Pottery Blog - Making Handmade Mugs & Tableware

I’ve been doing some glaze testing to try and create a glaze I can see in my head. It’s a light blue grey matt glaze with darker speckles. I thought I would investigate the difference glaze opacifiers have at the same time. The starting point is the base glazes I have been developing recently. Having tested various clays available, I wasn’t happy with the porosity of them when fired to cone 6, so I’ve recently started firing to cone 8. I use software at glaze simulator.com to develop glazes and also insight live which can be accessed by group membership...

I’ve decided to try and eliminate bisque firing by raw glazing pottery. Most potters nowadays do a bisque firing, which partially bakes the pottery so it can no longer return to mud. This makes glazing easier, before a second glaze firing takes place. I’ve read about single firing before and it seems fraught with difficulty. It involves applying a water based glaze to semi or fully dried clay which will immediately want to dissolve. Furthermore, the coating of glaze inhibits the release of water and impurities from the clay during firing which increases the likelihood of explosions and kiln damage....

This post has nothing to do with pottery. If you are looking how to get your blog posts organised nicely into categories on Shopify, and add some meta data to the categories then read on. Moving blog from Wordpress to Shopify I have been writing a blog using Wordpress for the last few years, and selling my pottery on Etsy. I've recently decided to move my product sales and blog onto the same platform, and I chose Shopify. I had heard Shopify kinda sucked for blogging. There are a few nifty ways to use Wordpress in a subdomain or subfolder...

I had a very unhappy kiln opening a few weeks ago with glaze dimples and pin holes all over my bigger pieces. I’ve had the problem on a smaller scale before, but nothing to this extent. It’s quite soul destroying finding a load of work that needs to be binned. I sulked for a couple of days, then with gritty determination I vowed to find a solution! Glaze pin holes and dimples – how to solve it? Initially, as a glaze defect I began pointing fingers at the glaze. The pieces in question have been glazed in two different layered...

Note: This post was written when I produced pots under the Woodseats Pottery name. My name is Tom Humphries, I’m the founder of Woodseats Pottery where I make all kinds of stoneware pots. I’ve always been interested in clay, my first encounter was at Junior school where we all made clay ornaments one day. Even then I was fascinated by the texture, and how a muddy substance would firm up into a hard object. Around thirty years later my wife was taking evening classes in pottery and I decided to buy her a pottery wheel for her birthday. After she...