Kiln & Cinder Ceramics · Saltmarsh Lane, Orford
Stoneware thrown by Rosa Vane and fired by Ezra Flood on the Suffolk coast since 2017.
Most studio sites show you photographs. We’d rather sit you at the wheel. The pot on this wheel is real geometry, spinning now. Take the dots at its edge and pull: fatten the belly, tighten the neck, flare the rim. Then dip it in a glaze and see what the fire does.
a generous mug
drag the dots
that’s your hand on the clay
Your browser sat out the wheel. Here’s one we threw earlier.
The studio
We are not a brand. We are a shed behind the chapel with a wheel at one end, a kiln at the other, and a strict division of labour that survives roughly until lunch.
Ten years of production pots in Stoke-on-Trent, then two seasons in Mashiko chasing a tea bowl she still hasn’t caught. Rosa pulls a wall thin enough to read the wheel through and gets bored of a shape the week everyone else falls for it. Every curve on this page started as one of hers. Her mark is RV in a wobbly circle; the wobble is deliberate now.
Ezra built Bertha, our sixty-cubic-foot soda kiln, from the arch bricks of a dismantled Ipswich bottle kiln, and he keeps her logs like a ship’s master. He reads flame the way Rosa reads a rim: by what it’s about to do. If your mug carries a toasted blush on one shoulder, that’s Ezra, leaning the fire exactly where he wanted it.
The division of labour is strict until it isn’t. Rosa loads, Ezra pugs, and whoever lost at cribbage sieves the wood ash.
The glazes
Recipes on request — glaze secrecy is for people with worse glazes. All three go to cone 10 in reduction, with soda vapour doing the last unpaid shift. Try any of them on the pot you just threw.
Wood ash, ball clay, a whisper of iron. Pale sea-green that pools bluer where it runs and thins to nearly nothing on the rim. Rosa’s favourite over a porcelain slip; the drips are not a flaw, they are the argument.
breaks pale on rims · pools blue-green in the throatIron to the edge of saturation. Black-brown in the belly, breaking russet wherever the form has an opinion — rims, ridges, the shoulder of anything proud. The oldest workhorse in the book, and it still shows off.
breaks russet on every edge · runs thick, pools blackBare shoulders, orange-peel skin. A dry porcelain slip left to the soda vapour; where the flame leans in, it toasts like good bread. No two come out alike, which is precisely the case for it.
orange-peel surface · toasts amber on the flame sideThe kiln
Bertha takes two days to fill, eighteen hours to fire and four days to cool, and she has never once been talked out of an opinion. We fire on slabwood offcuts from the yard at Snape, with three kilos of soda ash going in when cone 8 bows.
| time | temp | what happens |
|---|---|---|
| 21:00 | ambient | candle — flame low, damper wide, kettle on |
| 01:00 | 200 °C | the climb: 100 degrees an hour, nobody talks before six |
| 08:30 | 950 °C | body reduction — back pressure at the spies, flame gone lazy |
| 12:30 | 1 190 °C | cone 8 bows: soda in, four passes, 750 g each |
| 14:20 | 1 285 °C | cone 10 down; hold twenty minutes, let the glaze settle |
| 14:45 | 1 040 °C | crash cool, then clammed tight for four days |
“East wind. She pulled hard all morning; nine went at 13:40, ten at 14:25. Heavy blush on the front stack — the seconds table will be dangerous this month. Arch is singing again.”— Ezra’s log, firing № 61, 14 March 2026
Visit & buy
Behind the chapel, Saltmarsh Lane,
Orford, Suffolk IP12 2NU.
Saturdays 10–4, and most other days if the wheel’s on. Knock hard — the wheel is loud.
First Saturday after each firing: chips, blushes, glazes that ran past the foot. Priced to leave. Bring a box; we never have enough boxes.
We ship, reluctantly and very well wrapped:
rosa@kilnandcinder.co.uk