Studio Journal: November 2025

“It was a cold November day and she had dressed herself up in layers of cardigans and covered the whole lot with her old tweed coat, the one she might have used for feeding the chickens in.”
― Barbara Pym, Jane and Prudence

Above, scenes from our Festive pop up shop in the front of our studio

November has been a month of slightly unhinged making, of playing shopkeepers in our workshop and celebrating the fact that our studio now has some form of heating.    

This month we exhibited at Potfest in the Pens, Melton Mowbray. I am using the royal ‘we’ as in fact it was just Matt, selling pots by day, sleeping (or bingeing Traitors) in the van by night. As well as exhibiting at Potfest we have spent time transforming the front section of our workshop into a festive shop space. I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed working on this. So often we don’t have enough hours in the day and the functional, utilitarian and essential takes priority. We need stock shelves that make sense and order and our studio is organised by pragmatism, not poetics. So it was liberating to spend a few hours dilly dallying around with foraged hops, twinkly fairy lights and measuring the space evenly between the nails on which we strung up our pine garlands. We opened up for the first time on Sunday - pots, mulled apple juice, customers - it was really lovely. We’ll be opening again this weekend both days 11-3 and then the following weekend we’re away for the Toast festive market.

Espresso Cups (in progress and fired)

There has been a great deal of making these past weeks as we embarked on an ambitious deadline to make more coffee sets for Katto, plus finalise wholesale orders for Edinburgh Mercantile and Niki Jones Interiors. Not to mention for our own online shop. This time of year, nothing ever feels enough. And we’ve had some kiln casualties too. A whole batch of carefully made teapots with either hairline cracks in the handles or pooled glaze. I know many of you will wince at this notion - the waste - but we smashed the worst offenders immediately and boxed up the shards, sealed it and got rid. I just can’t have these pieces on my shelves, whispering ‘failure’ to me every time I walk past. We put so much time and passion in to the making, so when something doesn’t work out, especially if it is my fault (applying the glaze too thickly) it is impossible not to feel dismal and even a small element of self hatred. Because I do know better, I test, measure, think - and yet I can make one small mistake and miss something and then days of work just goes down the drain. It is brutal, a sort of humiliation and punishment for letting down my guard. I honestly do not how single makers do this, a huge part of mine and Matt’s relationship both as partners and potters is lifting the other’s spirits, saying that it is ok, ‘this too shall pass’. Constant tests, doubts and failures are balanced out by the joy of making pots, of a stubborn belief that what we do is important, but they are rarely in equilibrium and so we have some deranged weeks of despair intercepted with blissful, ego massaging weeks of success. We just need to remember that life is like this, and not to ‘sweat the small stuff’, as they say.

I wrote a guide to the local area for anyone visiting our festive pop up shore from afar. It made me realise just what a lovely place we live and work in. I also put together a playlist, the first in while, to guide me through the hectic days, and, also my first gift guide of the season - All is Calm, a Gift Guide.

Things I’ve enjoyed listening to: November Headspace (my playlist for November)

Things I’ve enjoyed reading: The Gustav Sonata by Rose Tremain

Things we’ve enjoyed cooking (and eating): If you’ve read the above novel, you may remember a passage about potato rosti, which lead me on to a bit of a deep dive into potato rosti! Matt made me this Ottolenghi recipe and I cannot recommend enough.