If it’s not purple, Regina Fees isn’t interested.

While an exaggeration, various shades of her favorite hue do spot her Landenberg home, whether it be in the form of a toaster, curtains or objets d’art. She said even when a baby, the best way to get her attention was to show her something that color.

Colors are important to Fees, as are shape, texture and function. The artist and teacher, whose imaginative instincts stem from a family tradition swathed in lace, thread and yarn, has carried on the custom with her ceramics work. Her Three Tuxedos Pottery Studio is based in Fees’ historic home, the Lamborn House, in New Garden Township Park.

Fees, whose enthusiasm for her work is clear, elaborated on how her parents influenced her creativity.

“My dad was a weaver for Quaker Lace (Company). He was a designer for 32 years,” she said. Her late father, Richard Fees, was director of design at the Philadelphia business. “Any of the patterns that you see are usually my dad's. He had over 200 patents. They were registered under Quaker Lace, but they were his designs.” Her late mother, Lilyann Fees, was a seamstress and a quilter.

Fees herself has a long personal history in the functional arts. And performing one, she said, just dovetailed into the next.

“I just love pottery. I love the fact that you can dig earth out of the ground and make it into something usable and beautiful. I was bitten by the bug a long time ago,” Fees said.

She explained how she started. In 2007, and then a teacher at a Philadelphia charter school, she had a vacation house in Lake George, N.Y. and would give fiber arts demonstrations during textiles shows. “I was really into knitting. I was really into crocheting and I got into spinning so I ended up making my own yarn.”

Fees laughed. “I'm an artist,” she reflected, “I just can't make up my mind. I don't know what I want to be when I grow up. I was dabbling.

“So, I made myself a shirt. I knitted myself a shirt with my own fiber. It looked very primitive in a really cool way, so I couldn't put plastic buttons on it. But I couldn't find a button that I wanted. So, I just got some clay and I made myself buttons.

“Then I put the buttons on and I do the demonstration in the convention center and I'm spinning and lo and behold, there's a quilt show upstairs.

“There are ladies coming in (from the quilt show) and they're looking at my stuff and they're watching me spin and we start a conversation. One woman comes up and I thought she was looking at my shirt that I made. You know, my handiwork. (But) she's looking at the buttons and asked me, where'd you get these buttons? I told her I made them. So, she's talking with some other ladies and she comes down to me and she says, ‘I own a quilt shop in Glens Falls (N.Y.). Would you be interested in packaging them so I could sell them at my shop?’

“That’s how it started. I called them Adirondack Nature Buttons. It was all reclaimed clay and reclaimed glaze that I would get from school but ended up in the (trash bin). I would trash pick it, reclaim it … from kids dropping it on the floor it would get hair and all kinds of nasty stuff in it. You soak it and you bleach it to make sure all the impurities are out and then you sift it to make sure there's no rocks, bottle caps or whatever in it.

“After you do that, then it's hard to hold its body, but it's really easy to roll it out flat and make ornaments and buttons.”

Among its wares, Three Tuxedos Pottery sells stoneware mugs, small plates, ornaments, buttons and vases. The mug sizes are each named for one of her three tuxedo (black-and-white) kitties, with the newest family member, a fluffy black feline, added to the mix. Abby is the smallest cat, thus the smallest mug holding 8 oz., then the Jessy at 10-12 oz., going up to the Morgan at 14-18 oz. The Simon mug, named for the coal-colored puss, is an in-between at 12 to 14 oz.

Fees will also do custom work, and proving very popular are her car-themed mugs. She continues with buttons, of course, which she has produced by the hundreds. Her sister, Ruth Raisner, makes quilted handbags under the name of My Sister’s Bag, and Sis uses Fees’ buttons.

“When we did shows together, we’d cross sell. If someone likes my buttons, I’ll say, oh, you need to see all my sister’s bags and then I send the people over there. And if people are looking at her bags and I'll have like a baseball button on her baseball bags. And they’ll say, what cool buttons. She’ll say, ‘my sister made them. She's next door. She sells pottery.’”

The Kennett Square Mushroom Festival is also a highlight of her year. She sells mushroom-shaped ornaments and festooned mugs. “I’m the only one with a purple tent,” Fees said, identifying a way to find her space. “I also sell pins and magnets of all mushrooms. I try to have stuff that anybody can buy, so little ornaments for $3 or $5.

She also donates her work. For the nearby Treetops Kitty Café-Cat Adoption and Visitation Center in Kennett Square, she created a stamp with its logo. “I make ornaments for them so they can sell them. I'm a teacher, so I don't really donate money. But what I can donate is my skill and my craft, so they can sell them for money. And it's also something cool for them to have.” And she’s gifted many folks with mugs she takes pains to personalize.

At Avon Grove Charter School, Fees teaches a host of art classes to the high school students, including Pottery, Fiber Arts, Drawing, 2D and 3D Design. She also teaches Intro to Business and Intro to Marketing as an adjunct instructor at Immaculata University. “Juniors and seniors can take entry-level coursework and they have three college credits before they graduate high school,” Fees said.

Very satisfying for Fees has been her work with her students at the charter school since she joined the staff in 2016.

“They have a micro farm with sheep and alpaca. Heaven. Heaven! I had unlimited access to fiber. And they didn't have a fiber arts program. So, I started one.”

In January 2020, some students participated in the Pennsylvania Farm Show event. Calling themselves “The Spinsters,” these students wove a shawl from scratch in three hours.

“It was a (competition) that's called Fleece to Shawl. So normally with adults, it's Sheep to Shawl. The adults bring their own sheep and they have shearer who's part of the team. You have to have a five-member team and the sheep and the shearer are members six and seven. So, with us, we had we had a fleece that we had already sheared. Everybody had their fleece and what they did was they card (disentangle and clean) it, then we get spinning wheels and start spinning it, then we got weaving looms and then weave it and then that's what they came up with.

“Unfortunately, it had to be certain number of inches and I think we were about 6 inches short; we ran out of time. So, it was disqualified because it didn't meet the minimum requirement.

“We knew we weren't going to make it. I said to the kids: ‘Do you want to keep going and finish it knowing that you're going to be disqualified? Or do you want to just go home early or walk around the farm show? It’s completely up to you. This is your experience, not mine’. They wanted to finish.

“They handed it in, and even though they didn’t place in the top, we ended up coming home with over $300 in checks because they got Best Fleece and won in other categories. I was super proud of we had done. It was so much fun. 

“It was just a really, really positive experience.”

In her home, the enclosed porch serves as her pottery studio. It’s fitted with a small kiln, shelving units and a potter’s wheel. The wheel is unusual in that Fees stands while using it. “I started to have some hip pain, and this was before I lost weight. I saw an article where somebody put their wheel up on blocks and they stand. I've been standing ever since so my wheel is elevated, which is pretty cool.”

She said her transition to pottery was just the next step in her artistic development

“When I got my hands on that pottery wheel, it was something I always wanted to try because it looked just cool. I’d go on YouTube and I just watched videos and thought, I want to do that. Then I got my hands on this pottery wheel -- this beautiful 2½-horsepower old pottery wheel. It's like it's like an ancient horse. It won't die.

“You get to a certain point where you can center (the clay on the wheel) easily and then you can just pull up the wall (shape the object). It gets to be so much fun because you can make anything then. I just I watched a video, then I made this vase and just took a tool and dragged it up the side to make little fluted edges. It was that easy and you have this really interesting little thing.”

“When I get into it, I get into it fully,” Fees said, about her devotion to the various functional arts. “I just started falling in love with a pottery wheel.”

More information about Three Tuxedos Pottery Studio is available at threetuxedospotterystudio.com

Natalie Smith may be contacted at [email protected]