The Craftsman’s Review ✦

Stories of Australian Craft & Kitchen

Advertorial · 2 days ago · By Kirsten Lowe

“My shoulder’s done after 26 years. These are the last ones I’ll ever make.” Why a 72-year-old Queensland potter is selling her last dip bowls at a special price

Soggy chips, gravy on the tablecloth, a ramekin on its side: for 51 years that was tea at the Dowling table. Then Kaylene made her husband a bowl with the dip cup built right on. About 270 are left, on sale until the end of November.

The jacarandas are out along the streets of Toowoomba and the Saturday markets are busier than they have been all year. Kaylene Dowling won’t be at them. Her trestle table is leaning against the wall of the old tin shed at the back of her block, the one her husband built for his tools in 1979. Kaylene took it over in 2000 with a second-hand wheel, and it has held a potter’s wheel, a small electric kiln and a great many shelves ever since.

She takes a bowl off the nearest shelf. It is about the size of a cereal bowl, cream-coloured, with a toasted brown rim and a small round cup sitting right up on the edge, joined to the bowl like a sidecar. She tips a serve of hot chips into the bowl, spoons gravy into the little cup and slides it across the workbench.

Then she tilts the whole thing, a good deal further than anybody would tilt a plate. The chips shift. The gravy stays in its cup. Not a drop of it gets anywhere near a chip.

“People always laugh at the little cup. Then they eat out of it once, and they won’t give it back.”

She is 72, and she has been making pots out in that shed for 26 years. Mugs, pie dishes, spoon rests, butter dishes, whatever the Saturday markets would take. Her three kids had left home by the time she started, and she still calls it her hobby.

“I never made a thing anybody needed,” she says. “Pretty mugs, mostly. Then I made one bowl for Col, and now that’s all anybody wants to talk about.”

The bowls started as one bowl, made for one man. Two market seasons later they are the thing people stop her about at Woolies. And because her shoulder won’t give her another big firing, this is the first and only time they’ve been sold anywhere but that trestle table.

Fifty-one years married to a man who won’t let his food touch

Col Dowling is 75. He worked on the railway out of Toowoomba for 38 years, and in 51 years of marriage he has never let one thing on his plate touch another. Not the sauce and the chips. Not the peas and the fish. Not the gravy and anything at all. He eats one thing, then the next, and he dips every bite by hand.

“Some blokes are fussy about their ute,” Kaylene says. “Col’s fussy about his plate. Gravy gets to a chip before he does, and that chip is ruined. He won’t touch it.”

Chip shops have stacks of little sauce tubs for people like Col. Most kitchens at home don’t. So at home the tomato sauce goes in a puddle on the edge of the plate, and the puddle goes wherever the plate tilts: into the chips, under the peas, into the beans. Or it goes into a ramekin that slides about on the plate and tips over the first time somebody knocks it.

Kaylene has tried every fix there is. Divided plates, saucers, the little glass dishes out of her mother’s sideboard. None of them lasted a week at the Dowling table.

So for half a century Kaylene put his tea on a plate with an egg cup of gravy beside it. And for half a century the egg cup ended up on its side on the tablecloth, or in his lap in front of the footy on a Saturday arvo.

“I’ve washed that man’s gravy out of more shirts than I can count. And I had never once thought to make him a bowl.”

Which is a funny thing to hear from a woman who had been making bowls in the shed for a quarter of a century. She learnt in a Thursday-morning class at a community arts centre in town, bought a second-hand wheel from a woman in Crows Nest, and Col wired the kiln into the shed himself. Thousands of mugs and pie dishes since then. Not once a bowl for the man across the tea table.

The bowl came on a slow afternoon in March last year. Col came in from the verandah with gravy on his sleeve again, and Kaylene went out to the shed and threw a small, deep bowl. Then she threw a little cup, cut it to fit and set it right up on the rim, so the floor of the cup sat up above the food. Sauce can’t run uphill.

The first nine cracked. The cup and the bowl dried at different speeds, and in the kiln the seam split open every time. On the tenth she joined the two while both were still leather-hard, scored them deep on both sides, and worked a thin coil of clay into the seam with her thumb. That one came out of the kiln in one piece.

Col named it the first night. He sat down to fish and chips with the chips in the bowl and the gravy in the cup, looked at it for a long while and said, “Well, would you look at that. It’s got a sidecar.” He has not eaten a chip off a plate since.

Kaylene took four of them to the Saturday markets in April, mostly to make Col laugh. A woman from Gatton bought all four before ten o’clock. By June there was a waiting list on the back of a chip-shop receipt.

After that it was word of mouth. Visitors took them home to Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne and wrote asking for more, and Kaylene started posting a few parcels a week. Until now there was no website and no shop, just a trestle table at the markets and a pile of letters on top of the bread bin.

What makes Kaylene’s bowl different

Most of us handle dip the same way. A blob of tomato sauce on the plate, a tub of French onion dip set down next to the chips, a ramekin if we’re feeling fancy. “And every one of those moves,” Kaylene says. “The blob runs, the tub gets knocked, the ramekin slides off the plate. Then you’re wiping the table instead of eating.”

Divided plates aren’t much better. “The little wall is about half a centimetre high,” she says. “Tip it and the sauce goes straight over.”

Her bowl takes Col’s rule and builds it into the dish. The cup is part of the bowl, so it can’t slide, tip or get lost in the washing-up. It sits up on the rim, so the dip stays above the food instead of running down into it. And it’s right where your hand already is. You pick up a chip, a carrot stick or a chicken tender, dip it, eat it. Nothing touches unless you want it to.

“I didn’t invent the sauce tub,” she says, before anybody can ask. “Every chippy in Australia has a stack of them. All I did was stick one on the bowl so it stays put.”

That is also why so many of the cheap copies online miss the point, she says. “If the cup sits low, down level with the food, the sauce creeps out the second you tip it. And if the seam is just glued, it comes off in the dishwasher.” She joins every cup by hand and checks every seam on every bowl before it goes on the shelf. Start to finish, every bowl takes her about four hours at the bench: throwing, trimming, joining the cup and glazing, before it goes into the kiln twice.

She is just as blunt about what it isn’t. The bowl is about 12 centimetres across, 15 with the cup, and holds about 400 millilitres. It is one person’s snack or one person’s side. “It’s not a party platter,” she says. “You want chips and dip for twelve, get a big bowl. This is for you, on a Tuesday, with the telly on.”

And she won’t pretend it makes anybody eat better. “It’ll hold carrot sticks and hummus just as well as nuggets and tomato sauce,” she says. “Pretzels and cheese dip, dumplings and soy sauce, strawberries and a bit of chocolate. What goes in it is your business. I just keep it from running together.”

Some of them came back to the market just to say thank you

Kaylene keeps the notes people have left her in an old biscuit tin on the kitchen windowsill. She pulls one out from August and reads it out loud.

“That one’s stuck up in the shed,” Kaylene says. “That’s who they’re for. Not for a shelf. For somebody’s tea.”

The bowls come in one glaze, the one Kaylene settled on after two dozen test tiles: Downs Cream, a soft speckled cream that thins out over the edge and fires to a toasted brown, like the crust on a good scone. The rings from the wheel stay on the outside so the bowl doesn’t slip in a buttery hand. Because the glaze runs a little differently on every rim, no two bowls look quite the same.

This is what’s left from the last big firing

In July Kaylene’s GP told her what her right shoulder had been telling her all winter. After this year, no more long days at the wheel. Centring clay is hard, steady work for the shoulder, and she had been doing it for 26 years, the last ten of them at an age when most people take up the crossword.

So she made it count with one last big run. She threw through most of August, fired the kiln full in September, and when she packed up her stall for good in October the shelves were still lined with bowls. Most afternoons now go to packing. Every bowl comes down off the shelf, gets one more look at the seam and is wrapped in paper.

What’s left comes to about 270 bowls. Kaylene will still throw a few mugs for the grandkids at Christmas. But there won’t be another firing like this one.

“I could keep them,” she says. “But then they sit in a shed while people eat tomato sauce off the edge of a plate. The cricket’s on, Christmas is coming. That’s when people want a nibble.”

So she set one flat price for what’s left: A$89 a bowl, down from the A$139 they sold for on the stall. “I’m not doing this to get rich,” she says. “Half the people at that stall bought them for somebody else. I’d like them under a few trees this year.”

Her granddaughter Tayla, 22, is the one who put them online. “Nan makes the bowls,” she says. “I just answer the emails.”

Kaylene won’t do another firing like this one. When the last bowls from September are gone, that’s it.

What customers say

Where to get one of Kaylene’s bowls

The bowls are only sold through Kaylene’s own shop. It is the one place to get the real ones from this September’s firing.

On sale until 30 November, and after that only while the last bowls last

“This was my last big one,” Kaylene says. “My shoulder made that decision for me.” Tayla is taking orders at A$89 until 30 November. After that, the shop stays open only as long as there are bowls left on the shelves.

Payment and shipping: the shop takes all major cards, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay. Every bowl is wrapped by hand and dispatched within 1 to 2 business days, and every order comes with Kaylene’s 90-day money-back guarantee.

Col still dips every chip by hand, one at a time. “He tells everyone at the bowls club that the bowls were his idea,” Kaylene says. “I let him. He did keep spilling the sauce.”

DISCLOSURE: The owner of this site has a material connection to the products shown on this page. Please review the full returns policy before ordering. Testimonials reflect individual experiences and results may vary. Images are for illustration; because each piece is thrown and glazed by hand, the final product may vary slightly in colour and shape.

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