From the bench, between gaiwan firings
The bench’s main work is gaiwans — twelve named pieces a month from the shophouse in Liuzhou, Guangxi, each signed at the foot. The teapot line began as a way to answer a question regulars kept asking: why watch the leaf open through a lid you have to remove, when a pot could show the whole session at once.
The 450ml size is the middle of the three — enough for two or three small cups, still intimate enough for a solo morning session. The strainer is pulled from the same gather as the spout rather than fitted as a separate metal mesh, so the whole piece stays one uninterrupted material from handle to lip. Walls are blown thin enough to read colour clearly but thick enough to survive the thermal jump from a cold bench to near-boiling water.
Every pot is annealed slowly, then checked by eye for the internal stress lines that catch light unevenly. Only pieces that pass go on to be signed at the base. Production alongside the bench’s main gaiwan work means this size restocks irregularly rather than on a fixed schedule — when you find one in stock, it is because the bench had a spare afternoon between firings.