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My wedging table has been standing there for four months holding a bag of plaster, three empty bottles and my keys. I do all the wedging on the floor now, on a canvas sheet, knees on the tiles. Started because I needed the table for drying pieces and never gave it back. Now I can't do it any other way. On the floor I use my whole body for the spiral and I can feel the air pockets leaving, like little pops under the palm. Standing at a table I was mostly using arms and the clay stayed stiff in the middle. Floor it comes out even. Downside is the knees and that I have to sweep before I start or I'm wedging in whatever came off my shoes. Also my neighbour below has asked twice what the thumping is. Not saying is better for everyone, my back is already filing complaints. But is anyone else working lower than they should be? I want to know if I'm the only one crouching on the ground like a goblin at 11pm

i know there's a "right" way to wedge. i've watched the videos. but my body just wants to do this violent ram's head slam every time and i swear the clay remembers the aggression. my left wrist has started clicking in a way that's definitely not normal. tried soft wedging yesterday like a normal person and the clay felt dead. like i'd been polite to it and it didn't trust me. had to go back and really put my weight into it before it started feeling alive again. my teacher from the course would be so disappointed. but also she had perfect wrists at 55 so maybe she was onto something. idk. anyone else have a bad habit you KNOW you should fix but it works so you don't?

ok so this was not a design decision. my tabla de amasar, the board I've wedged on since the course, finally split down the middle last month. it was pine, my uncle made it, I'd oiled it maybe twice in three years like an idiot. so it's gone. and I have not replaced it. I've been sitting on the floor of the studio with the clay between my feet and honestly? better. I feel the whole piece through my legs now, I catch a wobble in the wall before it becomes a problem. my back hates me by hour three but the vessels are coming out straighter in the foot and weirder in the belly, which is exactly the trade I wanted. everyone who comes in tells me to go buy a new table. my madre has offered me money for one twice. I keep saying vale, vale. tell me I'm not the only one who's given up furniture for a reason this dumb.

Had a really nice piece of black granite. Perfect for the piece I'm blocking out. Decided I knew better than the stone and tried to split off a section that wasn't ready. Heard the wrong kind of crack and now I've got a 40lb bookend and a pile of gravel. The worst part is I knew better. Thirty years in and I still get impatient and waste good material. My old mentor would've just looked at it and walked away. That was his move. Didn't need to say a thing. Back to the supplier tomorrow. Hope they still have some of that batch left.

For two years I filmed from the clean corner. One square meter of clean bench, nice light from the window, everything else out of frame. Neat little reels of a finished vessel turning on a banding wheel. Perfectly fine, perfectly invisible, about 400 views each and then nothing. In February I broke my phone tripod, so I propped the phone on a bucket of dry clay scraps and just filmed where I work, which is a disaster. Dust, a coffee cup from three days before, my grandmother's old knife I use for everything, half a head that failed in the glaze looking at the camera like it's disappointed in me. That video did 60k. Not a tutorial, not a before/after. Just me wedging clay and swearing in Valencian at a piece that kept cracking. Since then I film the mess and I stop deleting the boring parts. Saves went from maybe 20 a post to 60, 70. But here's the part that annoys me: comments went down. People save the messy ones and don't say anything. So I have no idea if it's working, I just know my DMs are fuller and my shop had 14 orders in March vs 4 in the whole autumn. I think what changed is there's no performance in it. Like people can smell the tidy version. But I also can't shake the feeling I just got lucky with the algorithm on one dumb video and now I'm chasing it by deliberately leaving my studio dirty, which is a very strange thing to be strategic about. Anyway if you film your work, do you clean first? I genuinely don't know anymore.

Nine pulls. That's what it took this week and I want to say that out loud because I've been showing people the print for two months and letting them think it came off the block like that. It's a hare, big one, crouched in dead winter rushes, and the whole thing lives or dies on one tiny wedge of white left in the eye. Cut it a hair too wide and the animal looks thick. Too narrow and it's a rabbit that's seen a ghost. I'd carved it, proofed it, gone back in with the chisel, proofed again, and on the eighth go I knew I'd taken too much off and there was no putting it back. Linocut doesn't do second chances. You can't weld the stuff back on, whatever your man on YouTube says. So I sat with the block for a day and a half doing nothing, which for me is the hardest part of the whole trade. Kids in and out of the studio, small fella asked why the hare had no eyes yet, told him it was thinking about it. Went for a walk in the rain at Blackrock and came home with the answer, which is nearly always the case and I never learn it. Cut the rushes in deeper instead, so the eye sits in shadow. Gave it the look. Ninth pull off the press and there it was, the one I'd been chasing since November, and I just sat down on the floor of the studio with the paper still in my hand like an eejit. Not a big whooping moment. Just quiet. The dog came over and sat on my foot. Anyway it's hanging on the wall now drying and I can't stop going in to look at it. Twelve in the edition. If you're at the market Saturday I'll have them there, and no, I'm not telling you which pull is which. The bit I keep turning over is that the eighth one wasn't wasted. If I hadn't ruined it I'd never have gone looking for the answer. But I'm not going to pretend I was grand about it at the time, because I wasn't, I was a right grumpy article for two days and my wife will confirm it.

People always ask to see the studio like it's this beautiful light-filled workshop. It's a corner of my flat in Ruzafa, 4 square meters if I'm generous, and my little kiln is wedged on a table next to the tostadora because it's the only circuit in the piso that won't trip. So when I fire, the whole flat smells like hot dust and I can't make toast for 8 hours. My abuela came over Sunday, looked at everything, and asked if the kiln was "a new appliance for the family." I said sí, the most expensive one. What I actually like about it: I can't spread out. So I build small. Small means I try more things, and when one dies in the firing I'm sad for maybe ten minutes then I'm already building the next. Last week I lost two faces to a glaze that came out like wet cement. But the third one, the mouth cracked open in a way I could never plan. That one's on the shelf looking at me. Anyway. Curious how much space everyone else actually has, because I keep seeing these huge studios online and I need to know if I'm the only one firing next to the breakfast

Funny thing happened last month. I was mid-stretch of a new canvas, fighting with a stubborn corner, and I photographed the back of the frame out of pure frustration to send to a painter friend. Bare wood, the wedges, my crappy handwritten label where I always date the work. Posted it by accident to my story before I caught myself. That image sold the painting before I ever showed the front. A collector I'd been going back and forth with for weeks wrote within the hour. Said he liked seeing the bones of it. I don't know what to do with that information. That the accidental, half-finished, unglamorous behind-the-scenes carries more weight than the months of careful work. I resent it a little. But I'm also not stupid. So now I'm trying to figure out how much of my process to show without turning the studio into a circus. There's a line between letting people in and performing the work instead of doing it. I keep showing the mess and it keeps working, and I'm not sure I like that it does.

I keep a couple of pots around that I don't sell. Not because they're good, but because they remind me of a specific moment. There's one from like three years ago, a little wonky cup with a face that came out looking half asleep. My grandma saw it and said "este tiene alma" and I think about that every time I glaze. Today I finally admitted one of them was never going to be anything. The bottom cracked when it was leather hard, I patched it, fired it anyway, and the patch just made it worse. A cup that leaks and looks like it's frowning. So I soaked it and scraped it into the reclaim bucket. It felt like putting down a dog that was already dead. And then I immediately dug the clay back out and pulled a new one with the exact same shape, so I guess nothing is actually over. The face came out slightly different this time. Less moody. Slightly confused instead. Maybe that's the whole job. Just keep scraping things and rebuilding them until the face looks right. Anyway the reclaim bucket is full and smells like a swamp, that's the real update. Need to wedge it tomorrow and my back is already complaining. Vale.

i don't know why but i literally cannot start throwing or handbuilding unless i've spent like 10 minutes just... touching the clay. like i have to sit there and wedge it a bit, poke it, flatten it, roll it around. my hands have to remember it first. it's not preparation really, it's like a weird ritual. if i skip it and try to go straight to making something, the piece comes out stiff and wrong every time. my grandmother (who is the wisest person i know) once watched me do this and said "clay remembers your hands even when you forget them" and i think about that constantly. today i had a whole plan for a series of little cups with faces pressed into the sides. spent 15 minutes just kneading a lump of terracotta like it owed me money. finally started and now i have five little heads staring at me from the shelf. vale, worth it. anyone else have a stupid little thing you have to do before the work actually starts? or am i just a weirdo with clay dependency issues

ok so I've been undercharging for literally years. selling my little handbuilt cups for €25, small wall pieces for €60, telling myself I can't ask for more because I'm still learning and who am I etc etc. finally just... raised everything. cups at €35 now, wall pieces at €80. I did the math on a single piece the other day, €25 cup, took me about 2 hours from wedging to glaze, plus firing costs, plus the ones that crack or warp in the bisque. I was basically paying myself €6 an hour and pretending that was fine. raised prices on my online shop and at the last market. nobody said a word. same people buying, same compliments. one woman even said "oh that's all?" about a piece I was nervous to price. now I'm mad I didn't do it a year ago. what are we even doing out here, giving away our time for free?

Not a joke. My easel is wedged between the toilet and the tub because the bathroom is the only room in this house with a door that actually latches and no one knocks on it for twenty straight minutes. But here's the thing I figured out last month: the light in the hallway outside it, the little high window over the toilet, that flat afternoon light is the best I've ever had for judging value. My greens stopped going to mud. I did a whole 8x10 of the field behind the elementary school and for once the darks read as darks. So now I have a stool in the shower and a tube of titanium white on the back of the sink and my husband has stopped asking why. Downside is I don't have a bathroom door that stays dry and I've dropped a brush in the toilet twice. Wondering if anyone else ended up working in a room they never planned to. Not looking for the pretty answer either, I want to hear where the easel actually is.

Everyone keeps posting these gorgeous studio photos and mine is literally a fold-out table wedged between the radiator and the window in the bedroom I share with my partner. The window I keep painting is the one right above the table. I have a box fan that sounds like a small plane taking off and honestly I've learned to hear it as white noise now, there's no going back. But here's the thing, I just finished the biggest commission I've ever had on that janky table and it went out today and I'm so proud of it I could cry a little. Eight months ago I was doing this on my lunch breaks at the café. Now I have a folding table that's mine all day. I keep catching myself staring at it like it's a whole room. I know someday I'll have a real studio with good light and a sink and I'll look back and miss this cramped little corner. It's got the paint flecks on the wall from when I flick my brush too hard and a cup of dirty water that's been sitting there for three days that I keep meaning to change. It's gross. It's perfect. What's your setup right now? Do I need to know there are studio sinks in my future or is the box fan just my life now