We knew September 2025 would be a busy month for the Cheshire Clay Studios and we were not wrong.
After expanding our space to accommodate more members we sent out an email to our wait list fully expecting one or two to be able to take up the studio membership scheme. We hadn’t anticipated all 10 to snap up our extra places but were delighted to welcome them all the same.
With 60 keen potters in the studios there is a real buzz on the member days, and it is wonderful to see people helping each other and forming firm friendships along the way.
This year, we teamed up with Goosfest – our local arts and music festival based in the village of Goostrey just a couple of miles away. This festival has grown every year since its inception and is now a two week festival of a variety of music, comedy, arts and crafts. We offered our studios as a venue over the weekend of 26th-28th September and were flat out running throwing demonstrations, throwing experiences and handbuilding sessions. In addition to these, we opened our doors to a bookbinding workshop and a linocut printing workshop. It was brilliant that all the activities were sold out.
If that wasn’t enough, we decided to run one of our very popular Raku experiences on Sunday 28th, again completely sold out, and everyone had a great time with some pretty amazing results coming from the firing. All credit to Alex who is our Raku firing leader. He throws the pots for our clients to glaze and does the scary bit of the firing, with everyone joining in on the other aspects of this exciting process.
The icing on top of this very busy cake was our Open Studio which we held on the Sunday. We had 20 of our members exhibiting this year and the studio looked absolutely amazing. Our members were justifiably very proud of the display of their work, and it was even more gratifying that we took around £1000 worth of sales on the day from visitors.
We won’t be putting our feet up in October though, as we have a teapot lid making workshop for our onsite café, Ginger and Pickles, and the launch of a very exciting range of new, British made brush on glazes – watch this space!
