Commissions · Sofia

Four questions, and you will know the price and the date before you write to me.

I am Elena. Commissioning a piece is vague and slightly frightening, and the vagueness is my fault as much as yours: a potter who will not name a figure until you have committed is asking you to guess. So the questions below are the four I would ask you anyway, and the answer you get back is a real range in euros and a real number of weeks from the same kiln I fire everything else in. Nothing is sent anywhere.

Question 1 of 4

What would you like made?

Close enough is fine. If you are between two of these, pick the one that is more work — I would rather quote you high and come back down.

Question 2 of 4

How many?

A set is priced by the piece, not by the set, because every one of them is thrown separately and every one can fail in the kiln.

Question 3 of 4

How soon do you need it?

This is the question that changes the answer more than any other, so please be blunt with it.

Question 4 of 4

Anything that matters to you?

Choose as many as apply, or none at all and press on. Every one of these changes what I would make and what I would charge for it.

Nothing is sent, and nothing is stored.

Your estimate

These are the same figures I would put in the first email, minus the questions I would have asked you twice. The studio is Studio 3, the old printworks, 47 Tsar Samuil Street, Sofia, and the kiln is a second-hand Rohde 60 L, electric, fired to 1220 – 1240 °C.

€280 – €900what a commission runs, from four dinner plates to a large vessel

6–9weeks from the first message to a boxed piece, and longer for eight or more

50%up front, the rest when it is fired and I am happy with it

4–5commissions a month, which is why the answers above are as blunt as they are

How it actually works

Four emails, two firings, one box.

You write to me with the answers you just gave, or a screenshot of them, or a photograph of the shelf the piece has to live on. The vaguer the brief, the more questions come back, so the estimate above is only a starting point — but it is a real one, and I will not move it upwards without telling you why.

I reply with a plan: what I think will work, what it costs, and which firing your piece can go into. I answer enquiries on Tuesdays and Fridays, so give me three days. If I am the wrong person for the job I say so in that first reply and name someone who is not.

Then you pay half, and I throw it. You get photographs of a test tile before the real piece goes anywhere near the kiln, because the difference between a glaze on a tile and a glaze on a curved wall is the whole reason I make tiles in the first place. If you asked to be involved in the glaze, this is the part where you get a say.

The last two weeks are the quiet ones. The bisque goes to 980 °C over eight hours and the glaze firing climbs to 1240 °C and comes down over another fourteen, and I do not open the kiln early. I did once. Six to nine weeks after the first message it arrives double-boxed in wood wool, insured, with the glaze recipe written inside the lid in case you ever want it repeated.