About

TIME AND TOAST is all about enjoying some of life's simple pleasures and daily rituals - a celebration of the things we like, to be shared with the people we love. 

My ceramics journey began as a result of the painting class being full at school, so I ended up in the pottery class - and I loved it! Somewhat ironically it was doing pottery, rather than painting, that made realise how much I loved designing things, which led me on to deciding to study graphic design. Fast forward through getting a degree, quite a few years of working in design, until a few years ago when I went back to doing pottery, initially through adult education. I was hooked again.

It’s only really now, with hindsight, that I can see that pottery has influenced quite a few of my creative choices, primarily with the launch of TIME AND TOAST in 2016. I've always loved the whiteness and translucency of bone china (and it’s a material I’ve also began using in my handmade ceramics). And so, after lots of research and sampling, I decided that, despite its higher cost, it was really important to use only the best quality English bone china - Made in Britain. This was, after all, to be a celebration of the things we like.

As a child I was always collecting postcards, greetings cards, and filling scrapbooks with ephemera. I guess it was how my passion for print began. Soon after launching my bone china range, I began designing a range of greetings cards, with the same minimalist aesthetic, and love of wordplay and humour.

2016 was also the year that I choose to take myself a little further out of my comfort zone, and enrol to study ceramics part-time. Having now completed the course, I am keen to see how these two areas of my work will influence each other. 

You can check out some of my handmade ceramics here.

And why TIME AND TOAST?

The inspiration for our name came from reading one of the many philosophical musings of Dougal the dog in The Magic Roundabout, and a rather wonderful misappropriation of a quote on time and tide. I wrote it down in a notebook at the time, but it was never far from my mind. Given that food and drink has provided inspiration for so much of my work over the years, both as a graphic designer, and more recently with clay, it somehow seemed the natural choice for a name.