Advertorial · 2 days ago · By Nadine Pfautz

“The arthritis won. These are my last ones.” Why a 76-year-old potter is selling her hand-made egg holders for the first and last time online

For 37 years Imogene Kemmerer ran a little ceramics shop in Berks County. Then she got tired of the soggy egg cartons her husband stacked on her kitchen counter, and she sat down with a lump of clay one more time. This fall her hands told her it was time to stop, and 238 egg holders are all that’s left.

Every morning a little after seven, the screen door on the Kemmerer farmhouse bangs twice. Once when Lyle goes out to the coop, and once when he comes back in. In between, nine hens get fed, the water gets changed, and the eggs get collected the way Lyle has collected them for 42 years: in his feed cap.

He sets the cap down on the kitchen counter like a bowl, and these days he takes the eggs out one at a time and puts them in a pale blue ceramic tray with six cups, a twisted handle at each end and little white daisies painted all over it. Brown ones, a cream one, one that is almost pink. Each egg goes into its own cup. Imogene made the tray for him.

Imogene is 76. She made the first tray in 2024, “for Lyle, and a little bit for me.” Since then it has become the thing people in this corner of Berks County ask her about at church, at the post office and at the egg stand at the end of the lane.

This fall the arthritis in her hands and a worn-out right shoulder made the decision for her. The kiln is promised to the high school. What came out of the last firing in October is all that’s left: 238 trays.

Nine hens, one cap and a stack of old cartons

Lyle keeps nine hens behind the barn, each one named after a woman from Imogene’s old Tuesday ceramics nights. “The real Gloria thinks it’s an honor,” Imogene says. “The real Arlene hasn’t spoken to me since 2019.”

Nine hens lay a lot of eggs. And for 42 years those eggs ended up in old cardboard cartons from the grocery store, reused until they fell apart. Lyle would fish one out of the recycling bin, fill it and set it on the counter next to the others. “Some weeks there were five of them by the coffee maker,” Imogene says. “Gray, soft, stained. You couldn’t even see what was inside.”

The cartons went damp and picked up every smell from the stove, and nobody knew which eggs were from Monday and which from Friday. “All my life I kept a nice kitchen,” she says. “And in the middle of it, a pile of soggy cardboard.” What finally changed it was something she had not touched in eight years.

Thirty-seven years of ceramics nights in Fleetwood

If you grew up in a small town in the 1970s or ’80s, you probably remember a shop like hers. Imogene opened Imogene’s Ceramic Corner on Main Street in Fleetwood in 1979, the year she turned 29: shelves of unpainted greenware, a wall of plaster molds, two kilns in the back, and long tables where women from three townships painted Christmas trees and cookie jars on Tuesday and Thursday nights.

“Every mother in the valley had something from my shop on her mantel,” she says. She taught them to paint, and she did the part nobody saw: wedging the clay, shaping the special orders by hand and firing the kilns so that nothing cracked.

She closed the shop in 2016, when the last of her Tuesday-night ladies stopped driving after dark. Her tools and the last bags of clay went into the barn behind the farmhouse. So did the kiln, a 1979 model Lyle wired in himself. For eight years, nobody opened it.

Then, in the spring of 2024, on a morning when Lyle tipped the eggs into a carton so worn that the lid came off in his hand, Imogene walked out to the barn, lifted the lid of the old kiln and found out it still worked. “I thought, that man deserves a proper place for his eggs,” she says. “And so do I.”

One tray, six seats

She shaped the first one at her kitchen table: six cups in two rows of three, each deep enough that an egg stands in it and can’t tip over. It took her three tries before every egg sat still.

Every tray is still made that way, one at a time. She rolls out a thick slab of clay, presses the six cups in with her thumbs and a smooth wooden egg she has kept since the shop days, and pinches the wavy rim into shape with her fingers. Then come the handles. She rolls two thin coils of clay and twists them together like a soft pretzel, one handle for each end. “This is Pennsylvania,” she says. “If it isn’t twisted, nobody trusts it.”

After the first firing she paints the daisies by hand with the same fine brush she used at the shop. Twelve strokes for the petals, one dot of yellow in the middle, about twenty daisies to a tray. Daisies were her mother’s favorite flower.

The red dots and the thin red line around the rim were Lyle’s idea. “He said it needed something red,” Imogene says. “Like the barn.” Then the glaze goes on, and the tray goes back into the kiln for a second firing.

Because every tray is shaped and painted by hand, no two come out exactly alike. “If you want them all the same,” she says, “buy plastic.”

How a tray ended up at the egg stand

The Kemmerers have sold eggs from a little wooden stand at the end of their lane for as long as anyone can remember: a cooler, a cash tin and an honor system that has always worked, Lyle says, “except for one raccoon.”

The summer after she made the first tray, Imogene set one on the stand, filled with eggs, just to show it off. By Saturday three people had left notes in the cash tin asking where they could get one. By August there was a waiting list on the back of a feed-store receipt.

So she made a second color. Then she dug out an old strawberry dish from the shop days, her best seller in 1986, and shaped a six-egg tray after it, modeling every strawberry, leaf and little flower by hand. The sunny yellow one came last. At the church Christmas bazaar last year, every tray she brought was gone by eleven in the morning.

Why eggs need a better place than the carton

There are cheap egg trays online, and Imogene has seen them. “Most of them are flat,” she says. “Little dents, not cups. The egg sits on top and rolls out the first time somebody bumps the counter.” Her cups are deep enough that the egg sits in them.

Lyle’s eggs now go straight from his cap into the cups on the counter. Her daughter Renée in Lancaster keeps her tray on a shelf in the fridge instead of a soggy carton. “Six eggs, six seats,” Imogene says. “You see at one look how many you’ve got left.”

And then there is baking. Every cake recipe in her mother’s tin box says “eggs at room temperature,” and almost nobody remembers. “Set six eggs in the tray when you turn the oven on,” Imogene says. “By the time your butter is soft, they’re ready.”

At breakfast, boiled eggs stand up on their own. At Easter, the dyed ones finally have somewhere to sit. And when company comes, Renée fills a tray with olives, cherry tomatoes and little cups of dip.

Four trays, and then the kiln goes cold

The trays come in four versions. Robin’s Egg Blue is the first one Imogene made, “the color of the eggs in the nest by our porch every April.” Rhubarb Pink is a warm rose with white daisies, named after the rhubarb patch behind the summer kitchen. And Strawberry Patch is the white tray modeled on her old shop’s best-selling strawberry dish. Sunflower Yellow is the newest, for the sunflowers Lyle grows along the garden fence every summer.

For a year now, Imogene’s hands have been telling her something. The arthritis started in her thumbs, then came the right shoulder, worn out by forty years of wedging heavy clay and lifting full kiln shelves. Some mornings she can’t close her fingers around the brush until she has held them under warm water.

In September her doctor in Reading said what Lyle and Renée had been saying for months: no more wedging clay, no more hours bent over a brush. “When it takes me a whole morning to paint one tray,” Imogene says, “it’s time.” The kiln goes to the art room at the high school, and her tools go with it.

So in October she fired the kiln one last time: every tray she had shaped and painted since January, load after load for four weeks, with Lyle carrying the trays and the kiln shelves for her. What came out is what’s left: 238 trays. “When they’re gone, they’re gone,” she says. “Lyle says if I buy another kiln, he’s moving in with the hens.”

Why she’s letting them go at a special price

At the church bazaar the trays sold for $119, and people still bought two. Imogene could ask the same online. She doesn’t want to. “I can’t make any more,” she says. “And I don’t want the last ones sitting in boxes in the barn all winter while people’s eggs sit in soggy cartons. They’re made to be used.”

So she set one price for everything that’s left: $59 a tray, down from the $119 they sold for at the bazaar. The special price runs until November 30, 2026. After that, Lainey keeps the shop open until the last tray is gone.

Her granddaughter Lainey, 24, set up a little online shop for her this fall. “Grandma shapes, paints and packs,” Lainey says. “I do the computer part and carry the boxes to the post office.”

What people say about Imogene’s trays

The present nobody else will bring

Half the trays at the bazaar went as presents. “For the daughter with the chickens, the neighbor who bakes, the sister who has everything,” Imogene says. “Nobody has one of these.”

The buyers surprised her: young couples with their first backyard coop, grandmothers who remember an egg dish on their own grandmother’s counter, and a man from Ohio who ordered all four and wrote that his late wife “would have painted them herself if she’d known how.” Imogene kept that note.

More notes from the cash tin

Where to get one

The trays are only available through Imogene’s own little shop, the one Lainey set up this fall.

The shop takes all major cards, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay. Every tray is wrapped by hand at the farmhouse kitchen table and ships within 1 to 2 business days, with Imogene’s 90-day money-back guarantee.

“When I put the brush down for good, the trays stay in other people’s kitchens,” she says. “That’s where I want them. Not in a box. On the counter, with eggs in them.”

Disclosure: The owner of this site has a material connection to the products shown on this page. Testimonials reflect individual experiences. Images are for illustration; because each tray is shaped and painted by hand, the final product may vary slightly.