The Pieces I Didn't Expect to Keep

For years I set those pieces aside, half-embarrassed by them, like a rough draft I didn't want anyone to read. But I've started noticing something: the pieces on that shelf are often the ones I like best. Not despite the flaw. Because of it. A slightly warped rim is proof a human hand was actually there.

Most of that warping doesn't even happen on the wheel. A rim that left my hands perfectly round can come out of the glaze firing a little oval, because near its peak temperature the clay goes briefly soft and settles onto whatever it's standing on. The kiln has the last word, always — which is a strange thing to accept in your work, and a good one.

I think that's true of more than pottery. The things we make with our hands — a meal, a garden bed, a letter, a first attempt at anything — are rarely perfect, and that is exactly what makes them belong to us. Perfection tells you nothing about how a thing came to exist. A flaw tells you everything: where the piece was standing, what the fire did to it, whose hands were on it and how hard they were trying.

If you're ever weighing up a piece of handmade pottery and wondering whether what you're looking at is charm or a problem, here is the test I use, and it takes about ten seconds. Set it down on a flat counter and see whether it rocks. Run your thumb all the way around the rim and the inside edge. Look at the surfaces that will meet food or water and check the glaze is unbroken there.

If it sits still, the rim is smooth, and the working surfaces are properly glazed, everything else is character. A lean, an uneven pool of colour, a foot that isn't quite centred — none of that touches what the piece is for. A crack, a rocking base, a lid that won't seat or a bare patch inside a bowl is a different matter, and that's the line I hold to when I decide what gets sold and what gets broken.

The pooling is worth knowing about too, because people often read it as a mistake when it's really just physics. Glaze runs off a high curve and gathers wherever the form changes direction, so the colour is always deepest exactly where the shape turns — the shoulder of a jar, the inside of a rim. Once you've seen it you start noticing it on every handmade piece you pick up.

Once a year, I clear that shelf properly — not because the pieces aren't good, but because they deserve to be somewhere other than a corner of my studio. It's the only sale I run, and everything on it is ready to ship exactly as it is. If you've ever wanted a piece with a little history already built into it, that shelf is here.