Category: Making

There’s a particular kind of mess that takes over the studio when the monsters are in production. Little limbs queued up on a board. Pairs of eyes drying on a tile. A row of round bellies, each one hollow, each one waiting for a face. It’s chaos — but it’s the good sort.

People ask me all the time how these little characters come to be, so I thought I’d lift the lid on it properly. The short answer: very slowly, and almost entirely with my fingers. The long answer is below.

How a lump of clay grows a face

Every monster starts as a pinched, hollow body — built up in my palms a section at a time and joined while the clay is still soft. The belly has to be hollow or the whole thing would crack in the kiln, so the trapped air needs a tiny escape hatch — often a poked-open mouth, sometimes a nostril, sometimes a cheeky little belly button.

Then the personality starts arriving. Ears get pinched and pressed on while the body is still tacky enough to take them. Feet are rolled, splayed, and given toes one at a time. Eyes are made separately as tiny domes and pushed home — the colour goes on later, but that’s the moment the monster suddenly looks at you. Teeth, wings, a held-up heart, a tucked-in bunny — every extra bit is added wet so it fuses cleanly through the firings.

Then comes two trips through the kiln — once bisque, once glaze — and the glaze is where the real surprises happen. A speckled stoneware here, a pool of green there, a wash of pink that pulls into the texture. I never quite know which monster’s going to come out looking smug, startled or properly delighted with itself until I open the kiln door.

No two ever come out the same — they couldn’t if I tried. The clay and the kiln have opinions of their own, and I’ve learned to take their notes.

A smaller drop than I’d planned

Now for the slightly bittersweet bit. The monsters have been a runaway hit at the local markets these last few weeks — far more flew off the table than I’d dared expect, and that means fewer have made it back to the studio shelf for the website drop than I’d originally lined up.

I’d rather tell you straight than quietly put a thinner drop online and hope nobody notices. Every piece is one-of-a-kind and hand-built start to finish, so once a particular monster’s gone, that exact little face is gone for good — the next batch will look related, but never identical.

If one catches your eye when the shop opens, don’t dawdle. And if your favourite slips away before you get there, the kiln’s already humming for the next round — follow along on Instagram for the kiln-opening reveals, and I’ll let you know when the next batch lands.

If you put a lump of clay in my hand on a quiet afternoon, I’d probably forget the rest of the day existed. There’s something about the way it warms to your skin, takes the print of your thumb, and politely refuses to be rushed — it pulls you into its own pace whether you’ve got time for it or not.

Most pottery you see on a shelf these days is slip cast or thrown on a wheel — and the wheel is wonderful, no argument. But almost everything I make at Henroo is built another way, with my hands and a couple of patient afternoons. So here’s a little love letter to the technique I keep coming back to: handbuilding.

Three ways to grow a pot from a lump of clay

Handbuilding isn’t really one technique — it’s a small family of them, often used together in the same piece. The three classics:

Pinch. Press your thumbs into a ball of clay, then turn and squeeze with your fingers until the walls thin out. It’s the oldest pottery technique on earth — pinched bowls predate the wheel by thousands of years — and it’s the one I reach for when I’m building small, round forms with personality. The monsters are pinch-pots underneath all the eyes and ears.

Coil. Roll the clay into long ropes and stack them, smoothing each one into the next as you go. Coiling lets you build taller and curvier than a pinch will allow — vases, jugs, pieces that need to flare in and out as they climb.

Slab. Roll the clay flat with a rolling pin (or a slab roller, if you’re lucky enough to have one), cut shapes out of it like pastry, and join them up. Slab building is how you get crisp edges, flat-sided things, mugs, boxes, tiles — anything that wants to remember it was once a sheet.

Most of what comes out of my studio uses a bit of all three. A coil for the body, a slab for the base, pinched details for character.

You can’t bully clay into the shape you want — it’ll let you know when it’s ready and when it isn’t. Half the craft is learning to listen.

Why slow, and why by hand

A pot thrown on a wheel can take its shape in a matter of minutes; a handbuilt piece often takes days. Build a bit, wait for it to firm up, build a bit more, wait again. Leather-hard before you can carve. Bone-dry before it goes near the kiln. Two firings before it lives on a shelf.

I love that pace. There’s no machine setting the tempo, no batch of identical ones rolling off a line. Each piece carries the marks of the hand that made it — a softer curve here, a fingerprint in the base, a wobble that turns out to be exactly the right wobble. By the time it’s glazed and out of the kiln, it’s already a small character with opinions of its own.

It also means no two pieces ever come out quite the same, even when they’re siblings — which is, for me, the whole point.

If you’re curious to see where this all ends up, the shop has the latest pieces and Instagram is where I share the wonky in-progress shots and the kiln-opening reveals. New drops land regularly, and as ever — once a piece is gone, it’s gone for good.