On the last Friday of August we cleared the long bench, oiled the vices, and counted what was ready. The release we date 09.2020 goes out in four crates. Small on paper. In the workshop it cost most of a summer, and it left its marks on us: brass dust under the nails, a pale burn on one forearm from a shade that came out of the oven a beat too quickly.

Almost everything in this release is revision rather than invention, which is the slower kind of work and the harder kind to photograph. A neck bent two degrees further so the light lands on a table instead of a wall. A base weighted until it stops ringing when you tap it with a knuckle. A seam ground back, then ground again, then left alone — because the third pass had begun to erase the evidence that a person made the thing at all.

Three finishes, relearned

We had made all three before. We had to learn them again this year, because the material arrives in a different mood every season and the hand has to follow it. Here is what left the bench:

• Mouth-blown amber glass. Every shade is a different thickness, so every shade dims the filament differently; we pair glass and bulb by eye at the bench and write the pairing inside the collar.
• Unlacquered brass. Left raw on purpose. It darkens exactly where it is touched, so after a year the lamp carries a record of the hands that switch it on.
• Waxed linen cord. Braided here, waxed here, softening with the first weeks of heat. It should look like string, not like cable.
• Sand-cast iron feet. We kept the pitting from the mould. A smooth base would have meant four more hours of grinding and one less honest surface.

When we call a piece finished

There was an argument in the second week of July, about a shade we had corrected eleven times. The corrections were all defensible. Together they had started to look like fear. We went back to the fifth version, kept two of the later ones, and shipped it. A release date is useful for exactly this reason: it forces the hand to stop. Somewhere along the way, the piece ceased to show us where we had interfered with it.

Four crates go out in September. The bench is already being swept for the next one. We begin again.