“For 38 years I’ve told people the same thing: your olive oil isn’t bad. Your bottle is.” — Why a 72-year-old Ohio potter is letting her last 219 hand-painted oil dispensers go at a special price, before her studio closes for good.

Every time someone picks up one of Wanetta Kuhlman’s oil dispensers at the pottery festival, she asks the same question first: “Where do you keep your olive oil right now?”

The answer is almost always: in the bottle it came in, next to the stove, in the sun. Wanetta nods and says the sentence she has been saying since 1988.

Wanetta is 72. She has thrown pots on a wheel for more than forty years, in an old milk house behind her farmhouse outside Crooksville, Ohio. This October she fired her kiln for the last time.

“People think their oil went bad. It didn’t. It sat in the light. That’s the bottle’s fault, not the oil’s.”

The bottle that broke on Orval’s kitchen floor

Crooksville is a village of about 2,400 people in Perry County, where the potteries once fired day and night. In 1972, at eighteen, Wanetta started painting flowers on dinner plates on the decorating line of one of them, until it closed in 1983.

Her husband Orval was a short-order cook in Zanesville and cooked at home every Sunday, with olive oil. He kept it where most people do: in a clear glass bottle on the windowsill above the stove.

One Sunday in the spring of 1988 he tasted the oil and made a face. “It tastes like crayons,” he said. The bottle was only two months old, with a greasy ring on the sill under it. Two weeks later he knocked it off the sill with his elbow, and Wanetta spent the evening on her knees with paper towels.

“I said, Orval, I’m a potter. Why on earth are we keeping oil in glass? The next morning I went out to the milk house and threw him one out of clay.”

The milk house behind the farmhouse

In 1984 Wanetta set up a used kick wheel and a small kiln in the old cinder-block milk house behind the farmhouse and made mugs and bowls for the church bazaar and the town’s pottery festival every July.

After 1988, people started asking for “one like Orval’s.” She thinks she has made about 5,800 since. Each one takes about three hours of work, spread over a week: throwing, trimming, pulling the handle, two firings and the painting in between. Then she fits the steel spout by hand and tests it with water over the sink.

“If it drips on my sink, it doesn’t leave the milk house. I’ve thrown plenty back in the scrap bucket.”

Five things the bottle on your counter gets wrong

After 38 years at her festival table, Wanetta can list every complaint about oil bottles in her sleep:

• It lets the light in. Clear glass lets the sun straight into the oil. After a few weeks on the windowsill, good oil tastes flat and stale. Orval called it “crayons.”
• It tips over. Tall, thin bottles are top-heavy. One elbow or one cat, and you are on your knees with paper towels.
• It drips down the side. Cheap spouts leave a drop behind every time. It runs down the bottle into a greasy ring that dust and crumbs stick to.
• It stays open. An open spout lets in dust, kitchen grease and, in summer, fruit flies.
• It ends up in the cupboard. Plastic bottles are too ugly to leave out. So the oil goes behind a door, and you reach for butter instead.

What 38 years taught her about an oil bottle

Each of those five problems is why her dispensers look the way they do. People who order one usually write first: “It’s heavier than I thought.” That is on purpose.

• “The Dark Clay Body”: Thick, glazed clay, painted all the way around. No light gets through to the oil, so it can stay out on the counter where you use it.
• “The Low Belly”: About 10 inches tall and 5 inches wide with the handle. The weight sits in the wide, round bottom, so it stands like it means it. “Orval knocked it with his elbow a hundred times,” Wanetta says. “It wobbled and stayed put.”
• “The Pulled Handle”: A loop handle with room for three fingers, pulled by hand from the same clay. You pour like from a little pitcher instead of squeezing a slippery bottle.
• “The Self-Closing Steel Spout”: A stainless steel spout with a small black flap. Tilt and it swings open, set it down and it falls shut, so dust and fruit flies stay out. The stream is thin and steady and stops clean.

“I didn’t invent anything. I just made the bottle I’d want next to my own stove.”

Three patterns from the farm, and never a fourth

Wild Rose is the white roses along Orval’s old fence. Red Poppy is for her mother’s poppies by the porch, with a band of cobalt blue like the old Crooksville dinnerware. Rose Mallow is the big pink and blue flowers along the creek behind the farm every August.

“Three is enough. I paint what grows out here, and nothing else grows that pretty.”

The morning her shoulder said no

What Wanetta will miss most are the mornings: coffee in the milk house, fog on the fields, the first lump of clay on the wheel.

Centering that clay takes your whole weight, leaned in through the shoulder. Last spring her right shoulder began to ache every time. The doctor called it arthritis. It will not get better.

“I can still paint a rose. I just can’t get the clay to sit still for me anymore. Four pounds of clay and it wins every time now.”

In October she loaded the kiln one last time. There is no one to take over. 219 oil dispensers are left, 73 of each pattern. On December 31, the kick wheel goes to the art room of the local high school.

“An oil bottle belongs next to the stove, not in a china cabinet”

Hand-thrown, hand-painted oil bottles like these sell for $120 to $160 in craft galleries. For her last 219, Wanetta could ask that much. Everyone would understand. She won’t.

“If it never gets an oily thumbprint on the handle, I made it for nothing.”

She is asking far less. She wants her last dispensers on real kitchen counters this Thanksgiving and this Christmas, next to real stoves, getting used every day.

Wanetta doesn’t use a computer. Her granddaughter Shayla, 24, a dental hygienist in Columbus, saw the full shelves at Sunday dinner. “Grandma, the festival is in July,” she said, and spent the next weekend setting up the page where you can order now.

“Shayla says more people will see them in a week than came to my table in forty years. I told her fine, as long as they get used.”

What home cooks say about Wanetta’s oil dispensers

• ★★★★★

  “My olive oil lived in the cupboard for years because the bottle was so ugly. Now the Wild Rose one sits by the stove and I actually cook with it. No more sticky ring on the counter either.”

  Linda M., Lancaster, OH
• ★★★★★

  “Heavier than I expected, and that’s a good thing. My old glass bottle went over twice last year. This one doesn’t budge. The little flap is clever too, it just closes when you set it down.”

  Donna R., Wheeling, WV
• ★★★★★

  “Bought the Red Poppy for my daughter’s new kitchen and the Rose Mallow for myself. Both arrived packed in so much paper I thought the box was empty. You can see every brush stroke up close.”

  Carol S., Erie, PA

Three questions people ask before ordering

Where can I buy one of Wanetta’s oil dispensers?

Only through this page. Wanetta’s dispensers are not sold on Amazon, Temu or in any store.

How long will they be available?

Only while supplies last. The kiln has been fired for the last time, and there are 219 dispensers left across all three patterns. Once a pattern is gone, it is gone for good.

What if it’s not right for me?

You have 90 days to try it at home. If you are not happy, just send a short email and you will get your money back. No questions, no hassle.

More from kitchens with one by the stove

• ★★★★★

  “I have arthritis in both hands and slim bottles always slipped. With the handle I just tip it like a little pitcher. It’s the first oil bottle I don’t have to think about.”

  Barbara K., Muncie, IN
• ★★★★★

  “Every summer we had fruit flies around the oil. Not this year. The flap stays shut until you pour. My husband says it’s the best-looking thing in the kitchen.”

  Sharon D., Frankfort, KY
• ★★★★★

  “Gave one to my sister for her birthday. She called me that night and said, ‘This was made by a real person, wasn’t it?’ I said yes, a lady in Ohio.”

  Patricia W., Lansing, MI