Metal Spinning : It’s a family business

Since 11 years we work with a wonderful family in East London. From father to son the craft of spinning flat sheets of semi-precious metals into three dimensional shapes is passed on.
Colin has 30+ years of experience in his craft, and is not just able to spin the sheets into perfect bowls, but also freehand forms the fine lip we require to locate the bowl on the glass shapes.

The process always begins from a sheet of solid copper, brass, aluminium or corten steel. These sheets are cut into circles , which go on a lathe on which they are spun. While spinning at high speed, the sheet is pushed over a given shape by hand, requiring a strong and sensitive touch to stretch and shape the metal without causing deformation .

Crafting and stretching a metal sheet over a form requires years of experience and dedication

Often the metal sheet needs to annealed (heated up) to change its physical properties, making it softer to shape. The shaping process reverses this annealing process, as the material hardens through the effort of shaping again.

After the sheets are spun into the bowl shape, we use a reverse mould to hold the pieces while the lip is freehand- shaped by Colin. This is a crucial but unique step to a utopia bowl!

After this, the bowls are attached to the lathe again and linished. This is the process of sanding the surface with fine paper to clean it up and create a less shiny surface, thus making more contrast to our glass.
Below you can see some of these steps in our slideshow.