Interested in pottery?
Interested in pottery?
The Beginning: Preparing the Clay
Every piece starts with wedging – it's similar to kneading bread, but with clay. This crucial step removes air bubbles that can cause explosions in the kiln or weak spots in the walls of your pieces and creates a uniform consistency throughout the clay. Some people find it meditative but honestly, it is my least favorite part of the whole process.
Forming: Bringing Life to Clay
This is where the magic begins. For wheel-thrown pieces, I center the clay and slowly pull up the walls, creating vessels with gentle curves and strong forms. Hand-building allows for more sculptural pieces, but my preference is the wheel and most of my pieces are created there. The clay is soft and pliable at this stage, full of the potential to become an amazing piece or something you end up wanting to throw against the wall because you lost concentration for two seconds and ruined your pot.
Drying
Once the piece takes shape, it enters what potters call the "leather-hard" stage. This is when the clay has dried enough to hold its form to light pressure but is still soft enough to care or add appliqué elements. For my horse carvings, this is the perfect time to create intricate details using my mother's drawings as guides. This stage requires careful attention as cracks can form from rapid or uneven drying.
The First Fire: Bisque Firing
After the piece has dried completely, it's enters the first firing, called bisque firing. The kiln gradually heats to about 1800°F (982°C) over 12-14 hours, then slowly cools down. This firing transforms the clay chemically, making it hard, but after the bisque fire, the piece is still porous – perfect for accepting glaze. Once bisque firing is complete, your piece moves on to the glazing stage!
Glazing: Adding Color and Protection
Glazed pieces go through a fascinating chemical process. Glaze is essentially liquid glass that, when fired, forms a protective and (most of the time) a beautiful coloring. Some people dip glazes, some airbrush glazes, but I apply glazes by brushing, experimenting with different combinations for especially unique pieces.
The Final Fire: Glaze Firing
The second firing, typically reaching 2180°F-2350°F (1193°C-1288°C), melts the glaze to create that gorgeous, glassy finish. This firing takes another 12-15 hours plus cooling time. The colors of the unfired glazes are often wildly different than the finished products, with many blues looking red before firing, some greens looking white, and many blacks looking light grey! Getting pieces back after a glaze firing is always interesting. Sometimes like Christmas morning and sometimes like the nightmare before Christmas! For better or for worse, you never know exactly how the pieces will turn out!
Failing!
As you can see, there are many places for pieces to go disastrously wrong! Pottery is a lesson in patience, resilience, and not ever growing too attached to a piece, because of course that's always the one that ends up breaking! Unfortunately, this also means that sometimes pieces have to be re-made and will have to start from the beginning. While I try to get custom pieces done within a few weeks, sometimes disaster strikes and they're delayed by weeks.
Learning More About Pottery
If you're interested in diving deeper into the world of ceramics, butyour best bet is to find a ceramics studio that offers classes near you, but in case there isn't anything close, here are some excellent resources to teach you a little more about pottery!
Florian Gadsby is a great teacher who makes incredible work on the wheel. His instructional videos are top notch, and I always learn something every time I watch one of his videos! https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2WJhtTF0eGhQwf8g2LHcom_KrvJpH_JT
Feeling nerdy? Find out about the physics behind throwing clay! This fascinating video is one of my favorites! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xu4vLEdqtlY
Not sure about throwing? Check out if hand building is right for you! https://www.thecrucible.org/guides/ceramics/handbuilding/