewing her spirit. Her thumbs are “back to normal” now except for the fact that they are good rain predictors, aching when a low pressure system is on the way.

She’s also found that avoiding certain foods helps the whole gout problem. Every vegetable with bright colors: beats, spinach, kale, chard, and all berries contribute to gout. She has found she can tolerate some of those berries in a “smoothie” with yogurt or bananas to ease the color problem and drinks gallons of lemon water.

Peg is back to her “old self” making pottery with her nature designs and adding that comfortable little “thumb tab” of clay to the top of mug handles. She stated that the final lump of clay at the top of that mug handle not only makes the mug easier to grip and hold comfortably, but also adds strength to the joint between the mug and the handle. This writer just loves the way a mug feels in her hand with that thumb tab she’s never seen on other mugs—handmade or store-bought.

Peg and her husband are now in their “golden

A close-up view of a plate that Peggy Erberwein made on her pottery wheel and hand-painted.

“What hit even harder was the pain of gout-induced arthritis ... Livable at first, it grew worse and worse.

She tried wearing special gloves, but the pain increased. Any work on her potter’s wheel left her in agony. years” and have cut back a lot on the number of shows they do, down to about five in the North Country and three or four in the South during the late fall. While her husband still mixes the glazes, Peg does most of the work, her wheels turning in the South and the North, keeping her “hands in the mud” and doing what she loves. Look for “Pottery Peg’s” booth at The Outback in Marquette each year in late July, at the Eagle Harbor Art Show the second weekend of August. About the author: Deborah K. Frontiera lives in the Calumet area. Three of her books have been award winners. She has published fiction, nonfiction, poetry and children’s books. Frontiera is on the board of the U.P. Publishers and Authors Association. For more information, visit her website: authorsden. com/deborahkfrontiera.

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