Studio notes
No newsletter, no posting schedule. A note appears here when a glaze finally behaves, when a firing goes wrong, or when somebody asks me a question worth answering properly.
I loaded sixty pieces on a Tuesday evening, set the controller for 1240 °C, and went to bed at eleven. At seven the next morning the kiln was sitting at 1080 and had been there for four hours. The elements were fine. The answer was duller than that: I had stacked the shelves too tightly and left the bottom third of the kiln with nowhere for the heat to move.
Here is what sixty pieces look like when they are underfired by a hundred and sixty degrees, what I did with them, and why I now leave a full hand's width between shelves even when it costs me four pieces of space.
14 February 2026 · 6 minutes
Eleven test tiles and three recipes later, one finally stays put on a vertical wall instead of pooling on the shelf.
Six weeks, one plate lost in the second firing, and a client who changed her mind about the rim twice. Both times she was right.
The pit is a hole in a field behind a petrol station, and the clay comes out the colour of wet brick and smells faintly of iron.
Not a manifesto. Just eleven years of handles that were never quite as good as the mug they were stuck to.
The first pot is always terrible, the third is usually good, and somebody always goes quiet at four o'clock on Sunday.
My skip used to fill up with bowls I would happily eat from. That was a pricing problem, not a pottery problem.