Whimsical and Functional Pottery

Whimsical artworks

About Us

Sweet Danes Farm consists of a yurt, an art building, a few Great Danes, and farm land in NC.

Our Yurt and Farm

We're a couple of fun loving goof balls from the mid-west who landed in North Carolina after a 12 year cross-country adventure. We live on 3.5 acres in beautiful NC, where we have a yurt, an art cottage, a few Great Danes, and many creatures to come. Jason works and hobby farms various plants each year, and is putting in an orchard with apples, pears, cherries, and elderberries. Each year we add another row of blackberries.

Megan is the artist and makes mostly pottery, some soap, and still (26+ years) tattoos.

All of our household items are hand made in North Carolina with love!

More than a farm

On our farm, Megan creates whimsical and functional pottery and tends to the needs of plants and animals. Our arts and crafts make fun and beautiful household items to last, because they're handmade with love. Megan also swims masters swimming and does a little yoga in her spare time! LOL Keep your eyes open for new products and ideas coming soon.

Our namesakes

The two family members we moved to NC with and inspired the name of our farm. They have both since gone to the rainbow bridge, and a few more wonderful dane souls are with us.

Megan's Bio and Statement

Megan's Art BIo

Megan Lassen lives in East Bend, North Carolina, where she is a 90% studio potter, and 10% tattooist. In the 27 years since receiving her Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Wyoming, she has lived in 7 states, owned and worked in tattoo shops, coached masters swimming, taught hot yoga, and worked as an EMT in River rescue. While living and coaching in Florida, she was reintroduced to clay in a small community studio, and hand-building became a new love. After moving to NC in 2018, she took community classes to learn more about firing and glazing, then became a mostly full-time potter in 2019 and outfitted her studio in 2020. When she's not making something in her studio, she lives in a yurt on the farm with her husband and their Great Danes. To keep the crazies away, she swims, enjoys hot yoga, cross fit, and loves tea.

Artist Statement

I’ve always been interested in the relationship between arts and crafts, and how each person from various parts of life, backgrounds, and their own internal and external reflections and bias, interacts with the art around them. The realization that everyone looks not just with their eyes, but with their joy, their pain, their beliefs; present and past, to see something completely different from the person next to them. I like to incorporate humor and whimsy into the surface decorations of my functional and decorative pottery. I don’t think of myself as overly serious or original, so combining nature and daily images and patterns with things from outside the box, helps me embody my own paradoxical desire for function with the humor of life’s strangeness. With unlikely combinations of images on my everyday objects, I hope to emphasize the joy, goofiness, and love that can be present in daily rituals and sometimes mundane activities. My hope is that the whimsical combinations may hit home with the personality of the users, or may be so outrageous, that it can make the user more courageous in their daily lives.

Pottery Technique

With mid-range stoneware, I construct functional pottery most often by hand-building (slab-building,) and incorporating some wheel thrown components, then fire at a cone 5 with varying hold times. Though I like the control of having multiple pieces come out somewhat the same in shape and size, I decorate the objects very much as one of a kind. I use a combination of hand drawing, underglaze printing, painting, and underglaze transfers, to create images and image collage on the surfaces. I also love to add in small stamped and or sculptural components (especially on mugs,) as well as leaving some of the natural color and texture of the clay, to create a visual and sensual feeling for the user. Using images that “normally” wouldn’t be seen together in nature helps me process the strangeness of life. Why be dull?

Sweet Danes Farm