“How’s your little hobby going?”

It’s a question I get a lot. Sometimes casually. Sometimes with a chuckle. Occasionally with genuine curiosity. But always carrying the same quiet assumption that what I do isn’t quite… real work.

Ceramics, apparently, sits somewhere between craft project and pastime in the minds of some people.

But here’s the thing. It’s not a hobby.

Ceramics is my profession. It’s my business, my craft, and the thing I’ve spent years building from the ground up. Running a ceramic studio is not me quietly pottering around the wheel when I feel like it. It’s employing a team of talented tutors, running classes and workshops, managing bookings, firing kilns, maintaining equipment, ordering tonnes of clay, packing online orders, doing the accounts, marketing the business, and keeping a complex little ecosystem running every single week.

It’s physical work. Clay is heavy. Kilns run hot. Production pottery demands skill, repetition and endurance. There is nothing “little” about the amount of labour that goes into making and running this studio.

And yet, creative work, particularly work done by women, is still often framed as a hobby.

My husband is an architect. No one has ever asked him how his little hobby is going.

No one asks him if the buildings he designs are just something he does for fun on the side. His work is immediately recognised as serious, professional, legitimate. The difference isn’t the hours worked or the level of skill required. It’s the assumptions people carry about whose work counts.

Then there’s the other question that sometimes follows.

“But who’s looking after the kids?”

The same people who look after every other working parent’s kids. School. Day care. Family. Community.

Women have been asked to justify working for a very long time, particularly when that work exists outside the neat boundaries of a nine to five office job. Creative businesses often sit right in the firing line of that thinking.

The truth is simple. I’m a mum and I run a business. Both things are real. Both things matter.

Ceramics first came into my life ten years ago in a pottery class in Japan. What started as curiosity slowly grew into something much bigger. Five years ago I made the leap to pursue it full time. Since then the studio has grown, the team has grown, and the community around it has grown too.

International Women’s Day is a moment to recognise the work women do in all its forms. The visible work and the invisible work. The businesses built quietly, often while raising children, managing households, and carrying an invisible mental load that rarely gets acknowledged.

So no, I won’t smile and brush it off.

Because this “little hobby” employs people.
It fills a studio with hundreds of students each year.
It keeps kilns firing and clay moving through many hands.

It’s not a hobby.

It’s a business.
It’s skilled work.
And it deserves to be taken seriously.