The studio smells of wet clay and woodsmoke, and the shelves are a census of the maker’s patience: forty mugs, twelve jugs, one bowl that took three years to get right.
We spent a day at the wheel with a potter who refuses to sell anything until it has survived a full year in her own kitchen. “If it chips, it was wrong,” she says. “If it wears in, it was right.”
The glaze recipes are kept in a dog-eared notebook, each batch numbered and dated like a diary. Some are failures worth keeping; the crackled rose glaze was one, rescued from the reject shelf by a visitor who loved it.
Making, she reminds us, is mostly waiting — and the waiting is the craft.