Make memories, art at Klay Crazy Ceramics and Gifts

In a 130-year-old building near downtown Auburn, one of the area’s most beloved art-related creative spaces is filled with whimsical ceramics that wait on the shelves as a 3-D blank canvas, a warm and inviting atmosphere and a small senior dachshund named Ringo Starr.

Klay Crazy Ceramics & Gifts has been operating for 18 years and it has become Auburn’s go-to spot for family-friendly entertainment, where folks can sit down at one of the many tables and paint a ceramic mug, a faceless gnome with a pointy hat or whatever their heart desires.

People who stop into the ceramics space, which is lined and peppered with hundreds of different ceramic pieces of a wide variety, often come in to work on art pieces, hang out with friends and make memories.

“This is where you come to make memories that you don’t need a camera for. You don’t have to take a picture, because every time you see that goofy, little, ugly thing that you painted when you were six, you’re gonna be like, ‘Oh, I remember that day,’” said Johnson.

The way it works at Klay Crazy, as the studio’s Facebook page says, is to “choose your piece and colors, then let your imagination take over.” Guests at Klay Crazy paint their chosen cermaic pieces however they want with provided supplies and then the piece will be fired in one of many kilns and then available for pick-up.

While Klay Crazy provides memories for guests, it is still common for finished ceramics projects to be forgotten and left behind. However, Johnson says that over the course of 15 or 16 years, they had never thrown away a child’s ceramics project that was left behind.

Johnson says that it all started when she had taken over the ceramics shop, which had been operating previously for 40 years. She says that there were plates with handprints and footprints of two kids with names on them, which still had their paid ticket stub but little else.

“No phone number, no nothing, no name, so we threw [the stub] away and we hung the plates up. I said, ‘We have to hang them up.’ Somebody’s gonna walk in here in 20 years and say, ‘I used to come here with my mom, and that’s my plate,’” Johnson said.

It turned out that a short time later, a mother had come into the studio because she had remembered that she had brought her sons to paint ceramics decades earlier when they were four and six.

“One of her sons had passed, and she knew that there was a new owner. She was positive that we didn’t have it. And I said, ‘You mean that one?’ And she turned around, and she just burst into tears. It was her sons’ plates when they were little,” Johnson said.

Klay Crazy is open Thursday through Sunday, and offers classes, group events and walk-ins. For more information, call 253-931-0660, email klaycrazy06@gmail.com or visit the studio at 720 A Street Southeast in Auburn.