Katie L Thompson Designs

A Birthday Present That Got Rather Out Of Hand.

Katie's mother gave her a pottery class for her twenty-first, which she was not at all sure about on the grounds that it involved getting covered in clay and making small talk with strangers. She bought her own wheel shortly afterwards. The business had started in 2015 with cards and textiles, the accounting job was the day job, and the pottery was supposed to be the escape from it. It is now a garden studio in Berkshire and the accounting has been quietly left behind, which is how these things tend to go once a wheel is involved.

Every piece is thrown, trimmed back once the clay has gone leather hard, dried for a fortnight, fired to a thousand degrees, glazed by hand inside and out, then fired again to 1,220. That is roughly three weeks of intermittent attention before a mug reaches anybody's hand. The glazes are the part she is proudest of and rightly so: every recipe worked out from scratch, which means the colours belong to her alone and you will not find them anywhere else. The shapes stay plain and practical, made for Sunday roasts and hurried lunches and the mug you reach for before you are properly awake, rather than for a shelf.

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