In less than two days, the new year will begin — and with it a new month and a new challenge.✨ For January, inspired by Gwen’s suggestion, we invite you to create your own oil lamp or incense burner. How it looks is completely up to you — the only requirement is that it works.🪔 For an oil lamp, you’ll need a container, a wick, and olive oil so the wick can draw the oil and produce a flame. Alternatively, you can create an incense burner, where a flame is placed underneath a small bowl or surface. The design can be very simple or more complex — that’s entirely your choice. Feel free to let your creativity run wild. This challenge is about ideas, experimentation, and making something functional, not perfection.🙌 Have fun with it, and feel free to share your progress, thoughts, and ideas along the way. We hope many of you will join in and take part. Enjoy the process and have fun! 🔥✨

Does anyone ever feel this?? I know it sounds crazy, I am doing what I love on a daily basis, and sometimes I get an intrusive thought that maybe I am not worthy! Or that maybe people will find out that I am not a “master potter” and shouldn’t be teaching? I have students every month, but I keep wondering if I’ll still have students the following month. Sometimes I worry if I cannot keep every single one of them 100% entertained and challenged and also happy. But! I remind myself that is not my job. My job it to provide a safe, encouraging, caring, space for them to create as much or as little as they want. I have one student who is so driven, he is working on an 8-piece dinnerware set! And I have another student who sits there poking at a ball of clay for two hours. Both are acceptable, even though one student makes me feel useful, the other makes me feel like I should keep my distance. Does anyone ever feel this way? I know it will pass, but today I am feeling like I am not really good enough to be teaching students 😭 **Picture of two of my students’ mugs, they did such a great job!!

How I make my Garlic/Ginger grater bowls❤️ https://youtu.be/-3DD-MC5ESc?si=hyGIls90XbvCMuxV

After weeks/months of behind-the-scenes work, my website is OFFICIALLY LIVE 🚀🎉💝 I would love it if you could take a look & share when you get time. At the moment I am only shipping within the UK whilst I get to grips with it all but will definitely be shipping globally soon. 🔗 https://www.sarahhallamceramics.co.uk/ Thank you for all your support 💝

Before heading to Antarctica, I managed to finish one last project today.☕️☕️☕️ It started as an idea last Saturday and came together surprisingly fast. On Sunday, a friend and I hand-built ten cups and added our gym’s logo. On Monday, I threw a few more cups, trying to match the same size — again with our gym logo. After that, the usual rhythm followed: drying, bisque firing on Thursday, unloading on Friday, sanding and glazing, loading the kiln again on Saturday — and today I finally unloaded them so I could bring them to the gym to be used for coffee.🔥 Even though I worked with the same reference and the same stencil, every cup turned out a little different. Because of that, I decided to glaze them in 15 different shades of blue. Not every blue came out truly blue — the differences are pretty striking.💙🔷🔵🩵🌀 I’ll show this in more detail in my kiln loading/unloading video. I’m not sure yet when it’ll be edited and uploaded — maybe Tuesday, before I leave. What’s your first impression?