If you keep an eye out, you’ll notice pottery studios cropping up in cities and towns across Ireland. You’ll spot it in a way that makes you smile windows showing shelves of mugs and bowls, a neatly stacked kiln outside, maybe the soft sound of clay being shaped inside. These days, pottery studios are quietly becoming part of the fabric of Irish towns and cities, and they’re doing more than just teaching people how to work with clay. They’re becoming spaces where people connect, create, and belong. Ireland’s relationship with clay isn’t new. Excavations in Kilkenny revealed a medieval pottery production centre where Highhays Ware was made and traded a reminder that ceramics have been part of life here for centuries. In the 20th century, pottery businesses like Carrigaline Pottery in Cork and Arklow Pottery in Wicklow were significant local employers, shaping everyday tableware for Irish homes. And organisations like the Society of Cork Potters, founded in the 1970s, helped sustain c...
For a long time, scrapbooking lived in the same mental box as novelty scissors and dusty craft cupboards. Something your aunt did. Something you definitely didn’t post about online. And yet, here we are. Scrapbooking is back. Not ironically. Not as a throwback joke. Genuinely, creatively, joyfully back. So what changed? Scrapbooking never really disappeared. It just went quiet. When social media took over, we started documenting everything digitally. Photos lived on phones. Memories became Stories. Albums disappeared into cloud storage we rarely opened again. But something got lost along the way. Scrapbooking offers what digital memory can’t. It’s slow. It’s tactile. It’s intentional. Cutting, arranging, gluing and layering asks you to stay with a moment instead of scrolling past it. And right now, that feels radical. The aesthetic has also changed a lot. Old-school scrapbooking didn’t do itself many favours, but today’s version looks completely different. Muted colour palett...