My love of pottery started many years ago when I was at school, studying for GCSE Ceramics, but having completed the course, I didn’t touch clay again for 25 years before my husband and I signed up for a throwing course at a local college and I was well and truly sucked in!

In 2021, I was desperate to build a studio in the garden, but quotes from companies ran into many thousands of pounds. At the same time, there was a sixth form centre being built at the school in which I was working. Every day I would walk past piles and piles of wooden pallets on the building site, and an idea was born. Lots of youtubing later, and we agreed (well - I suggested and my husband agreed under duress) that the pallets would be ideal to create the structure of our studio. So - a van was hired, and we lugged piles and piles of pallets home to begin the mammoth project.

Unfortunately, while we were on holiday, some of our boys had a ‘few friends’ round, and ran out of fire wood, so we lost about a third of the pallets to their bonfire - needless to say the return from holiday was a stressful one (mainly for the boys)! As luck would have it, the building work was still going on at school, so off we went to replenish the stocks of pallets and get building. The windows are 120 year old timber windows that were free on facebook, and the door was a bargainous find. Really everything was done on a shoestring, with the only big expense being the cladding and the kiln.

After many weeks of hard work (and aching bones), we finished the construction of my now fully insulated studio, and invited the electrician around to put in all the electric trickery so that I could get potting.

The structure taking shape with our hand built window frames

Because the windows were so old and non-standard sizes, we had to learn very quickly how to build window frames around the windows, planing and routing windowsills to fashion them from solid blocks of wood.

The rafters were made by pulling apart double length pallets and glueing/screwing the thick timbers together to make the rafters. The planks from the pallets were then used to create the roof structure.

Perfect cavities for insulation provided by the pallets

Needless to say, it’s certainly not that clean and tidy now, with shelves full of stuff and my electric kiln in the corner, but nevertheless we are very proud of our hard work and who would ever guess that underneath the cladding is a skeleton of pallets?!

Since building the studio, I have developed a keen interest (my husband has his head in his hands) in alternative firing methods… Having another brainwave, I decided that it would be a great idea to convert a dog crate into a gas kiln for my alternative firings - but that’s a story for another day!

So it begins…

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