Why eleven colours, and not a hundred
A paint shop can sell a thousand colours because it mixes at the till. We fire ours, so the card has to be small, fixed, and built from three oxides.
People ask, kindly, why we do not just offer more colours. The honest answer is that we cannot mix at the till, and that turns out to be a feature.
A glaze is not a paint
A paint shop mixes to order because paint is a suspension you can tint by the drop. A glaze is different: the colour is a metal oxide dissolved into glass and fired, and the firing is the mix. Once a batch of coloured frit is made, it is that colour forever. There is no adjusting it afterwards, no lightening it at the counter. So every colour we sell is a colour we have committed a whole tank to.
That commitment is why the card is short. Eleven colourways is what one small works can hold in true, consistent colour across a year of firings.
Three oxides do the work
Every colour on the card comes from three colorants that potters have used for centuries:
- Iron gives red.
- Cobalt gives blue.
- Copper gives green.
Stir them into the clear frit in measured amounts and you get the rest. Iron and cobalt together make Damson. Cobalt and copper make Peacock. A light charge of iron makes the coral we call Ember. The colour card shows the whole set with the mix written under each one.
Why the middle is mud
Here is the part that surprises people. On a screen, mixing colours adds light, so a jumble of colours tends toward white. In the kiln it is the opposite: the oxides each absorb part of the spectrum, and the absorptions multiply. Put all three in at once and they cancel each other to a low, grey brown. We call it Ash, and it is on the card as a reference rather than a product — a reminder of where every over-ambitious mix ends up.
The other reference is Frit: the bare base with no oxide at all. It fires white, because there is nothing in it to take colour out. Every other colour on the site is that white with something removed.
The discipline is the point
A fixed card means the Ember mug you buy this year matches the Ember mug you bought two years ago. It means we can hold the colour exact, because we are firing the same eleven recipes over and over rather than chasing a hundred. And it means the range coheres on a shelf, because it was all mixed from the same three pots.
Small, fixed, and built from three oxides. That is the whole idea, and it is why there are eleven.