What is being built, what is being fired, and what gets poured. Kept honestly, including the parts that crack in the kiln.
Log entry 002Vol. I
Tickets Are Live for the First Landing
The cove makes landfall on Tuesday, October 20 at The Revel Room in Uptown Charlotte, six until nine. One hundred tickets, one night, and then the tide takes it back.
Every general admission ticket includes a welcome Pele's Wrath, our passion fruit Mai Tai built on aged Jamaican and Martinique rum, served in a keepsake glass made only for this night. VIP gets theirs in a ceramic tiki mug and keeps a reserved seat. Behind the bar: eight cocktails from the Beachbum Berry canon, house-made orgeat, falernum and passion fruit syrup, and rums chosen for the evening rather than pulled off a shelf.
Two of the drinks are not printed on the menu. The only way to find them is to walk up and ask what is not on the list.
The first twenty-five tickets are early bird. When those are gone the price goes up and stays there.
Nobody is manufacturing these for us. Every Kapu Cove mug is sculpted, molded, cast, fired and glazed by hand here in Charlotte. It is slower, the failure rate is real, and it is the entire point.
SculptThe form is modelled from scratch, high relief, built so the detail survives a glaze that wants to pool and run.
MoldA plaster mold is taken off the master. This is the fussy part. Undercuts, draft angles and seams all decide whether the next hundred casts come out clean or fight you.
CastSlip goes into the mold, sets against the plaster, and the excess is poured back out. The wall thickness is a judgement call made in minutes.
FireBisque first. Some pieces crack here, and those are simply gone.
Glaze and fire againA reactive glaze that breaks from obsidian black into molten orange. It moves in the kiln, which is why no two mugs are the same and why none of them can be promised in advance.
The Pele, as designed. Goddess of fire, creator of land.The Trail Guardian, as designed. Still in the mold shop.
Straight answer on the two images above: those are design concepts, not photographs. Nobody has held one yet. Real pictures go up here the moment there is something real to photograph, kiln scars and all.
This is why there is no buy button on the mugs yet. When a batch survives the kiln it goes to the crew list first, and it will not be a large batch.
Once Vol. I is behind us, what was poured that night gets written up here, builds and all. The log keeps the record so the cove does not have to remember.
Hear It First
New mugs, secret locations and the next pop-up reach the crew list before they reach anyone else.
