Creating a Pottery Coffee Cup — From Beginning to End

I love creating these, ‘How it’s Made’, style videos. From footage gathered over the past year or two and edited into a seamless, flowing process that quickly shows how a lump of clay turns into the finished, reduction fired vessel. If only the actual process were as smooth. In between most stages are periods of waiting for clay to firm up, for glazes to dry, for kilns to cool down. At times producing pots feels like you’re juggling ten different tasks, different processes and finally all of that comes to a conclusion, weeks or months later, after my gas kiln has been packed and fired to 1290ºc. Not to mention trying to film every stage – social media is, very much a second job of mine – but I sometimes enjoy documenting my work as much as making it and when looking back in a decades time there’ll be a vast trove of pictures and film showing almost every pot I’ve made during that period. It’ll hopefully be easy to see how my style has changed, albeit slowly and surely. Hopefully I don’t loo