I collect places. I tend things, I tell stories.

A woman with long hair wearing a wide-brimmed hat, a sleeveless top, and jeans standing outdoors in a natural setting with tall grasses and trees.

Abstract brown and black illustration of a bottle, glasses, a plate, and a firework.

I’ve always been hopelessly nostalgic. I love stories. I love old things, weathered things, places that have been changed by water, wind, sunlight, and time.

I collect places — not because I want to own them, but because I want to remember how they made me feel.

Sometimes with a camera.

Sometimes with a notebook.

Sometimes with a pocket full of rocks.

And sometimes with clay.

I’m Allison, the maker behind Born on Sunset.

My 92 year-old garage studio sits on an alley, in Venice, California, where you’ll usually find me covered in clay, singing far too loudly, and happily interrupted by the life happening around me. There are kids who need me, dogs underfoot, plants begging for water, dinner to start and almost always someone calling “Mom…?”

Long before I ever touched clay, I was collecting places.

I just didn’t have a name for it yet.

The name Born on Sunset isn’t just a metaphor. It comes from the little pottery studio on Sunset Avenue in Venice where a friend asked me to take a class.

By then, I’d already left my career producing reality television. After becoming a mom, my priorities had quietly shifted and I was simply looking for a few hours each week that belonged only to me —a creative outlet, a reason to leave the house. I thought I was signing up for a hobby.

Clay had other plans.

It started with a wheel sitting on a mound of mulch beneath our carport. Before long clay had claimed the entire space. Eventually, it claimed our old detached garage too.

Still imperfect, but fully mine.

Illustration of a two-part taco shell with shredded cheese inside.

A woman and a young girl are happily engaged in pottery making outdoors, with a small blue toy jeep in the background and surrounded by trees.