January is the month we do not sell anything. Orders are closed, the kiln is cold, and the six of us spend three weeks on the things we said we would get to in the autumn.

This year that meant a new jig for the Plinth stool, a set of plaster tests for the Hearth light that we are not ready to talk about, and a hundred and forty small repairs to the workshop itself. The floor by the bandsaw has been fixed. The door still sticks.

Hanne fired the first vessels of the year on the twelfth. The stove ash from December gave a glaze somewhere between green and grey, which we have decided to call nothing, so as not to have to describe it.

Light comes back to the north windows around the twentieth. We photograph nothing until it does.