Angel Christmas Tree Decorations

Last few angel Christmas tree ornaments left now!
We're getting a little low on these and some of my other ranges, check out my full range of Christmas tree decorations here.
I made them from high fired white porcelain so treated carefully, these could be on your grandchildren's tree in 100 years!
The surface is decorated with pretty broderie anglaise fabric texture :)

Want a free gift and 10% off?

Check out the coupon code on my facebook page.
Happy Christmas shopping y'all!

Getting Christmassy!!

Well it is starting to feel very wintery here - black Friday has been and gone; Cyber Monday kicks off the Christmas shopping season in earnest and pretty soon everyone will be tucking into Turkey and pulling crackers!
So to celebrate the start of the season we're giving away a free ornament with every order placed by Monday night. And here are some of the Christmas tree ornaments I've been making this year:

Which ones are your faves?

New White Porcelain Tableware

It has been very hectic in the studio lately, and one of the outcomes has been some new tableware and serving dishes and bowls.

From my "Fragment" series, each has the imprint and texture of vintage lace crochet in the surface of the clay. The porcelain remembers where the crochet once was and this creates little fragments of porcelain fabric.

There are a very limited number of these available, but do contact me if you want more than are currently listed in my shop as I may have one or two more.

I love your comments - feel free to say what you think!

Gorgeous pics!

A lovely lady sent me some gorgeous pics of her wedding in Greece, so I thought I would share. Firstly, it's in Greece, on a boat.... Good choice! Secondly it is freezing cold and raining so hard that water is dripping onto the floor in the studio cellar here, and looking at these cheered me up. And last but not least, I really cannot say how honoured I am that she choose to use my little bird bowls as ring bearer bowls on her wedding day. So here they are!

Christmas decoration video!

A lovely lady got in touch to tell me that she had made a VIDEO about receiving her Christmas decorations in the post for her youtube channel!!

So she also sent it over to me in case I wanted to see it and use it on my blog! So here it is - thank you Lucy! It has got me thinking about making some videos too, so hopefully I shall make some about what I get up to and start uploading those too :)
In the meantime, I hope you like seeing my Christmas ornaments and new packaging!

Having trouble with the video? You can also see it here.

New designs coming soon, but in the meantime I am..

road testing my new ceramics... It is a tough job but someone has to do it...

Happy Friday everyone!

Really not cool...

I was recently made aware that some snide Chinese manufacturer was offering to make and wholesale my work on alibaba.com A couple of threatening emails later, they removed my images and text that they had used, infringing my copyright and intellectual property rights.Yes, that's right, they had the nerve to actually use my images and text. Concerned that I might be exaggerating? Here are the screen grabs from alibaba.com yesterday:

I took those last night, about 10 months after I sold the original set Makers beware - Alibaba is an apt name for this marketplace. Alibaba and the forty theives. Other makers I know have had success, as I did, by demanding that the images be removed, but if you see an artist you recognise being ripped off in this way - do the right thing and let them know.

Reopening my folksy shop for a trial period... www.princedesignuk.folksy.com UK customers you can pay in £ there, but my etsy shop still has the largest selection, and paypal will convert to £ for you automatically.

New plate

Ceramic bird shaped plate in seafoam turquoise:

Would you use it to decorate a living space of serve a little side salad or sandwich?

Nice weather for ducks

Thought I would share a picture of my lovely new studio roof terrace yesterday in the sunshine...

Sadly it is drowning in rain today, but hey! Continuing with today's watery theme, fresh out of the kiln are my Caribbean leaf dishes

They're made with recycled glass, and sparkle because of the cracks under the surface. However, the surface is completely smooth to the touch. I have one that I use as a soap dish - it looks great on a windowsill so that the cracks catch the light! Right, back to work! As it is such a rainy day, I think I might make some sets of ceramic flying ducks ;)

I have moved!!

We recently moved studio to Prestwich Village in Manchester. I have moved in above the lovely Ellie Magpie's shop, because there are lots of creative things going on there, and I shall be adding my own! I went to school with Jodie, the owner of Ellie Magpie, and she is now running sewing classes and workshops from there, as well as having a home and gift shop and haberdashery on the ground floor. I love her ideas for home decor, and if you are passing, it's a wonderful treasure trove of gift ideas and great to browse! I've been picking up a few sweet gifts for friends myself as I think they probably would like a change from pottery now and then! There are one or two of my pieces in there too, and more coming soon! As for me, I have my sunny studio upstairs, and my very own sunny roof garden to boot! Well it's sunny when the sun actually shines in Manchester... So in addition, I thought it might be nice to run some clay imprint days with children in the studio. I love doing these! Little ones grow up so quickly, so capturing how small their little feet and hands once were makes adorable artwork for your home, or cherished gifts for grandparents and relatives. We can even add names, dates and other words to the surface too - no child is too young, and we can even print grown up hands and feet! Slots are booking up fast and we're only doing limited dates, so book your place now! You can either book by calling Ellie Magpie on 0161 312 0934, calling into the shop at 491 Bury New Rd, Prestwich, Manchester M25 1AD, or use the contact form on this page.

Hey, how have you been?

Sorry for the long absence people!! I have been loving twitter lately - If you're on twitter and want to follow me I'm @princedesignuk - say hi! Over there, I have been following some really interesting people and consequently some great blogs. Especially loving remodelista designmilk and bright bazaar this week who have all kept me entertained whilst I recovered from an unexpected hospital trip and weekend in bed with some kind of bad gastro bug thing... Thankfully I am much better and back to work :) Firing this week for an interior designer and her client is a large group of these porcelain and silver butterflies:

I am super excited to see how these work in her space, so really hope she'll send me a pic or two even if it's not one I can share. A big part of my art education focussed on installation art, so it is great to put some of those principles into a domestic space. I love the way that these are so affected by the space, and interact with the shapes of the walls, textures beneath them, and other objects in the space. I'm hoping to install an even bigger group for a gallery show later in the year too. Another reason for the absence has been the scouting for new premises, which hopefully has now been found... One or two t's to be crossed and then all being well, the studio move will happen in the next week or two - wish me luck guys it's gonna be messy!!!

Back from my break!

Hello all, I am back in the UK and eating, sleeping and breathing hand made ceramics and pottery this week! It is good to be back in the studio and took a few weeks just to catch up with orders!
I am fairly up to date now, and so there has been a little time for experimenting with new ranges such as this little peacock bowl...



I have been looking a lot at peacocks lately, and there will be more peacocks in the future I am sure! So beautiful! I used a real peacock feather imprinted into the surface to make the texture on this one. When you really look at peacocks, they are completely amazing! I love the repetitive pattern of their feathers and their showy ways! I have also been having some fun drawing them, and I shall share some of the drawings soon.

I am also really looking forward to spending a day soon with the lovely website designer as we intend to tweak my website a touch.
So back to work for me! Incidentally, I interact quite a bit through my facebook page, so if you're interested, check it out here.

Prince Design UK...

will be on holiday from 14th Feb until the 5th March 2012.
If you wish to order any of our ceramic pieces for dispatch before we close, please make sure your order reaches us by this Sunday night, 12th Feb. Otherwise, it will not be dispatched until early March - sorry!
I may not be contactable during this time either - very sorry about that - we may not have internet access there you see!
Hope you all have a lovely couple of weeks.

Processes

I wanted to make pottery long before I first found a place with the facilities to make it. Consequently, by the time I arrived in the studio for the first time, I had a sketchbook full of ideas. My drawings were ideas that were not massively influenced by the material, because it had been a long time since I had used clay. Of course they were influenced by clay and what I imagined I might be able to do, but not the subtleties of the process of working with clay. Consequently some of the ideas were quite complex and ambitious structures. This was good. It meant that when I began, I had set myself a series of complex challenges.
After a few years of working with clay, I drifted out of sketching my ideas on paper. I made them in clay to sketch them. I made another one to refine the idea rather than rubbing out and redrawing as one would on paper. Drawing continued, but as a thing in its own right. So I gave this some thought a while ago, and decided that there might be something to be gained from returning to my original paper sketching. That it could be interesting to get back to this for a while. So that is what I have been doing. Sketching and researching and sketching and then sketching again some of the ideas, and this time swapping from paper sketching to clay sketching to paper again to clay again and so on. One of the results is that I am developing more and more two dimensional work, and I have been painting too. My new experiments with clay have taken me in unexpected directions. So whilst I am not quite ready to share my experiments with the world just yet, I am very excited about this experimentation and development, and can't wait to get things firmed up into some more finished pieces!