Hi! Thank you for visiting! I’m Traci, the founder of stone + stem. I work alongside my partner Jeff to bring you our hypertufa and concrete pots, bowls and candles.   

As long-time avid plant collectors and propagators, we were always looking for ways to bring more varieties of plants into our interior and exterior spaces. During COVID, as was the case with so many others, this became an even bigger goal. Unfortunately, with COVID also came supply chain disruptions, and the resulting availability, selection and quality of pots and plant containers was just disappointing. As we weren’t able to find pots and planters that appealed to our aesthetic, we of course turned to the Internet. There we discovered the almost Zen approach to our problem—making our own containers. Ceramics didn’t really fit our needs, but we did happen upon a more “basic’ solution, namely hypertufa, which we will describe below.

After plenty of evenings and weekends making as absolute mess with cement and the other hypertufa fixings (and letting our inner messy child run wild), we found ourselves truly enjoying the creative release of making pots, planters, and bowls by hand. That creativity was accompanied by the practicality of being able to custom make containers of pretty much any size and shape, all of which looked great both indoors and outdoors.

Over a short time, that undertaking evolved into a broader scope of creativity, namely crafting poured molds, some using hypertufa, and some using mostly only cement. We let our collective imaginations run wild, and the results were, in several cases, hysterically wild! Many everyday items in our kitchen and in stores jumped out at us as having great potential as molds, triggering our experimentation genes even more, which helped to produce a wide variety of containers, which more than met our needs. As for extras, we happily gave those to family and friends. We were delighted by the reaction we got from the recipients of our surplus! At some point, we realized this creative outlet that brought us, and our plants, such happiness could actually have merit as a business. After more tinkering, wishful thinking, market research, and soul searching, stone + stem was born.

Our creations are made of cement, either “straight up,” or as hypertufa. Hypertufa is a man-made material that mimics the look of natural tufa (a porous rock created by nature). S + S hypertufa products are a blend of cement, peat moss, vermiculite, perlite, and sand. All of our products are hand-crafted and are hand-finished with a beeswax polish to reduce any dusty feel, and to create a soft luster to bring out the nuanced colors and surface details of each piece. Because each item is hand poured and hand crafted, no two will be exactly the same. The surface of each item may vary slightly, as may the color and texture, making all S+S pieces individual works of art (at least to us). These hypertufa items are not mass-produced by machines, and therefore may have some imperfections, which we feel only adds to their uniqueness and character. 

Making candles in some of our pots was pure serendipity, as some of the more “visionary” pours resulted in pots that were a bit too eclectic as pots for living plants but seemed better suited for candles. That, coupled with our difficulty finding really nice candles for our own use, led us to try our hand at candle-making to give those items a second chance. The results were quite lovely. So lovely, in fact, that we expanded the candle selection to include several sizes and shapes of our regular pots. In keeping with  our “nature-centric” focus for S+S products, we felt the appropriate candle “fuel” was beeswax. Plus, the scent of a pure beeswax candle is something that all should experience at least once in their lives.

So that is our story, or at least our story so far. We are excited about where this journey may lead and thank you for taking a minute to get to know us. We truly are thrilled to be able to do what we do, and it has made us much happier and balanced, and maybe it will be the same for you. And in the end, isn’t that what it’s all about?