Windsong Acres Pottery

Windsong Acres Pottery features the clay creations of Jeff and Shelly Rasche. Here’s our pottery story, with all the muddy details:

Shelly graduated from Illinois Wesleyan University with a degree in Fine Arts in 1981. Her specialty was ceramics, and we have some of the incredible work she did during her college years on display around Windsong Acres still today. In spite of her background in ceramics, Shelly spent the next 35 years of her remarkable career as a freelance commercial artist doing watercolor based paintings for companies around the world to use on a wide variety of products (greeting cards, fabric, mugs, kitchenware, puzzles, prints, figurines, ornaments, counted cross stitch, magazine and book illustrations, gift items, etc.) And all that was a blast for both of them…they got to travel all over the USA and as far as Hong Kong and China, plus meet all kinds of creative and wonderful people.

Meanwhile, Jeff was a minister, and even though he was quite involved in Shelly’s commercial art career and her #1 fan, he did not have the nerve to ask any of the church trustees if they would mind modifying and rewiring the church parsonage to accommodate a large pottery kiln that heats up to more than 2000 degrees! As a result, her potter’s wheel and kiln just got stuck in the basement or garage at each of the three parsonages they called home for those many years.

Once they moved to their own home at Windsong Acres, Shelly wanted to get back into pottery. But, none of the existing buildings at Windsong Acres were properly set up to become a pottery studio (See the clay mess in the photo? Can you imagine what that would do to the beautiful saw-marked 150-year-old wood floors in the Scale House? Plus, the kiln requires a fireproof enclosure in a temperature-controlled environment, plenty of space, and a concrete floor). So the Rasches ended up building a new large building for the pottery studio that would also be spacious enough to offer an indoor option for large weddings.

During the two years that the pottery studio/wedding building was under construction, the Rasches took every pottery class that the Quincy Art Center offered. Shelly took the classes as a review, and Jeff went as Shelly’s “date” since there’s not that many good movies anymore. It turned out that Jeff caught on fast and loved doing pottery. In fact, once they had their studio set up back home, there was tension in the air when Jeff and Shelly stood by the potter’s wheel, trying to decide who got to go first. So they ended up buying another wheel because Shelly would not agree to let Jeff use the wheel most of the time.

Pottery began to accumulate on shelves, tabletops, and even in boxes, so in the fall of 2020, out of sheer necessity to avoid an avalanche of pottery, Windsong Acres had its first public pottery sale. Out of twelve tables completely covered with pottery, about 3/4 of it sold that weekend. So stay tuned for periodic future sales, or browse the shelves when you are here for a wedding, shower, or for any other reason. We hope you want to give a unique piece of pottery a good home as much as we need a little more room on our shelves!

Meanwhile, our stained glass students were keeping an eye on items going in and out of the kiln, and even asking if we could teach them how to throw pottery on the wheel, too. So we began to teach pottery on a limited basis, and that is why we now have four wheels and a little more space dedicated to the little venture we call “Windsong Acres Pottery.” If you want to give pottery a try too, contact us for the next available opening. We love to share the joy of learning and creating, whether that is pottery or stained glass, but our available openings are limited, so we also highly encourage people to take whatever classes you can at the Quincy Art Center–it is a fantastic place to learn all kinds of art and make new friends, too!

And if you want to adopt a genuine piece of Windsong Acres Pottery, we plan to offer a pottery sale each spring and fall–watch “Windsong Acres” on Facebook for announcements. In the meantime, you can stop by and browse our shelves for adoptable pottery, or watch for online opportunities to buy as well.