Along the landing next door to Lucy’s bedroom was a small rectangular room which Liz called her pottery ‘studio’, though its popular name was the Dragons’ Den. At the window end was a sturdy wooden bench, where Liz kept her paintbrushes and potters’ turntable and all the things she needed for making dragons. The two longer walls were taken up with shelving racks, upon which stood a large number of completed dragons. Most of these were in storage, waiting to be sold on the market in Scrubbley, though some were treasured ornaments and some…well, some, like Gruffen, could spread their wings and move around if they wanted to. In appearance, most of the Pennykettle dragons looked the same. Their glaze was a mid to bottle-green colour, with occasional streaks of blue or turquoise. And they all had spiky wings and curving tails and oval-shaped eyes and trumpet-like noses. Liz enjoyed sculpting them in different poses. She had dancing dragons, sporting dragons, baby dragons breaking out of their eggs – dragons in all sorts of appealing stances.
