what does it take to make a piece of pottery from start to finish?
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So. Many. Effing. Steps.
It takes a lot of time, a lot of skill, a lot of patience, and a lot of perfectly timed steps to make just one piece of pottery. As I’ve ventured further into my pottery journey, I’ve realized not many people are aware of the process of making pottery, and I will do my best to very quickly summarize it for you.
In short, you wedge, throw, trim, handle, dry, fire, glaze, and fire again.
This process takes on average about six to eight weeks.
While some pieces I make go through the typical two-firing process, some pieces require up to four firings, additional materials, extra time, and special skills.
This description of the pottery process is based off of what it takes to make a mug.
We begin our pottery process by wedging a piece of clay into a ball, and then throwing it on a wheel into a basic mug form. To throw, you center the clay with plenty of water, and use your hands to mold and shape the clay into the form you want. Once you’ve thrown your basic mug body, you cut it off the wheel with a wire and let it rest on a shelf for a day or two under a plastic sheet until it is “leather hard.” At the leather hard stage, you trim the bottom of the mug to be nice and smooth and symmetrical. I also stamp the bottom of the mug with my madhouse ceramics logo at this point, and then I add a handle by scoring the sides of the mug, dabbing some water on the roughed-up spots, and attaching the handle. Without scoring and water, the handle will crack and pop right off the mug body. Now, we let the mug dry for about a week until it is “bone dry.” It is very important to let pieces dry thoroughly - any bit of moisture left in the clay will cause it to explode in the kiln. It’s also important to let the clay dry slowly to reduce warping and cracks.
Once we have completely dry clay pieces, we can begin firing them in the kiln! The first firing is called a “bisque” firing, just like lobster bisque. This firing reaches just over 1,800 F, and takes about a day to reach temperature and cool down again. Once the kiln is cooled down to a temperature safe enough to handle with your bare hands, we glaze our pottery. I wax the bottoms of my pieces to make sure the glaze has a nice crisp line at the bottom, and either dip the pottery in a huge bucket of glaze, or hand-paint glaze onto the pottery with a paintbrush. Then, our pottery undergoes another firing, this time to over 2,100 F. This also takes about a day. When this firing cools, opening up the kiln and seeing all your fully glazed and fired pieces is like Christmas morning! At this juncture, you have fully functional, fully food-safe, ready-to-use pottery. Many potters stop and this point, and I stop at this point for some of my pieces as well, but I also choose to add overglaze decals and/or gold luster to some of my pieces, which takes additional steps and firings (continued below).
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An overglaze decal is essentially an image printed on a special printer that you apply to ceramics and fire it a third time to make the decal adhere. To apply decals, you soak them in warm water for a few seconds, peel them from their backing, apply them to your pottery, and squeegee all the water out from under it so it’s suctioned to the mug. Then, it gets fired to about 1,600 F. Some of my pieces, like the Red Bank Ditch Dweller mugs, are fully complete after this firing, but some pieces, like the goddess mugs (pictured above) need to have gold added.
The gold that I add is real gold finely ground in a solution so it can be painted on and fired a fourth time. Before you paint on any gold, there cannot be a single speck of dust or oil from your greasy lil fingers on the pottery at all, so you must wipe them down with rubbing alcohol. Then, paint the gold luster wherever your heart desires, fire the mug again, this time to a meek 1,200 F, and your piece is finally finished!! Because the gold is real gold, pieces with gold are not microwave safe and should be hand-washed as often as possible.
watch the great pottery throw down to see a sped-up version of this process
or some videos on tiktok or something