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WW’s annual Best of Portland edition debuts Wednesday. Tonight we offer a sneak preview.
At the St. Johns Farmers Market, Heath DeWallace pedals a small stationary bicycle outfitted with yellow and blue handlebar streamers, a floral basket and a pottery wheel. Pressing his index finger into a tiny mound of clay spinning in front of him, he shapes the walls of a bowl that could comfortably hold a handful of pennies, the wet clay curling around his nail. Then he scrapes it off the wheel with one of his business cards, placing it next to a line of other mismatched pots on an overturned crate. “Free for kids,” a sign next to them reads.
The farmers market handouts are made with air-dry craft clay. But DeWallace makes more functional and food-safe pots at the studio in his St. Johns garage, Fishbone Pottery (instagram.com/fishbonepottery), and sells succulent-sized planters and saucers fit for teacups at fairs and markets across town. “I like the small stuff,” he says. “People love the small stuff.”
DeWallace stumbled across the stationary bike at a thrift store in 2021 and fantasized about turning it into a sort of traveling pottery kick wheel. After tweaking and brainstorming and banging his head against a wall for two years, he brought it to an engineer friend. “Just use a drill bit,” the engineer told DeWallace. “You’re not building a car.” And the pedal-powered pottery bike was born.
“It’s a nice way to interact with people,” DeWallace says. “Instead of me having to ask people questions, people are coming up asking me things.”
Currently, he’s working on transforming a trundle sewing machine into his next pottery wheel.“I’ve always been a tinkerer,” he says.