A Coburg woman who began throwing pots as a weekend hobby eighteen months ago, and found it reliably calming, has since turned the hobby into a registered small business, and no longer finds it calming, a development she describes as "obviously the exact thing everyone warned me about, which I ignored."

The hobby began as a single Saturday morning class, booked on a whim after what she called "a particularly bad week," and quickly became a fixture of her weekend, two unhurried hours at the wheel with no outcome attached beyond whatever shape the clay happened to take.

"I made the worst little bowls," she said. "Genuinely misshapen. I loved every one of them. There was no pressure, because nobody was going to buy a wonky bowl except possibly my mother."

Encouraged by friends who began requesting pieces as gifts, she registered an ABN, opened an online store, and started taking custom orders, a transition she now identifies as the point at which the bowls needed to stop being wonky.

"Once someone's paying sixty-five dollars for a bowl, it actually has to hold soup properly and sit flat on a table," she said. "Which is a completely reasonable expectation. It's just not the expectation I was working under for the first year, when I was mostly making shapes and feeling good about it."

Her Saturdays, once a single unstructured studio session, now involve glazing deadlines, packaging orders for interstate postage, and responding to custom requests for specific colourways she has to test in advance. She estimates she now spends roughly eleven hours a week on pottery-related admin, a figure she had not calculated until asked.

"I haven't made a bowl for fun in months," she said. "Every bowl I make now is for someone, by a certain date, to a certain spec. It's good work. I'm proud of it. It's just not the thing I used to do on Saturdays to feel less stressed, because it is now, itself, the stress."

Asked whether she had considered taking up a second, business-free hobby purely for enjoyment, she said she had, in fact, recently signed up for a beginner woodworking class.

"I'm very excited," she said. "I've told myself I'm absolutely not going to sell anything."