Introducing the Maker Series No. 4

The Maker Series exists for the ideas that don't fit into our regular collections: the weave structure we've been testing for a year, the glaze that only works when the kiln runs a certain way, the small idea that deserves a small, honest release instead of being folded into something bigger. No. 4 is our fourth run since we started the series in 2019, and it's the first to pair a textile and a ceramic piece designed around the same color.

The textile half is a set of forty throws in a broken twill structure Mara has been refining since last winter, woven in undyed wool and overdyed in a single madder-and-iron bath that pulls the color toward a deep brick rather than the brighter red we usually get from madder alone. The twill catches light differently than our standard weave, showing a faint diagonal texture that flattens out under lamplight and sharpens in daylight.

The ceramic half is a run of forty serving bowls fired at the Asheville kiln during a wood-firing weekend this past March, glazed in a wood-ash recipe Dev has been adjusting for two years. Ash glazes are unpredictable by nature; no two bowls came out quite the same, which is part of the point of releasing them under the Maker Series name rather than as part of Studio Essentials.

We numbered each piece by hand, one through forty, and matched them loosely by tone rather than trying to force an exact pairing. A few of the bowls lean more olive than brick, and we've left those pairings a little looser as a result. If you buy both pieces, we'll do our best to send you a bowl and throw that sit well together, but we won't promise an exact match.

Once this run sells out, we won't reproduce it. That's true of every Maker Series release: the glaze chemistry shifts, the wool dye lot changes, and even if we tried to repeat No. 4 exactly, the kiln and the vat wouldn't cooperate. We'll announce No. 5 sometime this winter, once we have something worth making a fuss about.

Newsletter subscribers got first access to this run three days before it went live on the site, which is generally how we handle Maker Series drops. If you'd like that lead time on the next one, our studio notes list is the way to get it.