For seven weeks our workshop has been quiet. The benches stood empty, the kiln went cold, and we learned to answer letters from a kitchen table. On the twenty-eighth of April we can finally write the sentence we have been waiting to write: we are ready to start again. The doors open on the fourth of May.

The weeks we spent preparing

Turning the key will be the smallest part of it. Since the middle of April a handful of us have been going in one at a time, an hour each, to redraw the way the room moves. We measured the aisles between the glass station and the metal shop. We set the benches further apart so that one pair of hands now works where two used to. We cleaned, we ventilated, we measured again.

• One maker per station, benches spaced wider than before.
• Staggered mornings, so the kiln crew and the finishing crew never share the same hour.
• Deliveries left at the threshold and unpacked the following day.

What we will do first

There is a small ritual here, older than most of the people who keep it. Before a piece leaves the bench, whoever finished it switches the lamp on and stands back for a moment, hands still grey with metal dust, to see what the light does to the wall. On the first morning back, that will be the very first thing we do. The piece waiting for it is a wall light begun in February, its reflector hammered but never closed out. It has sat in the dark since the afternoon we left.

I kept thinking about that lamp at home. The shape of it I could draw from memory. What I missed was the sound the room makes when it is switched on, everything else going quieter around it.

The work left unfinished in March will be finished now, in the order it was begun, and the orders placed during the closed weeks are already back in the queue. If you have been waiting on something from us, we will write to you personally before the parcel does, with a date you can hold us to.

Seven weeks taught us how much of this craft is simply presence. A hand near the glass. An eye on the wall. A room full of small decisions, taken slowly. We are ready to start again. The light never went anywhere. It was waiting for us.