Studio Journal: September 2025
“All the months are crude experiments, out of which the perfect September is made.”
– Virginia Woolf
September has been the first proper month of making in our new workshop. Phase 1 of the studio move is finally complete! That is, we are moved in, things have found their general places and we are functional. We are back to making and back to a bit of teaching too.
We do have ambitions for a phase 2. The space is larger than any of our previous studios and full of potential for a gallery / display space. So we have aspirations of setting up a stock room upstairs (we have a mezzanine!!!) and building a beautiful customer facing area downstairs. But all good things take time and we are just content for now to be in and making and being surrounded by the beautiful countryside of the Peaks.
With the children back to school and the studio established Matt and I have fallen into a new rhythm. September is mine and two of my childrens’ birthday month and it has certainly come with many gifts. Rain. All the viruses from school. A bit of sun here and there. And a deadline! We actually love deadlines because stuff. gets. done.
This particular deadline is for a brand called Katto who you may know for their beautiful knives made down the road in Kelham Island. We’ve been working on some coffee pourers and dripper for a special edition from them, launching later this week. It’s been an absolute pleasure working with the team and we look forward to seeing how it goes.
We also completed a lovely order for Henrock by Simon Rogan - let me know if you ever visit and spot our pieces….
A collection of pieces heading to Henrock by Simon Rogan all glazed in nori
I also went to London for all but a few hours with Ben Stanton, our collaborator and friend for the opening of ‘Collaboration’ at County Hall Pottery. In March we approached by Emma at County Hall to work on a project exploring collaboration in some way. Even though we had quite a bit on we jumped at the idea because we just loved the idea of exploring new ideas and being creative. We asked Ben if he’d like to work with us and luckily for us he said yes. As makers of predominantly functional pieces, it was interesting to me that Matt, Ben and I all turned towards sculpture in our first meeting. We talked about materials primarily and then about process but mainly about how two polarising ideas can be true when it comes to form. Things that seem fragile can be strong. Heavy seeming objects can be light. We talked about beach-combing, the skeletons of a tiny creature, but also about our love of the sculptures of Brancusi and Noguchi. I referenced a series of children’s stacking toys that I had seen. Seemingly disparate strands of thought came together.
The tapered cylinders we’d been making for our glaze tests were a starting point for us and we decided to make these stacking, skeletal, modular systems - vertebrae - combined with hand shaped blades of oak to create a playful and sculptural system. It felt quite daunting to work in this way, to not focus on the end point, a tangible product, but to make the components for play. We had to trust the materials and processes we had created for ourselves.
The result for the exhibition are two sculptures, which I suppose are a bit like maquettes towards a larger work. The result of fascinating conversations, hours of careful making and playful and free sessions in which we assembled the structures.
Collaboration is on display at County Hall Pottery until November 9.
Looking ahead to next month we are in the midst of preparing for our first Autumn show - the Great Northern Contemporary Craft Fair at the very beautiful Victoria Baths in Manchester. We’ve not done this show for many years so I’m really excited and intrigued to see how we get on. There are a whopping 200 makers on show and this is a really established show, running for 18 years now. We will be joined by fellow potter friends Becca Brown, Eve Gnoyke and the 2 Hungry Bakers to name just a few. I hope you can join us?
We are bringing a collection of new pieces of reduction fired work (a few teasers below). These pieces are not yet online but will be in the coming weeks.
Alongside shows (Potfest in the Pens and the TOAST Christmas market are also on the cards), plus making orders for our stockists Edinburgh Mercantile and Nikki Jones Interiors, we are also deep into our Christmas making. Nowadays our production team consists of only myself and Matt with occasional freelance assistance, so we are needing to be really organised and efficient as we can’t always meet the demand. You may notice a few more pre-order opportunities, such as how we have done for the Coffee Sets.
Now something technical as I know many of you reading are also potters. We have had a nightmare! Our beloved pugmill, purchased about 4 or 5 years ago at great expense, found itself a little under the weather. We noticed these barnacle like pocks on the interior chambers and with a little research came to understand they were deposits of crystalline forms of aluminium hydroxide from the clay, corroding the metal. Over the past year we’ve been having a few problems with boating in the clay and I’m wondering if this corrosion may have been the problem. We ‘wet and dried’ it, cleaned it - a time consuming task - and it looks ok now. I think we’ll need to do this annually. And as for the bloating? I shall keep you updated to see if this problem goes away….