A wedding, a vine leaf, two sommeliers

Two people who already knew the studio came to me with a request, could I make a ceramic plate for their wedding? A specific kind of plate: one that would hold their rings on the day. They didn't say what they wanted on it. They left that part to me.

I sat with it. Then I learned the thing about them I hadn't known: they were both sommeliers. Both lived for wine. The plate had its design from that minute.

The commission

Most pieces that leave the studio are part of the small catalog, reamers, fish platters, soap dishes, vases. Pieces that already exist, made one at a time. A few times a year, customers ask for something that isn't on the shelf. A custom order. Those take longer because they have to be talked through, sometimes sketched twice. They cost more because the time matters. And they mean more because there is only one of them in the world.

A vine leaf, and a cluster

I made the plate as a vine leaf. Olive-green glaze, the colour of the terraced groves above town, speckled with the dark flecks the iron in the recipe brings up in the kiln. On top of the leaf, a sculpted three-dimensional cluster of deep-purple wine grapes, mounded high, glossy. The leaf was the bowl; the grapes were the gift inside it.

It's not a piece I would have made for the catalog. A vine leaf and a cluster of grapes belongs somewhere else, on a farmhouse shelf in Tuscany, perhaps. Not in a studio that mostly makes fish platters and salt-pan blue. But this piece had a job a catalog piece never has: it had to mean something specific to two specific people.

The day

The wedding went well. I heard later that the plate caught people off guard, that the wine reference landed, that the design got compliments. The rings had a place, and the place itself was the gift.

What I didn't expect was the part that came after. Years on, the husband still gets a warm feeling when he sees the plate. Not the photographs, not the music, not the cake, the plate. A small fired-clay object on a shelf at home that takes him back to the day. That's a function I don't get to design for. It's what custom orders can do.

Some pieces leave the studio with a function the maker couldn't have predicted. The custom ones leave with a function nobody could have predicted but the people who ordered them.

Why custom takes time

A piece like this isn't faster than a catalog piece, it's slower. The leaf was built flat; the grapes were rolled one at a time, scored, stuck to the leaf, smoothed at the join. Then dried slowly so nothing cracked. Bisque-fired, glazed, fired again. Three weeks from clay to door.

It also takes more talking. A custom order starts with a conversation, what is this for, who is it for, when does it need to land. Sometimes a sketch on paper. The clients get a little involved in the making. They have to. The piece is theirs before it's finished.

The studio takes a small number of custom orders every year. Email if you have something in mind.