handmade porcelain place settings

Creating a table setting is one of gleena’s favorite assignments. Asya, the designer and maker behind gleena, talks at length with the client about the way they serve food and beverages to come up with the right combination of gleena pieces. Based on the client’s home decor, interests, and life style, we decide on glaze and color combinations. Typography and imagery can also be added to the set.

Every piece in gleena’s collection is handmade with care. The process begins with mixing a batch of porcelain slip (liquid clay). This slip is Asya’s own formula which she has tinkered with over the years. It is a high fire porcelain, which means that pieces are extremely durable while remaining thin and light. Gleena pieces are dishwasher safe, but microwave is not recommended.

Because we finish each edge by hand, every piece develops a unique personality as it moves through the firings. Bowls that come out of the same mold will shift slightly in the high fire to create unique, one of a kind shapes. They stack inside one another, but not perfectly.

Please contact Asya info@gleena.com if you would like to discuss a table setting for your home.

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A set of custom 10-inch plates, numbered 1-10.

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I love this custom summery table setting with eight white platters, large organic bowls in mustard, and small organic bowls in pale green. Each bowl has a different garden or beach image in the bottom: a grasshopper, a moth, a butterfly, a shell or a flower. The green bowls are numbered 1 through 8, for an impromptu place card when needed. The set creates a warm atmosphere, even in the cold of winter.

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My very good friend Su and I designed dishes together that match Su’s new house as well as Su’s personality. Su is an elegant woman with sophisticated taste and a love of fashion. She also has a great sense of humor and a very casual, playful attitude to life. The set combines all aspects of Su’s persona by using ivory, a lovely warm gray and a joyful yellow, with a mix of polka dots. Plus fun sayings of foods Su loves and illustrations of shoes.

The table place setting has a formal white platter, an elegant warm gray salad plate, a happy yellow dessert plate with a shoe illustration on it, a fun polka dotted soup bowl, and a tea cup imprinted with letters that stand for things like "hot sauce" and "mom’s macaroni and cheese".

I love the way the soup/cereal/yogurt/oatmeal bowls stack up. They immediately put me in a good mood. We made these more casual so they can be used for breakfast, lunch or dinner.

Su is a big fan of shoes, think Carrie on Sex and the City. We found fun sketches of different shoes on istock, and purchased them for one time use.

The tea cups (or ice cream cups) are for after dinner conversations, and are inscribed with pieces of information not commonly known about Su. One saying "D is for sticky ‘date’ cake" is a good conversation starter. I don’t even know the full story behind that one.

The serving dishes are gray on the inside and white on the outside.

Chloe is Su’s Maltese and Yorkshire mix, and has her own dishes to match the set. One for water, the other for food.

I love the combination of Su’s style and gleena aesthetic that this set embodies, creating a one of a kind collection.

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A set of dinner plates, with blue hand-painted swirls, each stamped with a number. To see the plates in their "green" (dried but not fired) stage, click here.