Meet the Maker…

March sees an annual Instagram event called ‘March Meet the Maker’. Every day there is a challenge to help you express some of your creative life to your followers. I (Michaela) do my best to participate as it makes me stop and think about the prompts- what they mean to me and how to respond to them. Prompts have been things such as ‘inspiration’, ‘the story behind our name’, ‘dream collaboration’, ‘self-care.’.. and the one that prompted this video was how it’s made.

(You can follow my response to these prompts via our instgram feed at the bottom of this page)

Pottery is such a complex process – preparing the clay, designing, making, drying, firing, glazing – each step has a space between it so you can imagine the chaos in the studio sometimes with pots at various steps dotted around the pottery. So it was quite hard to show one image that summed that up and I decided to choose to show just one step.

I put the first step of the design in the clay when it is a rolled out slab – in this case, flowers and poetry. The slab was then made into a mug, dried and fired. To add a subtle colour to the lettering and flowers, I daub the pot in various splashes of underglaze, glaze and watered down oxides then wash them back with a damp sponge, leaving the colour within the lines I had printed or inscribed.

If you do instagram you can check out all of my #marchmeetthemaker posts and some have gone onto our facebook feed too. Let us know which your favourite posts have been – and we hope you enjoy the little video snippet.