i was eight years old the first time i watched someone make something out of nothing. mr. bjornson, in wisconsin, at a wheel. i remember thinking it looked simple. you throw the clay, put it in a fire, and boom — it’s done.

it is not simple. i was going to learn that the hard way, more than once.

when my family moved from wisconsin to the east coast, i tripped and broke twelve of our dinner plates. i was a young teenager with no job and no way to replace them, and the shame of it sat heavy in my chest. so i decided i’d make new ones myself. i dug dirt out of our virginia backyard and put it in a water bucket to separate the clay. i built a fire around some bricks. i shaped a piece and set it in the flames.

when the fire died down, i looked underneath.

ashes.

the shame got a second layer that day. so i did the only thing i knew to do with it — i went to the library, i went to youtube, i went anywhere that might teach me something true about this process i clearly didn’t understand yet.

momentum came slowly. someone gifted me a tabletop wheel. i funded a small kickstarter. strangers started asking for custom pieces, and i couldn’t keep stock on the shelves. and still — still — the process wouldn’t be rushed. i watched eighty dinner plates glazed in 22k gold come out of my kiln as hundreds of broken shards. i started to think i had a gift for breaking dinner plates. the shame layered on top of itself like a parfait nobody wants to eat.

so i worked harder. i told myself to get a bigger space, to move faster, to push through the december rush at night while my dog waited by the door for a game of fetch i never had time for. i worked so fast i couldn’t see what it was costing me — not until the debt had climbed into the tens of thousands, and rest and friendships and even my own health had quietly gone missing somewhere along the way.

no one on instagram saw it happen. but i did.

i have thirteen siblings, and i think it took exactly that many people kneeling beside me to help pick the pieces back up — like a brio train set scattered across the floor, the kind you want to just walk away from because looking at it is too much. they didn’t walk away. piece by piece, we started something new.

my now-husband asked me, while we were dating, what three things i’d learned from all of it. i tried to walk away from the question the first few times he asked. eventually i answered: my time and my art have value. rest creates the best work, not the other way around. and i can only love the people in my life with what i actually have in my hands — which means i have to protect what’s in them. he didn’t ask for a fourth, but i gave him one anyway: honesty wins the day, no matter how hard it is to tell the truth about where you actually are.

i tell you all of this because i think you might be standing where i stood at sixteen with a bucket of virginia dirt — wanting badly to make something with your hands, with no idea yet how much the process asks of you, and maybe a little afraid that wanting it at all makes you naive.

it doesn’t. it’s telling you something true.

you don’t need the whole plan before you start — i certainly didn’t have one. you need a place to begin, and the willingness to pull ashes out of a fire more than once and try again anyway. what you don’t need is thirteen years and tens of thousands of dollars in lessons to get there. that’s the part i can actually hand you.

i built a course for the ones standing at this edge — the pricing, the workspace, the boundaries, the slow and steady rhythm of building something that lasts, without the debt and the broken plates i had to go through to learn it myself.

slow down. start small. but start.

with love, talia