Advertorial · 2 days ago · By Hannah Pickering

“Five minutes in the milk and his cereal was mush. He left half the bowl, every single time.” Why a 72-year-old Derbyshire potter is selling her cereal bowls online for the first and last time

Sheila Ashworth has been making dishes on the same wheel for 53 years. The little bowl she made for her grandson last winter turned into the piece people asked her about most at the Saturday market. Arthritis in her hands won’t let her fire another kiln load, and about 260 bowls are left from her last one. She is selling them until the end of November.

The Saturday craft market in the Market Place in Wirksworth packed up for the season on the last weekend of October, and Sheila Ashworth’s folding table has been leaning against the wall of her studio ever since. The studio is the old stone wash house behind her cottage at the edge of town. Nobody has done a load of washing in it since the 1950s. For the last forty years it has held a potter’s wheel, a kiln, a long oak workbench and shelves that climb all the way to the beams.

She takes a bowl off the shelf by the window. It is a small, heavy dish that does two jobs at once: a deep, round cup on one side, a shallow tray that curves around it like a crescent moon, and one flat loop handle on the outside of the cup. She pours cold milk into the cup and shakes a handful of honey-oat cereal into the crescent.

Then she scoops a spoonful of the dry cereal, dips it into the milk and takes a bite. It crunches. She does it again, and again. Ten spoonfuls in, the cereal still waiting in the crescent is as dry as it was in the box.

Sheila has been at the wheel since she was 19. Fifty-three years of coffee mugs, pie dishes, casserole dishes and the odd wedding platter, most of them sold off the same folding table in the same market place. By her own rough count, well over 25,000 pieces.

“I’ve made the cereal bowls in half the kitchens in the Derbyshire Dales,” she says. “And I never once thought about what the cereal was doing in them.”

The crunch bowl, as her family calls it, started as one bowl for one little boy. Ten months later, people she has never met stop her about it in the Co-op. And with the market closed for the winter, this is the first time anyone can order one online.

What 53 years of making bowls teach you about milk

Ask Sheila about wet things and she will talk longer than you expect. “Anything wet wants to go somewhere,” she says. “Gravy, soup, milk. Your job as a potter is to tell it where.” A gravy boat gets a deep belly and a spout. A pie dish gets a low wall, because nothing in it runs. Every good dish, she says, starts with one question: what in here is wet, and what has to stay dry?

The cereal bowl never got asked that question. It is one round hole that you fill with two things that should never sit together: something crisp and something wet. “The second the milk goes in, the clock starts,” she says. “That’s not a cereal problem. That’s a bowl problem.”

Alfie is Sheila’s grandson. He is eight, he has freckles and opinions, and four afternoons a week he gets dropped off at her gate after school while his mum, Sheila’s daughter Claire, finishes her shift at the hospital in Derby. The routine hasn’t changed in three years: school bag on the bench, wellies by the door, a bowl of cereal and an hour of cartoons.

Last January, Sheila started paying attention to what came back from the sofa. Half a bowl, every single time. Pale, swollen flakes sunk in grey milk. One frosty afternoon he carried it back to the kitchen, tipped it towards her and said, “Gran, it’s soggy.” Then he poured it down the sink.

“Five minutes in the milk and his cereal was mush. He left half the bowl, every single time,” Sheila says. “He’s a slow eater. He watches his show, he talks, he takes a bite every couple of minutes. And I thought, I’m a potter. This one is my department.”

She went out to the studio that night with the frost already settling on the garden. She threw a deep, round cup with a high wall, for the milk. Then a shallow tray that curves around one side of the cup like a crescent moon, for the cereal, and joined the two while the clay was still soft. Last came the handle: a flat loop on the outside of the cup, big enough for a small thumb, set right beside the milk so the heavy side of breakfast sits under your hand.

It took her ten tries and most of February. On the first ones the cup was too shallow, and the milk slopped over on the way to the sofa. On others the crescent was too flat, and the cereal slid straight into the milk the moment the bowl tipped. Two handles cracked off in the kiln. “Fifty-three years at this,” she says, “and an eight-year-old sent me back to the wheel nine times.”

Each bowl still takes her about four hours of handwork from start to finish: throwing the cup, shaping the crescent, joining the two, attaching the handle, trimming, dipping the glaze by hand, and two trips through the kiln. “People think pottery is the wheel,” she says. “The wheel is the fast part.”

The tenth bowl came out of the kiln on a Thursday. Alfie filled the crescent himself, carried it to the sofa by the handle and ate every last bite. Then he came back for more. He named it “the crunch bowl,” and he hasn’t left a soggy bowl on the coffee table since.

Claire took the second one to work for her granola and yoghurt. A neighbour down the road wanted one for her two boys, and then the neighbour’s sister did. When the market opened again in May, Sheila set two at the end of her table, mostly to see what would happen. A mum of three bought both before nine o’clock and came back the next Saturday with her own mum. By July there was a waiting list in a spiral notebook.

Word got around the way it does in a market town of 5,000. Families who drove over from Derby and Nottingham for the market took bowls home and wrote asking for more, so Sheila started posting a few boxes a week from the post office on the Market Place. There was no shop and no website. Just the folding table, the notebook and a biscuit tin full of addresses.

The trouble with cereal and milk

Most of us still eat cereal the way we did as kids: pour it in, drown it in milk and race the clock. The flakes on top stay crisp for about a minute. The ones underneath start soaking the moment the milk touches them. Anyone who reads the news over breakfast, answers a text or helps a kid find a missing shoe knows how it ends.

The usual fixes don’t really work. Pouring a little milk at a time means topping it up every two minutes. Eating fast standing at the counter isn’t breakfast, it’s a pit stop. And a glass of milk next to a bowl of dry cereal means two dishes, two hands and a puddle on the coffee table.

Sheila’s bowl simply keeps the two apart until your spoon brings them together. The milk sits in the deep round cup. The cereal waits, dry, in the crescent. You take a spoonful of cereal, dip it in the milk and eat, so every bite is as crunchy as the first one, right down to the last spoonful. The high wall of the cup keeps the milk on its own side, and the handle sits right next to it, where the weight is, so the bowl rides level when you carry it to the sofa with one hand.

“I didn’t invent cereal and milk,” she says. “I just stopped making them share a bowl.”

The grown-ups figured out the rest on their own. At the market, people told her what they used theirs for: granola in the crescent and yoghurt in the cup, porridge next to a pile of blueberries, crackers next to a dip, tortilla chips next to salsa on match day. “One lady told me it’s the only way she eats granola now,” Sheila says. “She said the yoghurt used to turn it into cardboard.”

That is also why the knock-offs you see online disappoint people, she says. “They copy the shape off a photo. The cup is too shallow, so the milk sloshes into the cereal. Or it’s thin plastic that slides all over the table, or the handle is a little nub you can’t get a thumb through.” Sheila lifts every finished bowl by its handle before it goes in a box. If it doesn’t hang level, it goes on the seconds shelf.

She is just as plain about what it won’t do. “It won’t get a kid to eat his broccoli,” she says. “It’s milk on one side and cereal on the other. That’s all it is. Turns out that’s enough.” Like everything she makes, it goes in the microwave and the dishwasher, so the porridge can be warmed right in the cup.

The bowls come in four glazes, each one dipped by hand: Oatcake Cream, a soft speckled white with a toasted rim; Holly Berry Red, the red of the berries along the lanes in December; Derwent Blue, deep and glossy like the river down in the valley; and Primrose Yellow, the colour of the banks along her lane in April. Every glaze moves a little in the kiln, so no two bowls come out exactly alike.

The notes that came back to the market table

Sheila keeps the cards people send her in a biscuit tin on the windowsill of the studio. She fishes one out from August and reads it out loud.

“That one stays at the top of the tin,” Sheila says. “I don’t make bowls for a shelf. I make them for somebody’s breakfast.”

What’s left after the October firing

The market closed on the last Saturday of October. Sheila loaded the kiln one last time at the start of that month, for the autumn crowds and the Christmas shoppers, and by the time it had cooled she already knew it would be her last.

Most afternoons now go to packing. Each bowl comes down off the shelf, gets lifted once by its handle and is wrapped in brown paper. On the days he’s there, Alfie helps, mostly with the tape. On the wall above the wedging table hangs a calendar from the farm shop with 30 November circled in red.

What’s left comes to about 260 bowls, and they are the last ones. For two years Sheila’s hands have been swelling in the mornings: arthritis in both hands, in exactly the knuckles that do the work of centring the clay, pulling up the walls and pressing on a handle. In October her GP told her plainly: no more long days at the wheel and no more big firings.

So she put one flat price on what’s left: £55 a bowl, down from the £95 they sold for at the market. “I’m not trying to get rich off the last ones,” she says. “I’d like them under people’s Christmas trees. Half the people at my stall were buying them for their kids and grandkids anyway.”

Claire is the one who put them online. “Mum makes the bowls,” she says. “I pack the boxes, answer the emails and keep Alfie away from the bubble wrap.”

She is selling what’s left until 30 November, or until the last bowl is gone, whichever comes first.

What customers say

Where to get one of Sheila’s bowls

The bowls are only sold through Sheila’s own small shop. It is the one place to get the real ones from her October firing.

On sale until 30 November, while the October firing lasts

“This was my last big one,” Sheila says. “My hands won’t give me another.” On 30 November, or sooner if the last bowl is gone, the shop closes.

Payment and delivery: the shop takes all major cards, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay. Every bowl is wrapped by hand and dispatched within 1 to 2 working days, and every order comes with Sheila’s 90-day money-back guarantee.

Alfie still comes through her gate after school four afternoons a week, and the crunch bowl is waiting for him on the counter. “He tells his whole class his gran invented crunchy cereal,” Sheila says. “I’ve stopped correcting him.”

DISCLOSURE: The owner of this site has a material connection to the products shown on this page. Please review the full return policy before ordering. Testimonials reflect individual experiences and results may vary. Images are for illustration; because each piece is made and glazed by hand, the final product may vary slightly.

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