Advertorial · 2 days ago · By Harriet Coyle

“The arthritis won. These are my last ones.” Why a 76-year-old potter is selling her hand-made egg holders for the first and last time online

For 37 years Sybil Gooderham ran a little pottery shop in Framlingham. Then she got tired of the soggy egg boxes her husband stacked on her kitchen worktop, and she sat down with a lump of clay one more time. This autumn her hands told her it was time to stop, and 238 egg holders are all that’s left.

Every morning a little after seven, the back door of the Gooderhams’ farmhouse bangs twice. Once when Denis goes out to the hen house, and once when he comes back in. In between, nine hens get fed, the water gets changed, and the eggs get collected the way Denis has collected them for 42 years: in his flat cap.

He sets the cap down on the kitchen worktop like a bowl, and these days he takes the eggs out one at a time and puts them in a pale blue ceramic tray with six cups, a twisted handle at each end and little white daisies painted all over it. Brown ones, a cream one, one that is almost pink. Each egg goes into its own cup. Sybil made the tray for him.

Sybil is 76. She made the first tray in 2024, “for Denis, and a little bit for me.” Since then it has become the thing people in this corner of Suffolk ask her about at church, at the post office and at the honesty box by the farm gate.

This autumn the arthritis in her hands and a worn-out right shoulder made the decision for her. The kiln is promised to the secondary school. What came out of the last firing in October is all that’s left: 238 trays.

Nine hens, one cap and a stack of old egg boxes

Denis keeps nine hens behind the old cart lodge, each one named after a woman from Sybil’s old Tuesday pottery evenings. “The real Babs thinks it’s an honour,” Sybil says. “The real Doreen hasn’t spoken to me since 2019.”

Nine hens lay a lot of eggs. And for 42 years those eggs ended up in old cardboard egg boxes from the supermarket, reused until they fell apart. Denis would fish one out of the recycling, fill it and set it on the worktop next to the others. “Some weeks there were five of them by the kettle,” Sybil says. “Grey, soft, stained. You couldn’t even see what was inside.”

The boxes went damp and picked up every smell from the cooker, and nobody knew which eggs were from Monday and which from Friday. “All my life I kept a nice kitchen,” she says. “And in the middle of it, a pile of soggy cardboard.” What finally changed it was something she had not touched in eight years.

Thirty-seven years of pottery evenings in Framlingham

If you grew up in a market town in the 1970s or ’80s, you may well remember a shop like hers. Sybil opened The Pottery Corner just off Market Hill in Framlingham in 1979, the year she turned 29: shelves of unpainted greenware, a wall of plaster moulds, two kilns in the back, and long tables where women from a dozen villages painted Christmas trees and biscuit barrels on Tuesday and Thursday evenings.

“Every mother for miles had something from my shop on her mantelpiece,” she says. She taught them to paint, and she did the part nobody saw: wedging the clay, shaping the special orders by hand and firing the kilns so that nothing cracked.

She closed the shop in 2016, when the last of her Tuesday-evening ladies stopped driving after dark. Her tools and the last bags of clay went into the cart lodge behind the farmhouse. So did the kiln, a 1979 model Denis wired in himself. For eight years, nobody opened it.

Then, in the spring of 2024, on a morning when Denis tipped the eggs into a box so worn that the lid came off in his hand, Sybil walked out to the cart lodge, lifted the lid of the old kiln and found it still worked. “I thought, that man deserves a proper place for his eggs,” she says. “And so do I.”

One tray, six seats

She shaped the first one at her kitchen table: six cups in two rows of three, each deep enough that an egg stands in it and can’t tip over. It took her three tries before every egg sat still.

Every tray is still made that way, one at a time. She rolls out a thick slab of clay, presses the six cups in with her thumbs and a smooth wooden egg she has kept since the shop days, and pinches the wavy rim into shape with her fingers. Then come the handles. She rolls two thin coils of clay and twists them together like a stick of barley sugar, one handle for each end. “My mother had a barley-twist table,” she says. “I always loved those legs.”

After the first firing she paints the daisies by hand with the same fine brush she used at the shop. Twelve strokes for the petals, one dot of yellow in the middle, about twenty daisies to a tray. Daisies were her mother’s favourite flower.

The red dots and the thin red line round the rim were Denis’s idea. “He said it needed something red,” Sybil says. “Like a pillar box.” Then the glaze goes on, and the tray goes back into the kiln for a second firing.

Because every tray is shaped and painted by hand, no two come out quite alike. “If you want them all the same,” she says, “buy plastic.”

How a tray ended up at the farm gate

The Gooderhams have sold eggs from a little wooden honesty box by their farm gate for as long as anyone can remember: a cool box, a cash tin and an honour system that has always worked, Denis says, “apart from one fox.”

The summer after she made the first tray, Sybil set one in the honesty box, filled with eggs, just to show it off. By Saturday three people had left notes in the cash tin asking where they could get one. By August there was a waiting list on the back of a feed merchant’s receipt.

So she made a second colour. Then she dug out an old strawberry dish from the shop days, her best seller in 1986, and shaped a six-egg tray after it, modelling every strawberry, leaf and little flower by hand. The sunny yellow one came last. At the church Christmas fair last year, every tray she brought was gone by eleven in the morning.

Why eggs need a better place than the box

There are cheap egg trays online, and Sybil has seen them. “Most of them are flat,” she says. “Little dents, not cups. The egg sits on top and rolls out the first time somebody knocks the worktop.” Her cups are deep enough that the egg sits in them.

Denis’s eggs now go straight from his cap into the cups on the worktop. Her daughter Claire in Norwich keeps her tray on a shelf in the fridge instead of a soggy box. “Six eggs, six seats,” Sybil says. “You can see at a glance how many you’ve got left.”

And then there is baking. Every sponge recipe in her mother’s old tin says “eggs at room temperature,” and almost nobody remembers. “Set six eggs in the tray when you put the oven on,” Sybil says. “By the time your butter is soft, they’re ready.”

At breakfast, boiled eggs stand up on their own. At Easter, the painted ones finally have somewhere to sit. And when people come round, Claire fills a tray with olives, cherry tomatoes and little pots of dip.

Four trays, and then the kiln goes cold

The trays come in four versions. Duck Egg Blue is the first one Sybil made, “the colour of a duck egg, which seemed only fair.” Rhubarb Pink is a warm rose with white daisies, named after the rhubarb patch behind the old dairy. And Strawberry Patch is the white tray modelled on her old shop’s best-selling strawberry dish. Sunflower Yellow is the newest, for the sunflowers Denis grows against the cart lodge every summer.

For a year now, Sybil’s hands have been telling her something. The arthritis started in her thumbs, then came the right shoulder, worn out by forty years of wedging heavy clay and lifting full kiln shelves. Some mornings she can’t close her fingers round the brush until she has held them under warm water.

In September her GP in Woodbridge said what Denis and Claire had been saying for months: no more wedging clay, no more hours bent over a brush. “When it takes me a whole morning to paint one tray,” Sybil says, “it’s time.” The kiln goes to the art department at the secondary school, and her tools go with it.

So in October she fired the kiln one last time: every tray she had shaped and painted since January, load after load for four weeks, with Denis carrying the trays and the kiln shelves for her. What came out is what’s left: 238 trays. “When they’re gone, they’re gone,” she says. “Denis says if I buy another kiln, he’s moving in with the hens.”

Why she’s letting them go at a special price

At the church Christmas fair the trays went for £89, and people still bought two. Sybil could ask the same online. She doesn’t want to. “I can’t make any more,” she says. “And I don’t want the last ones sitting in boxes in the cart lodge all winter while people’s eggs sit in soggy egg boxes. They’re made to be used.”

So she set one price for everything that’s left: £45 a tray, down from the £89 they went for at the fair. The special price runs until 30 November 2026. After that, Tilly keeps the shop open until the last tray is gone.

Her granddaughter Tilly, 23, set up a little online shop for her this autumn. “Gran shapes, paints and packs,” Tilly says. “I do the computer bit and take the boxes to the post office.”

What people say about Sybil’s trays

The present nobody else will bring

Half the trays at the fair went as presents. “For the daughter with the chickens, the neighbour who bakes, the sister who has everything,” Sybil says. “Nobody has one of these.”

The buyers surprised her: young couples with their first back-garden hens, grandmothers who remember an egg dish on their own grandmother’s dresser, and a man from Norfolk who ordered all four and wrote that his late wife “would have painted them herself if she’d known how.” Sybil kept that note.

More notes from the cash tin

Where to get one

The trays are only available through Sybil’s own little shop, the one Tilly set up this autumn.

The shop takes all major cards, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay. Every tray is wrapped by hand at the farmhouse kitchen table and dispatched within 1 to 2 working days, with Sybil’s 90-day money-back guarantee.

“When I put the brush down for good, the trays stay in other people’s kitchens,” she says. “That’s where I want them. Not in a box. On the worktop, with eggs in them.”

Disclosure: The owner of this site has a material connection to the products shown on this page. Testimonials reflect individual experiences. Images are for illustration; because each tray is shaped and painted by hand, the final product may vary slightly.