Melanie's work is thrown using North Carolina stoneware clay with a few simple tools. “My work is influenced by the nature that surrounds me here in the mountains as well as the memories I have of the beach,” she says. In Long Island, she lived just 20 minutes from the coast and traveled there every chance she got. “The glazes I choose tend to flow like the ocean waves that slowly creep up onto the shore,” says Dyel. Even her memories of working in a bakery and decorating with icing when she was young inspire her to add slip trailing designs on all of her work. “Slip is clay mixed with water until it is a consistency that is like icing, which is then squeezed from a bulb with a fine tip on semi-hard clay,” she says. “I feel like the piece is not complete until my slip trailing designs have been added.”