What is up guys, welcome to the pottery studio. Today in the studio, I wanna do something a little different. I wanna do a book review of a recent book that we got. So Florian Gadsby, if you haven't heard of him, he is content creator, Potter, YouTuber, Instagram. And he was kind enough to send us his book that he wrote last year, as well as a little mug that he made. So I want to just talk a little bit about the book, what I liked about it, why you should maybe read it, and cheers. So before we get to that, our first restock of the year, we have over a hundred pots going up February 4th at 6 p.m. So check out the Etsy shop if you wanna see what's behind me, plus a few other things too. All right, let's get into this book. So buy my hands by Florian Gadsby. Florian has an amazing YouTube channel. If you haven't checked out his YouTube channel, it is super informative, very, very well done. He is super thoughtful, methodical about everything. While my YouTube channel is kind of crazy and all over the place and full of energy, his is very like, these are the facts, it's very soothing to listen to. He has a great mind and just a way to talk about pots. And he really exemplifies that through his new book. The book is kind of separated into three different sections. First is his early life growing up. He's from the UK. And then the second part is his apprenticeship with Lisa Hammond, who is the leader of Mays Hill pottery. And then the third part is his time that he spent in Japan, working with Ken Matsuzaki. Matsuzaki, I'm not sure if I'm pronouncing all these names, right? But a couple of things that I really thought were super interesting, the way that he just writes about pottery makes me like super proud that I get to work with clay. It's like sometimes you get caught up in the mundane and you're just putting handles on, you're trimming, you're throwing, and it doesn't seem like that big a deal, but he does a really good job in this book of making it seem like, oh, this is really cool that you get to make something out of mud and you get to give it to people that want to buy it. So anyway, that was like an overarching theme that I thought he did a really good job of just making me appreciate working with clay and how special that is. I think a couple of things that stood out to me in the first section was the different type of schooling that he went to when he was an early child. They got to experiment with clay. I mean, he's been working with clay almost his whole life, it seemed like, but it was more experimental in terms of his schooling. It wasn't like the American schools where you go and you sit in a chair and you listen for eight hours. It was like they were experimenting with things, they were playing, they were, it was just a lot different. So that stood out to me. And then his apprenticeship at Mays Hill pottery really reminded me a lot of like the, what I have in here with Kai where he does lots of the tasks, once he's really good at doing certain things and he moved into handling and throwing and trimming and everything in the studio. And by the end of that apprenticeship, he could really do everything. It was also really fun to hear him talk about the soda firing at Lisa Hammond at Mays Hill pottery because we're building a soda kiln this April with Kevin Kualsky's flying here to build a soda kiln. So that's something that I am super interested in. And so hearing about his experience with the soda kiln was really interesting. Also hearing about how he got started where he's been posting something on Instagram pretty much every day for like many years, like seven, eight, nine years to hear how he got started posting and then he would have like 10,000 followers and then he had 100,000 followers. And that was all before he even started YouTube which I feel like that's where I got to know him a little bit was on YouTube. And so that was really interesting. That was while he was working at Mays Hill pottery. He just started posting and then he would post off online and people wanted to buy it. And then while he went to Japan, I mean, that was just super interesting. I mean, the rich history of pottery that Japan has was very cool to read about his experience in Japan. And that's something that I would love to do is go to Japan and see some of how they work and their glazes and their firing, you know, when he was working, just how they were firing their gas kiln was super interesting in Japan. How it would take days, how they would collect clay and they would make the clay from the ground in Japan was super interesting. Coffee break. Oh, I thought of something else that I was gonna say just in that. The last part of the book is him finding the current studio that he's in which was really interesting because he was like trying to look for different studios. Just wasn't figuring out. He was like almost destined to go to electric firing instead of gas firing, which was interesting because he just couldn't find the right studio space to accommodate a big gas kiln, but eventually he did. And so that's where his studio is now. You can see many, many, many videos of that. The other thing that really stood out to me which is so amazing is he seemed like he found his style so early, like he has a specific style of mugs. Lots of gray, lots of white kind of crackly glazes, very simple forms, angular. There are certain things about Florian gasbe that are really, like you can look at a pot and be like, that was a Florian gasbe pot, where that's very different from me where I feel like I continually am, like he's experimenting too, but I am like all over the place in terms of gas, soda, like marbling, white, brown, I try all different things where he has like a specific style that he really sticks to. And it's been that way for a long, long time, like even before his apprenticeship at Lisa Hammond's Mays Hill pottery, he was making some of the same style pots that he makes to this day. And he was like 19 years old when he started kind of figuring out what style he was. So I really admire that about him because I don't feel like I've been able to like hone in on one thing, there are certain things that I've done over the years that have been consistent, but in terms of like really, you know, the style of pots that he is known for, it's been amazing how long he's been doing that. And it's probably one of the reasons he's been so successful. I do love the fact that he throws a lot of pictures, the fact that he has been taking pictures every day, posting them on Instagram for years and years and years, really brought a lot to this book. I felt like he was able to illustrate things really nicely. It was very elegantly written. I mean, look at that, look at that page of pots. Sotified and Lisa's I believe. This is a picture of all the broken pots that he was at Ken's studio in Japan. He just talked about how it was an amazing amount of pots that were just broken and shards and all the inclusion. This book, I really, really, really enjoyed it. It was less like about how to make pottery and what, you know, he does day to day nowadays and more about his history and more about what it's like to be a potter that has done multiple apprenticeships for very well-known and accomplished other potters. So this is his story and his journey is so different than mine and I really appreciated hearing it and seeing it. So thank you, Florian, for taking the time to put your history of how you became a potter into a book. I really enjoyed it. If you're interested in it, I would definitely recommend getting a copy. Check out his YouTube channel for some amazing YouTube videos as well as all his content is really good. Also, Florian recently put up a video of how he made all these. So if you wanna check out how he made them, I'd have finished the copy so you can get a good look. He put his Florian stamp on there but then he also has a little stamp of like a book. That's it for this video. Once again, we have pots going up for sale this weekend, February 4th. We'll call it a Valentine's Day Restock, even though there's nothing special about Valentine's Day. All right, thank you guys for watching. Hopefully you guys enjoyed this video. We'll be back with another one very soon. See you guys soon.