“For 39 years I’ve told people the same thing: your olive oil isn’t bad. Your bottle is.” — Why a 72-year-old potter from Rye is letting her last 219 hand-painted oil dispensers go at a special price, before her workshop closes for good.

Every time someone picks up one of Avril Tutt’s oil dispensers at her stall, she asks the same question first: “Where do you keep your olive oil at the moment?”

The answer is almost always: in the bottle it came in, next to the hob, on the windowsill. Avril nods and says the sentence she has been saying since 1987.

Avril is 72. She has thrown pots on a wheel for more than forty years, in an old hop-pickers’ hut at the bottom of her cottage garden in Rye, East Sussex. This October she fired her kiln for the last time.

“People think their oil has gone off. It hasn’t. It sat in the light. That’s the bottle’s fault, not the oil’s.”

The bottle that broke on Clive’s kitchen floor

Rye is a small hill town of about 4,800 people near the Sussex coast, where potters have worked for centuries. In 1971, at seventeen, Avril started painting flowers on plates and mugs in one of the town’s potteries, until it closed in 1982.

Her husband Clive cooked in the kitchen of a pub out on the marsh and cooked at home every Sunday, with olive oil he had fallen for on a holiday in Crete. He kept it where most people do: in a clear glass bottle on the windowsill above the cooker.

One Sunday in the spring of 1987 he tasted the oil and pulled a face. “It tastes like crayons,” he said. The bottle was only two months old, with a greasy ring on the sill under it. Two weeks later he knocked it off the sill with his elbow, and Avril spent the evening on her knees with kitchen roll.

“I said, Clive, I’m a potter. Why on earth are we keeping oil in glass? The next morning I went down the garden to the hut and threw him one out of clay.”

The hop-pickers’ hut at the bottom of the garden

In 1983 Avril set up a second-hand kick wheel and a small kiln in the old hop-pickers’ hut at the bottom of the garden and made mugs and bowls for the church Christmas fair and the town’s arts festival every September.

After 1987, people started asking for “one like Clive’s.” She thinks she has made about 5,900 since. Each one takes about three hours of work, spread over a week: throwing, trimming, pulling the handle, two firings and the painting in between. Then she fits the steel spout by hand and tests it with water over the sink.

“If it drips in my sink, it doesn’t leave the hut. I’ve thrown plenty back in the scrap bucket.”

Five things the bottle on your worktop gets wrong

After 39 years at her stall, Avril can list every complaint about oil bottles in her sleep:

• It lets the light in. Clear glass lets the daylight straight into the oil. After a few weeks on the windowsill, good oil tastes flat and stale. Clive called it “crayons.”
• It tips over. Tall, thin bottles are top-heavy. One elbow or one cat, and you are on your knees with kitchen roll.
• It drips down the side. Cheap spouts leave a drop behind every time. It runs down the bottle into a greasy ring that dust and crumbs stick to.
• It stays open. An open spout lets in dust, kitchen grease and, in summer, fruit flies.
• It ends up in the cupboard. Plastic bottles are too ugly to leave out. So the oil goes behind a door, and you reach for butter instead.

What 39 years taught her about an oil bottle

Each of those five problems is why her dispensers look the way they do. People who order one usually write first: “It’s heavier than I expected.” That is on purpose.

• “The Dark Clay Body”: Thick, glazed clay, painted all the way round. No light gets through to the oil, so it can stay out on the worktop where you use it.
• “The Low Belly”: About 25 centimetres tall and 12.5 centimetres wide with the handle. The weight sits in the wide, round bottom, so it stands like it means it. “Clive knocked it with his elbow a hundred times,” Avril says. “It wobbled and stayed put.”
• “The Pulled Handle”: A loop handle with room for three fingers, pulled by hand from the same clay. You pour like from a little jug instead of squeezing a slippery bottle.
• “The Self-Closing Steel Spout”: A stainless steel spout with a small black flap. Tilt and it swings open, set it down and it falls shut, so dust and fruit flies stay out. The stream is thin and steady and stops cleanly.

“I didn’t invent anything. I just made the bottle I’d want next to my own cooker.”

Three patterns from the garden, and never a fourth

Dog Rose is the white wild roses in the hedge along the lane. Red Poppy is for her mother’s poppies by the back door, with a band of cobalt blue like the old Rye plates she painted as a girl. Hollyhock is the big pink and blue flowers that lean against the garden wall every August.

“Three is plenty. I paint what grows round here, and nothing grows prettier.”

The morning her shoulder said no

What Avril will miss most are the mornings: a mug of tea in the hut, mist over the marsh, the first lump of clay on the wheel.

Centring that clay takes your whole weight, leaned in through the shoulder. Last spring her right shoulder began to ache every time. The doctor called it arthritis. It will not get better.

“I can still paint a rose. I just can’t get the clay to sit still for me any more. Two kilos of clay and it wins every time now.”

In October she loaded the kiln one last time. There is no one to take over. 219 oil dispensers are left, 73 of each pattern. On 31 December, the kick wheel goes to the art department of the secondary school in town.

“An oil bottle belongs next to the cooker, not in a china cabinet”

Hand-thrown, hand-painted oil bottles like these sell for £95 to £130 in craft galleries. For her last 219, Avril could ask that much. Everyone would understand. She won’t.

“If it never gets an oily thumbprint on the handle, I made it for nothing.”

She is asking far less. She wants her last dispensers on real worktops this Christmas, next to real cookers, being used every day.

Avril doesn’t use a computer. Her granddaughter Jodie, 23, a nursery nurse in Hastings, saw the full shelves at Sunday lunch. “Nan, the arts festival isn’t until next September,” she said, and spent the next weekend setting up the page where you can order now.

“Jodie says more people will see them in a week than came to my stall in forty years. I told her fine, as long as they get used.”

What home cooks say about Avril’s oil dispensers

• ★★★★★

  “My olive oil lived in the cupboard for years because the bottle was so ugly. Now the Dog Rose one sits by the hob and I actually cook with it. No more sticky ring on the worktop either.”

  Linda M., Tenterden, Kent
• ★★★★★

  “Heavier than I expected, and that’s a good thing. My old glass bottle went over twice last year. This one doesn’t budge. The little flap is clever too, it just closes when you put it down.”

  Susan R., Lewes, East Sussex
• ★★★★★

  “Bought the Red Poppy for my daughter’s new kitchen and the Hollyhock for myself. Both arrived packed in so much paper I thought the box was empty. You can see every brush stroke up close.”

  Carol S., Canterbury, Kent

Three questions people ask before ordering

Where can I buy one of Avril’s oil dispensers?

Only through this page. Avril’s dispensers are not sold on Amazon, Temu or in any shop.

How long will they be available?

Only while stocks last. The kiln has been fired for the last time, and there are 219 dispensers left across all three patterns. Once a pattern is gone, it is gone for good.

What if it’s not right for me?

You have 90 days to try it at home. If you are not happy, just send a short email and you will get your money back. No questions, no fuss.

More from kitchens with one by the hob

• ★★★★★

  “I have arthritis in both hands and slim bottles always slipped. With the handle I just tip it like a little jug. It’s the first oil bottle I don’t have to think about.”

  Barbara K., Maidstone, Kent
• ★★★★★

  “Every summer we had fruit flies round the oil. Not this year. The flap stays shut until you pour. My husband says it’s the best-looking thing in the kitchen.”

  Sheila D., Norwich, Norfolk
• ★★★★★

  “Gave one to my sister for her birthday. She rang me that evening and said, ‘This was made by a real person, wasn’t it?’ I said yes, a lady in Rye.”

  Patricia W., Bath, Somerset