An Honest Week at the Bench

I'm going to be honest about how this week actually went, because I think the made-it-look-easy version of artisan work is starting to do everyone a quiet harm.

Monday. I broke a setting at about 11am. A small pronged bezel I had been working on since Friday. The metal fatigued where I'd worked it too thin and a prong sheared clean off. Two hours of work, gone. I made a cup of tea, sat with the loss for about ten minutes, and started again. The replacement is, as is often the case, better than the original. The bench rewards you for failing without flinching.

Tuesday. I sat at the bench for six hours and made one small piece — a silver pendant with a single sapphire — that I love very much. Six hours, one piece. If you costed my time at any reasonable rate it would be a financially nonsensical day. This is one of the realities of one-of-a-kind work that I think gets glossed over. The pieces take what they take. You either love it enough to make peace with the maths or you go and make something else.

Wednesday. I fired an enamel piece I'd been working on for three weeks. The colour came up wrong. Not subtly wrong — wrong wrong. The blue I'd been building was supposed to come up like a winter dawn. It came up like a fluorescent light. I made a cup of tea (a pattern emerges). I sat with the wrong colour for a long time. And I decided I actually liked the wrong colour. The piece is now finished and is its own thing, not the thing I planned. It's one of the strongest pieces in this month's batch.

Thursday. Customer enquiries, photography, packaging. Almost no bench work. This is the part of the job no one shows you. The orders that need to be photographed for listings. The questions that need to be answered carefully. The packing of two pieces for two different customers in two different countries, with two different notes written into two different cards. Necessary, but quietly disappointing — every Thursday I look at the kiln with a small twinge.

Friday. Polishing. Most people would not believe how long a piece takes to polish properly. There is no shortcut. There is sandpaper, in finer and finer grits, until your fingertips ache. Then there is a polishing wheel with progressively finer compounds. Then a final hand-polish with a cloth. A small silver piece might take an hour. A complicated piece can take three. The mirror finish you see in the photos is the residue of someone, somewhere, sitting at a bench until their hands hurt.

Saturday. Paddington Markets, six in the morning to two in the afternoon. Set up the table, lay out the pieces, drink a coffee, watch the light come up over the canvas. People begin to arrive at about seven. The day is conversations, mostly. Some sales. A few people who come back week after week and have become friends. A few first-time visitors who are, often, surprised that the pieces they've been looking at online are in fact one-of-a-kind real objects made by a real person who is now standing in front of them. Saturdays are the best day of the week. The market puts everything else into proper proportion.

Sunday. This letter. The bench gets a rest. Sometimes I sketch. Sometimes I just sit.

I'm telling you this because I want you to know what a week of one-of-a-kind work actually looks like. It looks like patience, small failures, and a Saturday that makes the rest of it make sense. The romance is in the result. The work is in the work.