Why we fire ten colours, and not a hundred

People ask, kindly, why we do not offer more colours. The honest answer is that we cannot mix at the till, and that turns out to be a good thing.

A glaze is not a paint

A paint shop mixes to order because paint is a suspension you can tint by the drop. A glaze is different: the colour is a metal oxide dissolved into glass, and the firing is the mix. Once a batch of coloured frit is made, it is that colour for good. So every colour we sell is a colour we have committed a whole dip tank to.

That commitment is why the card is short. Ten colours is what one small workshop can hold true across a year of firings.

A handful of oxides do the work

• Cobalt gives Cobalt, and at a quarter strength, Chalk Blue.
• Copper gives Verdigris, and with a little white, Sage.
• Iron gives Iron Red, and at half charge, Ember.
• Antimony gives Mustard, the hardest to fire evenly.

Mix them and you get the rest: cobalt with copper makes Peacock, and all three together make Liquorice, almost black with a blue edge in the light. Frit White is the base with nothing in it at all. The colour card shows the set with what is in each.

Why the card stays the same

A fixed card means the Cobalt mug you buy this year matches the one you bought three years ago. It means a Sage bowl and a Sage jug match on the table even if you bought them a year apart. And it means the whole range sits together on a shelf, because it was all mixed from the same few pots.

When we add a colour, we retire one. Mustard replaced Damson in 2024, and we still get letters about it.