During the course of making countless ashtrays and playing around with just as many glazes, Seth started making a gloopy glaze out of melted globs of glass. As he put it, “I thought it looked cool and was texturally really unique.” When he tried to buy it he realized what he made wasn’t a thing anyone else was actually making. Which not only inspired him to learn how to make it at scale, but to keep playing around with it. It was when he started posting pictures of the Gloop, and saw the reaction to the Gloop, that he decided Houseplant should try and produce a Gloopy Ashtray based on his designs and glaze. Which leads pretty naturally right into our next section…

It’s one thing to make a glaze at home and apply it to a single piece, it’s another to create hundreds of almost identical pieces to sell online through your housegoods company. Knowing that he needed help to build the Gloopy beyond what he could do at home, he reached out to Curt Hammerly at Hammerly Ceramics. Together, they figured out the process, while Seth continued to explore what was possible with Gloopy colors and textures and designs.

The Gloop has to be added by hand, which is another reason each piece is so unique in its texture, look, feel and finish. Also, because of the nature of the Gloop, the glaze has to be applied right in front of the kiln moments before we fire each individual gloopy, otherwise it will slide off the piece, resulting in a gloop-less ashtray surrounded by a melted pile of gloop. The amount of time and effort that goes into making a single Gloopy is why each edition is so limited.