A Few Pieces Are Coming Home for Less

It isn't a warehouse sale or a clearance event. It's a small, real, once-a-year moment where the pieces that usually stay in my studio — slightly warped, a little uneven, sample runs I never repeated — get to go somewhere other than a corner shelf. Each one is fully usable and food-safe. None of them are damaged in any way that matters. They just aren't quite symmetrical enough to be the main listing. These are the pieces I wrote about in The Pieces I Didn't Expect to Keep, finally leaving the studio.

If you've been wanting a Muddy Heart piece but the made-to-order wait hasn't lined up with your timing, this is the one moment all year where something can come home immediately, at a gentler price, precisely because it's a little imperfect.

People sometimes worry that a one-of-a-kind piece won't go with anything, and I understand it — nothing here has a matching set behind it. But mismatched objects only read as clutter when they have nothing to do. Give the odd piece a job and it stops looking like an orphan: the lopsided bowl becomes the one the keys live in, the single spoon sits in the salt, the ring cone goes by the kitchen sink where you actually take your rings off. A shelf of unrelated beautiful things looks restless. A shelf of unrelated things that are each in use looks like a home. That is the whole trick, and it costs nothing.

This round includes a small set of gloss white everyday bowls, a one-of-a-kind turquoise cheese board from an old design I'm not repeating, and a few pieces from past collections I'm setting free. Quantities are genuinely small — some of these are down to a single piece.

There are a few more besides: a handful of bell pendant lamps and a couple of wide pendants from a past lighting run, plus small things — marbled ring cones and a few ceramic spoons — sample designs I only ever made once.

The shades are a good illustration of why a sample shelf exists at all. A glaze on a lampshade behaves nothing like a glaze on a bowl: once there is a bulb behind it, every thin place quietly glows and every thick place stays opaque, and you cannot judge any of it until the light is actually in. So I make a few, hang them, live with them, and keep the one that lights best. The others are perfectly lovely and simply lost a competition nobody told them about.

The ring cones are the other kind of one-off. That marbling isn't painted on — two clays are wedged together and then every slice through the block comes out differently, so no two cones in that row are the same and no two ever could be. It was a whole afternoon of testing that never turned into a collection, which is exactly why they're here.