When you leave the wheel or the hand-building bench, your pot is really just getting started. Between that first form and the finished piece you take home, it goes through several weeks of careful, patient work — most of it happening quietly on our shelves and in our kiln. Here's what actually happens along the way.
1. Trimming and turning
The day after your pot is made, it reaches what potters call the leather-hard stage — firm enough to handle, but still slightly damp. This is when we trim and turn it, refining the base and cleaning up the form. It's a small step, but it's where a pot goes from "just thrown" to properly finished in shape.
2. The long dry
From there, your pot needs to sit and dry out completely — what we call bone dry. This isn't a step we can rush. Any moisture still trapped in the clay will turn to steam in the kiln, and steam trying to escape trapped clay is a recipe for a cracked or even exploded pot. In summer this might take a few days. In winter, with the studio cooler and damper, it can take weeks.
3. The first firing (bisque)
Once fully dry, your pot goes into the kiln for its first firing — known as the bisque firing. This is where raw, fragile clay is transformed into a hard, porous ceramic material for the first time.
The great thing about bisque firing is that work can be stacked so we can really pack the kiln at this stage. Still, there are lots of things that we need to look out for when we load, so pieces don't explode or get distorted when the heat rises.
We always start our bisque firing with a 2 hour preheat to 80°C so we are doubly sure that all of the pieces are completely dry before the temperature starts to rise. For our stoneware clay, the kiln needs to reach Cone 04. Cone numbers don't measure temperature directly — they measure something called heatwork, a combination of temperature and time. In our kiln, Cone 04 correlates to roughly 1060°C. Because we need to bring the temperature up slowly at this early stage, a bisque firing can take upwards of 15 hours.
To know exactly when we've hit the right heatwork, we place witness cones inside the kiln and check on them through small peep holes in the kiln's side. When the Cone 04 witness cone has reached the correct heatwork, it bends so that the tip is just hovering above the kiln shelf — our signal that the firing is done.
Even once the firing itself is finished, the kiln can't be opened straight away. It has to cool down naturally, so from loading to unloading, the whole process takes around 24 hours.
4. Glazing
After the bisque firing, your pot comes out hard but still porous — exactly the state we need it in for glazing. We dip or brush on glaze, let it dry completely, and prepare it for its final trip into the kiln.
5. The second firing (glaze)
Unlike the bisque run, we can't stack work during this firing. If two pieces touch even a little bit, they will fuse together. We have to play a lot of kiln Jinga to maximize each run. In general, we have to do three glaze firings for every bisque firing. Glazes also gives off toxic fumes during firing, so our glaze runs have to fire when no one is in the studio. Just a couple of reasons why this final step can become a bottleneck in the overall process.
The glaze firing runs significantly hotter than the bisque firing, though we don't have to ramp up slowly so it is quicker overall — around 9 hours. Our glazes are formulated for Cone 6, which works out to around 1220°C in our kiln. Just as before, we rely on witness cones to make sure the kiln reaches exactly the right heatwork — no more, no less — so your glaze comes out as intended.
And just as with the bisque firing, the kiln then needs to cool down naturally before we can open it, so from loading to unloading it's roughly 18 hours in total.
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And that's it: from wet clay to finished piece, with a fair bit of trimming, waiting, and precise heat along the way. The next time you pick up a mug or a bowl from us, you'll know exactly what it took to get there!