I've had a sudden influx of followers over the last few days so most of you would have found me from the making of Pebblemug video so I just thought I'd hop on and say hi and introduce myself a little bit so I am Joe hi I'm a potter based in sorry in the UK just south of London I've been doing this for about three and a half years now got into ceramics quite accidentally didn't study it at school I went to university for graphic design about de graduated about a decade ago then I worked as a graphic designer for six or so years and around the time of the Brexit vote my company I was working for were looking to make redundancies so I took that and used the money from it to essentially start all the full decorations which it took a couple of months between the two but what happened was we were my wife and I were planning on waiting at that point and we wanted to make something for our safer dates so that people would have a little play hasn't had that in a minute tonight and we wanted to make something that people could keep as a safer date and would actually use and we settled on making coasters and we couldn't find anyone making interesting personalised ceramic coasters we might be someone now who wasn't back then or no one that we could find and I kind of said how hard can it be and obviously the answer is harder than you think whenever you say that but what we did was we borrowed a kiln from family friend who had a little 40-liter kiln lying around and we were only working in earthenware so it wouldn't go particularly high but that didn't matter for us at that point and we got our design for it 3D printed and then us rolling them out on the kitchen table with just a rolling pin and casting them with cookie cutter, stamping them and then firing them so that earthenware and I was using pre-made glazes to fire into about a thousand degrees and they worked really well and they were really happy with them and I had realised at that point that firstly there's no one selling personalised coasters and the way that we'd made them work quite well but also you could mill let the hard to play with a CNC milling machine so you could cut individual patterns onto coasters and so you could do individually personised things including things like kids drawings because it was each one was completely personal you could get a kid to write a message and you cut it into the coaster so I started a business doing that got a little CNC mill better kiln and did that for a little while but there was lots of downtime while running the mill because it could take a while to cut the clay each time and I used that to learn about the rest of ceramics I was hand building and looking at stoneware as well so I was doing earthenware fireings for the coasters but at the same time I was using stoneware claying glazes to make hand built planters and things like that and then I started making my own glazes and got hold of an old broken wheel which I repaired in this like the budge sort of way but got it working and I could throw that I taught myself I have to throw from youtube videos and and instagram mostly because that's so many great how-to videos on youtube so I just taught myself and after a little while stop making the coasters and just became a full-time throwing process I don't hand build I don't make coasters or at least I don't make coasters the way I was then I just throw a full time so that journey took probably the first year and a half of the business I've said about three and a half years in now no yeah three and a half years so it's been a few years worth of just throwing constantly now and that's pretty much how I got started few other things the name old forge creations is because the studio is on the site of a 16th century forge and the place is called the old forge so it seemed like an obvious name for it and it was creations rather than ceramics because at the very start I wasn't 100% certain that all I'd be doing was clay I was doing some metal work and things like that at the same time but then this kind of has taken over and right well I don't think I've done a particularly good job of either throwing or answering questions or explaining anything there and I'd love to hear how you found this channel and what your experience with players whether you've just done it a little bit at school or whether you've done evening classes or even if you haven't done it at all then you're just like watching the slow soundless videos of this so yeah come in below how you found the channel and how you found clay how much experience you've got with clay and if there's any questions I mean there will be loads of questions that I didn't answer there there's probably should have prepared a list of questions and did it but there's nothing you want to know about how I got here or my process or any of that sort of stuff comment below and thanks for watching