Tiny Shiny Ceramics was born far from its studio. Somewhere between a kitchen table in Cape Town, a ceramics school in France, and three children growing up. Here is how.
Before porcelain, there were thirteen years at the bar. A life of case files, pleadings, words — a profession I loved, and that I eventually set down. What I was missing, I understood late: to make with my hands. To feel a material yield, resist, take shape. To keep, at the end of the day, a trace you can hold.
Clay arrived like a slightly unreasonable certainty. I went back to school to learn the craft at the source, and earned a State diploma in ceramic throwing — at the Académie de Bordeaux. You don't improvise with porcelain: it is probably the most demanding of clays, the most temperamental on the wheel, the most beautiful once fired. Translucent, soft, surprisingly strong. It had to be the one.
Why little ones
A mother of three, I kept the memory of those very first objects we place around a cradle: the cup of first meals, the little evening melody. Objects we pass through quickly, often plastic, anonymous — and throw away without a thought. I wanted the opposite: for a child's very first treasure to be beautiful, soft, handmade, and made to last well beyond childhood.
It became the thread of everything I shape: porcelain music boxes and newborn tableware, in small batches, one piece after another. And then this touch of gold, applied by hand and fired separately, that turns an object into a keepsake — the sparkle you keep, and pass on.
Shaping far from home
The paradox of this adventure is that I am carrying it out from Cape Town, thousands of kilometres from the studio that awaits me in France. The collection matures this way, slowly, between two continents: the tests, the misfires, the glazes you start over, the shapes you abandon. That patience is not a delay — it is the time that beautiful things, like children, ask for.
On my return to France, in summer 2027, I will open my studio in Occitanie and bring the collection to life. There, in a renovated stone barn at the heart of the sunflower fields, workshops and retreats will also take place — ceramics and yoga — to offer other (future) mothers that same pause: to create with your hands, breathe, slow down.
Until then, I'll share the behind-the-scenes of this making right here: what comes out of the kiln, what breaks, what gets decided. This journal is the studio window — between Cape Town and Occitanie, through the seasons.
— Amandine