Advertorial · 2 days ago · By Shelley Cartwright

“The arthritis won. These are my last ones.” Why a 76-year-old potter is selling her hand-made egg holders for the first and last time online

For 37 years Valda Hosking ran a little ceramics shop in Kyneton. Then she got tired of the soggy egg cartons her husband stacked on her kitchen bench, and she sat down with a lump of clay one more time. This spring her hands told her it was time to stop, and 238 egg holders are all that’s left.

Every morning a little after seven, the flyscreen door on the Hoskings’ farmhouse bangs twice. Once when Darryl goes out to the chook pen, and once when he comes back in. In between, nine hens get fed, the water gets changed, and the eggs get collected the way Darryl has collected them for 42 years: in his old work hat.

He sets the hat down on the kitchen bench like a bowl, and these days he takes the eggs out one at a time and puts them in a pale blue ceramic tray with six cups, a twisted handle at each end and little white daisies painted all over it. Brown ones, a cream one, one that is almost pink. Each egg goes into its own cup. Valda made the tray for him.

Valda is 76. She made the first tray two springs ago, “for Darryl, and a little bit for me.” Since then it has become the thing people around the Macedon Ranges ask her about at church, at the post office and at the honesty box by the front gate.

This spring the arthritis in her hands and a worn-out right shoulder made the decision for her. The kiln is promised to the secondary college. What came out of the last firing in October is all that’s left: 238 trays.

Nine chooks, one hat and a stack of old cartons

Darryl keeps nine hens behind the machinery shed, each one named after a woman from Valda’s old Wednesday ceramics nights. “The real Joy reckons it’s an honour,” Valda says. “The real Rhonda hasn’t spoken to me since 2019.”

Nine hens lay a lot of eggs. And for 42 years those eggs ended up in old cardboard cartons from the supermarket, reused until they fell apart. Darryl would fish one out of the recycling bin, fill it and set it on the bench next to the others. “Some weeks there were five of them by the kettle,” Valda says. “Grey, soft, stained. You couldn’t even see what was inside.”

The cartons went damp and picked up every smell from the stove, and nobody knew which eggs were from Monday and which from Friday. “All my life I kept a nice kitchen,” she says. “And in the middle of it, a pile of soggy cardboard.” What finally changed it was something she had not touched in eight years.

Thirty-seven years of ceramics nights in Kyneton

If you grew up in a country town in the 1970s or ’80s, you probably remember a shop like hers. Valda opened Valda’s Ceramic Corner on Mollison Street in Kyneton in 1979, the year she turned 29: shelves of unpainted greenware, a wall of plaster moulds, two kilns out the back, and long tables where women from every town between Woodend and Castlemaine painted Christmas trees and biscuit jars on Wednesday and Friday nights.

“Every mum in the district had something from my shop on her mantelpiece,” she says. She taught them to paint, and she did the part nobody saw: wedging the clay, shaping the special orders by hand and firing the kilns so that nothing cracked.

She closed the shop in 2016, when the last of her Wednesday-night ladies stopped driving after dark. Her tools and the last bags of clay went into the shed behind the house. So did the kiln, a 1979 model Darryl wired in himself. For eight years, nobody opened it.

Then, in the spring of 2024, on a morning when Darryl tipped the eggs into a carton so worn that the lid came off in his hand, Valda walked out to the shed, lifted the lid of the old kiln and found out it still worked. “I thought, that man deserves a proper place for his eggs,” she says. “And so do I.”

One tray, six seats

She shaped the first one at her kitchen table: six cups in two rows of three, each deep enough that an egg stands in it and can’t tip over. It took her three tries before every egg sat still.

Every tray is still made that way, one at a time. She rolls out a thick slab of clay, presses the six cups in with her thumbs and a smooth wooden egg she has kept since the shop days, and pinches the wavy rim into shape with her fingers. Then come the handles. She rolls two thin coils of clay and twists them together like the old barley-sugar lollies, one handle for each end. “We bought those at the Kyneton show every year,” she says. “I always loved the twist.”

After the first firing she paints the daisies by hand with the same fine brush she used at the shop. Twelve strokes for the petals, one dot of yellow in the middle, about twenty daisies to a tray. Daisies were her mother’s favourite flower.

The red dots and the thin red line around the rim were Darryl’s idea. “He said it needed something red,” Valda says. “Like his old ute.” Then the glaze goes on, and the tray goes back into the kiln for a second firing.

Because every tray is shaped and painted by hand, no two come out exactly alike. “If you want them all the same,” she says, “buy plastic.”

How a tray ended up at the front gate

The Hoskings have sold eggs from a little honesty box at their front gate for as long as anyone can remember: a cool box, a cash tin and an honour system that has always worked, Darryl says, “except for one possum.”

The summer after she made the first tray, Valda set one in the honesty box, filled with eggs, just to show it off. By Saturday three people had left notes in the cash tin asking where they could get one. By February there was a waiting list on the back of a produce-store docket.

So she made a second colour. Then she dug out an old strawberry dish from the shop days, her best seller in 1986, and shaped a six-egg tray after it, modelling every strawberry, leaf and little flower by hand. The sunny yellow one came last. At the church Christmas fete last year, every tray she brought was gone by eleven in the morning.

Why eggs need a better place than the carton

There are cheap egg trays online, and Valda has seen them. “Most of them are flat,” she says. “Little dents, not cups. The egg sits on top and rolls out the first time somebody bumps the bench.” Her cups are deep enough that the egg sits in them.

Darryl’s eggs now go straight from his hat into the cups on the bench. Her daughter Kerri in Bendigo keeps her tray on a shelf in the fridge instead of a soggy carton. “Six eggs, six seats,” Valda says. “You can see at one look how many you’ve got left.”

And then there is baking. Every recipe in her mother’s old tin, the sponge and the pavlova most of all, says “eggs at room temperature,” and almost nobody remembers. “Set six eggs in the tray when you turn the oven on,” Valda says. “By the time your butter is soft, they’re ready.”

At breakfast, boiled eggs stand up on their own. At Easter, the painted ones finally have somewhere to sit. And when people drop in, Kerri fills a tray with olives, cherry tomatoes and little pots of dip.

Four trays, and then the kiln goes cold

The trays come in four versions. Duck Egg Blue is the first one Valda made, “the colour of the eggs the ducks lay down by the dam.” Musk Pink is a warm rose with white daisies, “the colour of musk sticks, Darryl’s favourite lolly.” And Strawberry Patch is the white tray modelled on her old shop’s best-selling strawberry dish. Sunflower Yellow is the newest, for the sunflowers Darryl grows along the chook-pen fence every summer.

For a year now, Valda’s hands have been telling her something. The arthritis started in her thumbs, then came the right shoulder, worn out by forty years of wedging heavy clay and lifting full kiln shelves. Some mornings she can’t close her fingers around the brush until she has held them under warm water.

In September her GP in Kyneton said what Darryl and Kerri had been saying for months: no more wedging clay, no more hours bent over a brush. “When it takes me a whole morning to paint one tray,” Valda says, “it’s time.” The kiln goes to the art room at the secondary college, and her tools go with it.

So in October she fired the kiln one last time: every tray she had shaped and painted since January, load after load for four weeks, with Darryl carrying the trays and the kiln shelves for her. What came out is what’s left: 238 trays. “When they’re gone, they’re gone,” she says. “Darryl reckons if I buy another kiln, he’s moving in with the chooks.”

Why she’s letting them go at a special price

At the church fete the trays went for A$176, and people still bought two. Valda could ask the same online. She doesn’t want to. “I can’t make any more,” she says. “And I don’t want the last ones sitting in boxes in the shed all summer while people’s eggs sit in soggy cartons. They’re made to be used.”

So she set one price for everything that’s left: A$88 a tray, down from the A$176 they went for at the fete. The special price runs until 30 November 2026. After that, Tayla keeps the shop open until the last tray is gone.

Her granddaughter Tayla, 24, set up a little online shop for her this spring. “Nan shapes, paints and packs,” Tayla says. “I do the computer side and drop the boxes at the post office.”

What people say about Valda’s trays

The present nobody else will bring

Half the trays at the fete went as Christmas presents. “For the daughter with the chooks, the neighbour who bakes, the sister who has everything,” Valda says. “Nobody has one of these.”

The buyers surprised her: young couples with their first backyard chooks, grandmothers who remember an egg dish on their own grandmother’s dresser, and a man from Gippsland who ordered all four and wrote that his late wife “would have painted them herself if she’d known how.” Valda kept that note.

More notes from the cash tin

Where to get one

The trays are only available through Valda’s own little shop, the one Tayla set up this spring.

The shop takes all major cards, PayPal, Apple Pay and Google Pay. Every tray is wrapped by hand at the farmhouse kitchen table and dispatched within 1 to 2 business days, with Valda’s 90-day money-back guarantee.

“When I put the brush down for good, the trays stay in other people’s kitchens,” she says. “That’s where I want them. Not in a box. On the bench, with eggs in them.”

Disclosure: The owner of this site has a material connection to the products shown on this page. Testimonials reflect individual experiences. Images are for illustration; because each tray is shaped and painted by hand, the final product may vary slightly.