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I dropped off a completed study at a framer yesterday. Small hawthorn branch, done on 300gsm paper I'd stretched and let dry for the better part of two days. Handed it over with explicit instructions: do not trim, do not crop, mat it as-is. Came back today and he'd taken the tiniest sliver off the bottom edge. A millimeter, maybe less. He was genuinely proud of it, said it "balanced the margins better." I stood there looking at the sheet. The signature. My signature was on that trimmed edge. He had cut through my name. Some people will tell you it's nothing, that a millimeter is nothing, that he was just trying to help. But I drew right up to that edge on purpose. The whole composition depended on that lower margin being what it was. And now the piece isn't what I signed, which means I can't in good conscience call it mine anymore. I took it home and I'll redo the whole study. A day and a half of work, gone, because someone assumed his eye was better than mine. I've learned to check every single thing I hand over to someone else. The collectors who want me to "fix" things, the framers who want to improve them. I am so tired of being the only person in the room who treats my own work as finished.

spent my whole Sunday morning on three mugs i should've trimmed in an hour. clay was too soft, kept collapsing every time i got cocky with the tool, so i'd wait, come back, start again. by the third one i just put on a podcast and gave in to the pace. the one good thing is i've learned to read the leather-hard better now. you feel it in the first pass, that little give. i used to rush it because i hated waiting around for clay to set and now i'm starting to think the waiting is half the skill. anyway the mugs look fine. wonky but fine, which is basically my whole brand. the kiln will have the final word thursday. 🫠

Working on a piece out of my grandmother's scraps, cloth she cut back in the eighties from old work shirts and a couple of Sunday dresses. Her blocks never did sit square, and I decided last week I'd true them up, trim the edges so they'd join clean. Took maybe two inches off each one off the top and bottom. Cut it Tuesday evening. Now the top's laying on the floor of my sewing room and it's straight. Every seam meets. And it's dead. All that crookedness was her hand, every block leaning a little like she was talking while she cut. I trimmed her voice right off it. I know better than this. My own quilts go crooked on purpose. But hers I wanted to honor and I went and made it a machine. I got the trimmed pieces in a jar on the windowsill, I can't bring myself to throw them out. Thinking I might piece them into a strip down the back, let the offcuts live somewhere. That's about the best I can do for it now. Any of you ever go and fix something that wasn't broken, thinking you were helping it? Not asking about the quilt so much. Asking about the wanting to fix.

I tear everything by hand, deliberately, because a torn edge catches light in a way a cut one doesn't. That part is fine. But then I mount it on a straight-cut board, square corners, and I line the whole thing up so it sits dead level in the frame. Spent yesterday on a small piece, maybe 18 by 24, and the torn paper was doing what I wanted, soft grey page from a 1953 Swedish almanac, one warm ochre scrap, a lot of white. Then I squared it off and it went quiet in the wrong way. Not calm. Just corrected. I keep telling myself the frame is the discipline, the edges have to hold the tearing in. But I'm not sure that's true anymore. Maybe the tearing is the piece and the square is me being afraid of it. Anyone else flatten something out of a piece and only notice after? Or is this just what mounting is and I should stop thinking about it.

I've had these old Wiss scissors since I was maybe twelve years old. They was my grandmother's before that, she used 'em to cut patterns and rip seams and trim threads for I don't know how many years. The handles was that old black rubber that gets sticky after a while, but they cut true right up till this morning. I was trimming the binding on a quilt I'm finishing and the little screw that holds 'em together just... gave out. Dropped right onto the floor. I sat there holding the two pieces like they was a little bird that died in my hand. You know how it is with a tool that's been with you that long. It ain't just the tool. It's her hands on it before mine. It's every quilt I made with these things, baby quilts for my children, my grandchildren, a wedding quilt for my niece, the one I made when my husband passed and I didn't know what else to do with my hands. All of it in those blades. I tried to see if I could get 'em fixed but the metal's worn thin where the screw goes through. They're done. I don't know if I'm more sad about losing the scissors or losing that little piece of her I still had in my hands every day. Gonna have to break in a new pair and hope they carry some of the same memory forward. That's the way of it, I suppose. Tools wear out. What they helped you make stays.🙏

there's a torn piece from a 1978 Sears catalog in the bottom corner of the piece on my table. it's been sitting there unmatched for two weeks because I couldn't find a scrap the right shade of faded. today I found one. spent 40 minutes trimming it to fit. the photograph it's butted up against is a picture of a motel sign I took on a drive last spring that I honestly don't care about. I've been telling myself for a month I'd pull it and start over with something better. so I just spent 40 minutes serving a photograph I'm going to throw away. and I'll probably do it again tomorrow, and the day after, because I keep finding reasons not to look at the actual problem, which is that the whole piece is polite. it's nice. it's fine. nothing in it is fighting anything. I made a thing with no tension in it and I keep dressing the edges instead of admitting that. anyway the paper matches beautifully.

I have this shallow drawer in my flat-file that's just chaos. Scraps of paper too small to use, edges I trimmed off, bits of envelopes, a receipt from an exhibition in Copenhagen three years ago, one single glove. Everything else in the studio is ruthlessly ordered, papers sorted by colour and weight, tools in their places. But that drawer is a mess and I can't bring myself to clean it. I think it's because if I sorted it, all those tiny bits would stop being potential and just become trash. As long as they're in the drawer they might still be something. I know that's not rational. But I don't think the studio needs to be rational everywhere.

I quoted 6,500 for a carved limestone garden piece. About 40 inches, one block, some undercutting on the base. Six weeks of work if nothing goes wrong, which it will. He said fine, when can you start. That's the part that's been sitting with me. I spent two days on that number. Went back and forth, trimmed it, told myself 6,500 was already pushing it for the area. He didn't ask a single question about it. I've been undercharging for years and I know exactly why. The first ten years I was just glad to be paid at all. That number got stuck in my head and I never moved it. Stone is slow. A block that looks fine on the outside can have a seam running through it and then you've lost a week and there's no one to bill. My old teacher used to say if they don't flinch, you left money on the table. He said it like a joke. It isn't one. So the question I'm chewing on is where the real floor is. I don't think it's a formula. I think it's whatever number makes you not resent the piece by the time you're finishing it. I've resented plenty.

ok so i spent three days on this little sculptural vase, handbuilt, textured surface, this glaze combo i've been testing for weeks. really proud of it. posted a reel of the process, lighting nice, good music, the whole thing. got maybe 300 views. then yesterday i posted a story of my cat sitting in a bisqueware bowl i forgot to trim down. phone footage, bad lighting, my thumb in the corner for half of it. 4.2k views. 14 dms asking if the bowl is for sale. i don't know what the game is anymore. i'm not even mad, just... confused. like the algorithm has decided my cat is the artist now and i'm just the assistant who cleans the kiln.

A small collage went to a collector in Utrecht last month. He found me through a paper conservation forum where I'd posted about repairing a 1920s ledger, not through any of the platforms I actually put effort into. He said he liked that I talked about the material as something that had a life before me. I've had an Instagram account for six years. It has brought me one sale that I know of. The forum post took twenty minutes and cost nothing. I'm not going to delete anything. But I've started to notice that the places where I'm genuinely useful to people are the places where I'm not trying to sell anything, and those are the places that sell things. Which is annoying because you can't really manufacture that on purpose. I spent two hours last week trimming a batch of edges for a show in Malmö. That part doesn't go anywhere. It just is the work.

Everyone thinks the studio is loud. It's not. Music goes on for the building and the trimming, but the second the glaze bucket opens, radio off. Full silence. I can hear the brush drag on the bisque and that's the whole point, the sound tells me if the layer's too thin before the kiln does, and the kiln is less forgiving about it. Last night I did six small cups, all leaning the same direction like they're listening to something. Three of them I swear the glaze went on perfect. The other three have a drip near the foot that I already know will go ugly at 1230, but I left it. Sometimes the drip is the piece, you know? Sometimes it's just a drip. The silence also means I hear the neighbours fighting through the wall. So. Pros and cons. Anyway the kiln opens Thursday morning and I'm not sleeping Wednesday. That part never gets easier, everyone tells me it does, it does not.

Not a bad one, nobody got hurt, but it kicked. Plate was warm from being in the sun all morning, sat it on the sawhorses to trim a corner and the wheel bound up maybe two inches in and climbed. Whole saw jumped. I let go, which is the only reason my wrist is fine. Thirty years and it still happens when I get casual. Which is the point. I do the same three things every time now before the saw comes out, even when the cut takes ninety seconds: check the guard is where it should be, check the plate is actually clamped and not just sitting there because I'm in a hurry, and stand off to the side, not behind the wheel. Behind the wheel is where the piece goes if it goes. The corner I was cutting was for a base plate, one of a set of four for a garden piece. Three are done. That last one is going to sit there a while, I think. Not superstition, I just don't want to go back at it today. Anybody else get spooked and then have to walk away from the bench for the rest of the afternoon.

So the small cheap brayer I'd been using for years finally gave up, the roller went egg-shaped on me around last Tuesday, and I went in to the art shop in town half intending to buy another cheap one and came out with a proper hard rubber one for a tenner. I know. Wild spending. But here's the thing, I've been printing the same block of a heron for about three weeks now trying to get an edition of twelve out of it, and I was blaming the lino, blaming the ink, blaming the damp weather in the shed, and it turns out the whole time it was the brayer. The cheap one was pressing uneven, so the middle of the block was picking up ink lovely and the edges were starving. Twelve prints in and the last six look like a different block entirely. So many years at this and I still spend a fortnight giving out about the wrong yoke. The block was grand. I was the problem. Trimmed the first six in half for test prints, which killed me slightly, but they're in the bin now and I've moved on with my life. Anyway, the heron's nearly there. Much darker at the edges now, properly moody, which is what I wanted all along.

I have this old tobacco tin on the shelf full of buttons I never use. Found it at a flea market years ago, tins were always good for something. Yesterday I was supposed to be trimming a stack of pages and instead I tipped the whole tin out and sorted them by colour. Two hours gone. Did not touch a single page. The thing is, I don't sew. I have never sewed a button onto anything in my life. But I know exactly where each one came from because I've handled them so many times, the provenance is half the appeal. A brass one off an army coat, four small grey ones that used to be on a child's cardigan, one big wooden thing nobody can identify. I put them back in unsorted. I do this when a piece isn't working. My hands find some mindless sorting task and then the actual problem solves itself in the background. It's like the collage equivalent of staring out a window, except I get to feel productive about it. The pages are still untrimmed. But I worked out the composition issue that was blocking me, so maybe the buttons earn their keep after all.

sold a little lidded pot at the market last Sunday for €60. handbuilt, caña color glaze that came out almost exactly how i wanted which basically never happens. woman who bought it posted a photo on instagram, three people messaged me that night asking for "something similar." i quoted them all €75 and they all said yes. which is great obviously. but i keep doing the math and after clay, glaze, two firings, the hours of throwing and trimming and the one lid that warped and had to redo... that €60 piece was maybe €9 an hour. and the €75 ones are gonna be worse because now i'm self-conscious about repeating myself and I'll probably take longer. the thing is the €60 piece got me three sales. if i'd priced it €90 would it have done the same? i genuinely don't know and that's the part that keeps me up. cheap prices get you seen, but you can't live on exposure unless someone else pays your rent. my grandmother keeps telling me to charge more and she's 84 and has never sold a thing in her life, yet somehow she's right. anyone else ever had a "cheap" piece accidentally do more work for you than your best priced one? or am i just bad at this.

I got a pair of sewing scissors that belonged to my grandmother, she carried them in her apron pocket my whole childhood and I'd watch her snip thread and cut fabric and trim little corners off pieced blocks, never setting them down, just keeping them right there at her hip like they was part of her. She passed in '84 and I got those scissors and honey they are dull as all get out and I don't care one bit. I could get them sharpened, I know I could. But it feels wrong somehow, like I'd be erasing the wear she put in them. Every little nick and gap in the blade is from her hand. My daughter bought me a nice new pair for Christmas two years ago and they sit in the drawer. I use them when I have to. But when I'm really working, when I'm piecing something that feels like it matters, I reach for Mamie's scissors every time. They pull at the fabric more than they cut it sometimes. And that's alright with me. Anybody else got a tool they keep using past when they should? Or am I just being sentimental?

Some guy at the market last weekend watched me centre clay for like ten minutes, clearly had no idea what was happening, and then pointed at a wet cylinder on the wheel and asked if I could "just add a handle" to it. Like, yeah bro, sure, I'll just reach through time and space and slap a handle on this thing that hasn't been trimmed or fired or anything. You want a mug? That's a whole journey, not an Uber Eats order. I said "it's a bit early for that" and he looked at me like I was being difficult. Honestly the confidence people have about a craft they've never touched is incredible. I wish I had that energy about literally anything. Imagine walking into a kitchen and telling the chef to just add some saffron to the thing that's still raw in the mixer.

There's this old bungalow on Convent Road, the kind with a deep verandah and blue trim and a neem tree that must be a hundred years old. I sketched it first in 2021, just passing by. Did a proper watercolour in 2022. Came back last month and it was still standing, the gate was open so I sat on the steps and painted it again, trying to be faster, looser, less attached maybe. It's gone now. I walked past yesterday and it's just rubble and a JCB parked on top of it. I don't know why I'm posting this in wins except, I caught it three times. That's three more paintings than I'd have if I'd just shrugged and walked past. I keep thinking that's what I'm here for really, just catching things before they disappear. It's not sad exactly. It's what I do.

A museum shop in Vienna picked up a small edition of my screenprints for their retail. I was thrilled, museum shop, right, that feels like validation. They paid €150 per print, wholesale. I sold them 20. I did the math yesterday because I was avoiding something else. Each print takes me about four hours from exposure to final trim, not counting the drawing time before that, not counting the screens I burned and then rejected, not counting the test proofs. So €150 for roughly six hours of work per print if I'm being generous about what counts as labour. That's €25 an hour if nothing goes wrong. Something always goes wrong. I'm not saying the museum shop ripped me off. That's just the going rate, they were fine to deal with. But I sat there thinking: I have an MFA, I've been doing this fifteen years, and I'm making €25 an hour selling to an institution that will mark it up to €400 and call it affordable art. And I said yes because I was flattered they asked. I don't know what the right number is. I just know that the gap between what feels good for the ego and what's actually sustainable keeps getting wider and I keep choosing the ego.

I still make my own brushes from neem twigs sometimes. Not always, I have proper ones also, from the city, my son brought me. But for the very fine line work, the kind you see on the border of a Sita kalyan painting, nothing works quite like the neem twig brush. You chew the end soft, shape it with your teeth, then trim it. My grandmother could make one in two minutes without even looking. I still cannot do it like her. But I try. When I am using a store brush I feel something missing. The twig brush, it does not hold so much colour. You have to dip again and again. But the line, thin like a hair, steady. The hand remembers. Yesterday I broke one I was making. The wood split wrong. I sat there a while just looking at it. Then I went outside and found another twig.🙂