How a Handmade Pottery Cup is Made from Beginning to End — Narrated Version

In this week's video, I'm going to be showing you how I make my coffee cups, all the way from a soft lump of clay to the finished fired vessel. It's a long process and it begins from clay fresh out the bag. This is a high iron stoneware clay body that's made to be reduction fired in a gas kiln. Each ball of clay here weighs about 200 grams, plus or minus 10, which makes weighing out a lot faster. That tiny bit of difference won't actually make any impact when I'm throwing. You'll barely notice 10 grams. Once the clay has been weighed out, I then wedge it like this, rolling it quickly beneath my palms and then slamming it down against the table, which pops any air bubbles that the clay might contain. Ideally, when throwing on the wheel, you want clay that's as homogenous as possible, as all it takes is one inconsistency or one air pocket to ruin the pot that you're throwing on the wheel. Once they've all been weighed out, I wrap them up with plastic and I give them a spray with water. This prevents the balls of clay from drying out too much as I throw. Even a slightly hard skin around the outside of a ball of clay can make it more troublesome to throw and centre. Next, the throwing can begin, and actually this is one of the fastest steps of this entire process. Each cup takes probably about just over a minute to throw, and their forms are simple too. They're thrown to roughly 9cm tall by 9cm wide, with a form that tapers slightly from bottom to The rubber pointer I just flicked down is my throwing gauge, which is set at 9x9, and means I have a point in space to aim for as I'm throwing, which is beyond useful for when you're repetition throwing. Once the clay has been opened up and the base has been formed, I very carefully pull the clay up from the bottom. I pinch towards the base where the clay is thickest, and I pull up in one very gradual, even motion. Then, when my fingers approach the top, I release my hands very gently, as if you let go too suddenly, it's very easy to impart a wobble into the clay. For my last pull, I switch to my fingertips, as I feel at the bottom I can really squeeze out the very last bit of clay, and thin out the walls as evenly as possible. Ideally, we want the walls to be the same thickness from top to bottom. As a vessel with an unnecessarily heavy base, this is a sign that the pot hasn't been thrown very well. I then remove this skirt of clay from around the base. And then I use a sponge on a stick, just to mop up any water that might be left inside. Then, it's time to start cleaning up the form, and removing those harsh throwing lines on the outside. I do this by offering up my metal kidney to the outside, and then I push the clay out against the metal, rather than pushing the metal into the clay. Not only does this leave you with a cleaner finish, but the chances of your metal kidney catching and snagging on the clay and destroying the pot are much lower. I will be trimming the outside of these very lightly, so I don't worry about removing all of the throwing lines, as I'll be able to do so later. I then use a chamois leather, just to smooth over the drinking lip, to make it nice when it fits into the corners of your mouth. For any kind of drinking vessel, I think you want to avoid having blocky, chunky rims, as they simply feel uncomfortable when you put your mouth to them. Then with dry hands, and a dry exterior of the pot, I gently clasp around the vessel, and lift it away. This is a process that's more easily done with clay that's slightly grogged, as it isn't so sticky, but it's also one of those processes that just takes a lot of practice. I certainly ruined a good few pots as I learned, but it's more about knowing where to position your hands, and how to apply the correct pressure, without distorting the upper sections of the walls. Then, the next day, once the pots have firmed up, and they're now approaching leather hard, I can move on to the next step. I don't need to trim these coffee cups very much, but I do just skim the outsides, and trim the base. I place them over a specially made chuck, which holds them firmly in place, and it means that I can trim the entirety of the walls, and the base, without any lumps of clay, or mechanical arms getting in the way. I keep my chucks leather hard, and wrap them up with plastic when I'm not using them, as I think the slight tackiness of them helps to stick the pots in place. The round chuck also helps to keep the rim of the cup nice and round too, and any distortions that might occur as the cups dry overnight, can be corrected by placing them firmly over the chuck. Once the walls have been cleaned up, I can move on to finishing the base. First, I remove a beveled edge from the outside of the vessel, and then I trim away the wiring off marks, that are left from when I wired off the piece from the wheel before. Then, using a metal kidney, I quickly just burnish over these areas, just to smooth them off one last time. I'm not aiming for perfectly smooth bases, with perfectly burnished clay, I just want to make them that little bit more neat. I always like knowing that the bases of pots haven't been forgotten about, and really, just as much care and attention should go into those sections of the vessel, as compared to the walls, and the handle, and everywhere else. The last step now, is just to impress my little maker's mark into the soft clay. Whenever you trim pots, you're often revealing softer clay underneath, and sometimes the pots become a lot softer than they were, when leather hard, before. So before I attach the handles, I like to give the cups a while to dry out again, as if I were to try and attach them to freshly trimmed pots, they'd likely distort. All my handles start off like this. I take a larger block of clay, and using a wet hand, I gradually pull the block longer and longer. It's a difficult skill to describe, and a difficult process too. It's also very similar to how you pull the walls of clay up when you're throwing, as essentially, each movement not only has to be done with a wetted hand, but whenever I pinch and pull, that motion is continued until the very end of the handle. And I try my best to keep my movements as consistent and even as possible. I never hesitate, I never change the pressure at which I'm squeezing. It's all about confidence, really. And at the beginning, whenever you learn this skill, the length of the handle constantly feels as if it's going to fall off, or collapse, and you just have to get past that. Once the length is long enough, and my blanks are at the right thickness, I lay them out onto a board like this, and just snip them off with the edge of my thumb against the wooden board. This clean cut gives me a nice region at which to create flare from for when I attach them to the cuts. And whenever I'm pulling handles, I always pull a few extra blanks along the way, as it's always useful to have a few backups in case you ruin a few. This is a very traditional method for making handles, although these days you see it used less and less. It's incredibly efficient, and you don't have to wait at all from pulling and shaping the handle, to attaching it to the cup, and pulling it further. The blanks can be immediately attached, and then pulled, and then shaped, and that's it. Additionally, pulled handles give you joins that look very natural. They look as if they spring from the pot, flowing from it, as if they were always meant to be there. And the joins themselves are also very strong, as when I attach the blank to the cup, I don't have to worry about how it looks. I can be quite rough with it, and really make sure that it's really well attached and joined, and thereafter I can pull it, and thin it out, and make it much neater and more delicate. As opposed to attaching an already pre-pulled handle that's already very delicate, and therefore I have to be very careful attaching it, and creating such strong joins, as compared to using this method, can be much more difficult. All that being said, no one method is better than another. There are of course pros and cons to all of them. It really just depends on what end result you want. And there are some end results that this method of pulling can't achieve. It just happens to be a very good way, and a quick way, of making handles. Using this method, I can easily attach more than 150 handles a day onto thrown cups. And to keep my handled blanks from drying out too much, I do the same thing to them that I did with my balls of clay at the beginning. Give them a good spray with water, stack them up, and then wrap them in plastic. It doesn't matter that they're touching, or that I get fingerprints on them, as long as the overall shape isn't distorted too much. I'll start to pull with these almost immediately. And in fact, it's an easier process to do if these blanks are softer, rather than firmer. As the firmer they get, the more difficult and time consuming it is to blend in the flare that I'll be creating into the body of the coffee cup. This also really depends on what the weather's like, or how hot your studio is. In the summer, like when this footage was filmed, I do this immediately to stop them from drying out. But in the winter, I can get away with just spraying them with water. I don't have to worry about wrapping them up with plastic. It's situational, and it might change depending on where you live, and what your studio's like. Let's move on to attaching the handles. First, I score the area, and apply a little bit of slip to where the top join of the handle will be. I then take one of the blanks of clay, hold it in my hand so I don't distort it, and tap out one of the ends, which creates a flare of clay, like this. This flare of clay provides us with material that we'll quite easily be able to blend into the cup, helping to create a strong join. I push it against the scored area, wiggling it, and really pushing it quite firmly into place. I also keep one hand inside the cup as I'm doing this, just to make sure that I don't distort the inside portion of the wall, with the amount of pressure that I'm pushing the handle on with. Then, I start to blend in that flare of clay that I created, and finally, I can start to pull the handle. Initially, I ladle on a lot of water onto the handle blank. Then, I can really start to pull. I place my hand right at the top of the handle, where it meets the cup, squeeze, and pull down the entire length. If you release pressure too early, you'll end up building up a lump towards the end of the handle, and eventually this lump will become so large that your pulling hand will catch on it, and likely you'll rip the entire handle away. Once the rough length is there, I use my thumb to score in three grooves into the back of the handle, which thins it further, and also creates some interesting lines that my glazes will be able to pull in. Then, I loop the handle down, and join it on the base. For this join, I don't need to worry about scoring and slipping the clay, as the angle at which it's attached allows me to really easily smear in the clay very firmly, which creates a strong join. Although this can change depending on what your clay's like, really, so experiment, and see what works for you. Once the bottom join has been made, I spend a few moments just using a slightly wet finger to clean up any pulling marks that are left, and to correct, if need be, the shape of the handle itself. Once handled, I place the cup back over my chuck, just to make sure that the rim is round once again, as there's a good chance that the process of attaching and pulling a handle will slightly deform the shape. Then, to stop the handles from cracking, I spray them with water, and I wrap them up with plastic, and I might leave them like this for a couple of days, even a week. This allows time for the clay of the handle and the clay of the cup's body to acclimatise to one another, and to dry very slowly, and very evenly, which is the key to avoiding cracks. Once bone dry, the cups can be placed into my electric kiln to be bisque fired. This is usually a few weeks later, but really it depends on what part of my making cycle I'm on. These bisque firings are very simple. I simply pack the kiln as tightly as possible, and then fire it up to 1000 degrees centigrade overnight. Then, usually a day after that, I can unpack it, and move on with the process. The next step is waxing. When the pots are finally glaze-fired in my gas kiln, the bases of them can't have any glaze on them, as otherwise the pots would stick and fuse to the kiln shelves. So, for that reason, I wax the bases of every single one of my pots. This is a very quick task in comparison to any of the others, and I can quite easily wax the bases of about 500 or 600 pieces in one go. They're simply tap-centred, waxed over, and then I dab a little bit extra into my maker's mark, just to make sure that it's totally sealed. There's nothing special about the wax emulsion I'm using, it's just the basic one sold by Scarver Pottery Supplies. Most pottery suppliers will sell more or less the same product, I think, and thereafter, all I do is mix it with a little bit of boiling water, which just makes it that much easier to brush on. This is also a process that benefits hugely from being able to tap-centre, which I've also made a video about, which you can see on the screen right now if you'd like to take a look. As if you're spending a whole day tap-centring pots into position, every second or two that you can save will make a big difference. The wax itself simply burns away during the firing, and you'd never really even know it was there once you unpack the kiln, and it saves a huge amount of time in regard to clean-up, as it means you don't have to spend hours wiping off glaze from the bases of pots. Once all the pots have been waxed, it's time to start glazing. This red liquid here will become my dark green crackle glaze later on once fired. After a few weeks not having used it, the glaze settles, so the first step is to always mix it thoroughly. I lift away the really stuck glaze off the base just using my fingers, and once that's all lifted off, I use a ladle to really mix it up. Whenever I'm using glazes that I haven't used in a few months, I always begin by removing a little bit of water from the top, and then I just put it aside. Then, as I'm mixing, if I feel it needs more water, I can simply add it back until it's just the right viscosity. I've been using these glazes for so long now that I can tell when it's the right consistency simply by watching how it flows off my knuckles and off my fingers if I were to dip them in. You'll also have noticed in that last clip that I always keep all my glazing tools kept on the lid of the glaze bucket itself. I never put them on the table or my wareboards, it's always the lid, which in the long term saves a huge amount of cleanup and wasted glaze. Then it's time to start glazing. I do this by grasping the pots quite firmly with a pair of tongs, and then I submerge them for about four or five seconds. Once dunked, I set them aside immediately, and I try not to do any cleaning up at this stage whatsoever, as I find touching the glaze as it's still drying generally leads to more trouble than it's worth, as it becomes much easier to clean them up after they've dried out for a couple of days. That being said, that's with my glazes, it may be very different with yours. The way I move the cup after it's been glazed is basically just to try and stop the drips from settling too prominently. What I'm aiming for once I pull them out from the glaze is as clean a surface as possible, as sometimes that's easier said than done. Here you can see just how well the wax works on the base. There are of course always a few little beads of glaze that settle on the wax, but those are very easily wiped away later on. I'm not the biggest fan of glazing, truthfully, although gratifying in one sense, as it's the last step before firing them. It's also very monotonous, and there's not much creativity in it, so I always try to get my glazing done as fast as I possibly can. Once I've glazed everything, I set the pots aside for a couple of days so that they can really dry out. As they dry, the glaze surfaces go from being very tacky and sticky to very powdery, and it's when they're powdery that they become much easier to tidy up. This is the part of glazing that takes a long time, as each and every pot has to be painstakingly gone over, double and triple checked, any droplets removed and the tong marks removed too. But it's also the step that really benefits from being done carefully and well, as the neater the pots look at this stage, the neater they'll look once finally fired. Once I've cleaned up the walls, I then use a wet sponge just to go over the base and clean up the line where glaze meets clay, and it's also when I remove those excess beads of glaze that settled onto the wax. This is usually the process when I'm not filming, but a good podcast or audiobook really makes a big difference. Then, a few days later, once all the pots have been cleaned up, it's time to start packing the gas kiln and firing. Normally I prepare a bunch of pyrometric cones beforehand, and then I start. At the moment I'm using a Roda KG340 gas kiln, which is fuelled by natural gas from the main supply, but more on that later. First, I actually have to pack the kiln. Each pot is positioned inside so that it isn't touching any others. If, say, two pots were actually touching, during the firing they'd melt and fuse together. After each layer has been packed, I place over two new kiln shelves, ready for the next layer of pots. Packing the kiln is quite a fast process in comparison, it takes about an hour or so from start to finish. Essentially it's like one big puzzle, and often I have to try numerous iterations of layout before I find the best one, the one that'll allow me to fit in the most pieces. The method of firing I use is called reduction firing, which, again, I'll explain a little bit more about later, but it's a process that benefits when the kiln is more tightly packed, as there's simply less space that oxygen can occupy. And the whole idea of reduction firing is we want to put the kiln into a state where there's insufficient oxygen for the fuel to burn efficiently. Once the bottom layer has been packed, which is the only one which needs a little bit more care and attention, as it needs a void, a channel, above some of the pots so that the flame coming back down can go into that layer and heat it sufficiently, otherwise it has a tendency to fire a little bit too cool, resulting in pots that are a little bit under-fired. Apart from the bottom layer, I pack the rest of the kiln as tightly as I physically can, as the more I squeeze in, the more cost-efficient each firing becomes. This kiln's capacity is 340 litres, or 12 cubic foot. I think generally I can squeeze in just about 150 pieces, but really it depends on what forms I'm putting inside. This clip here is a good example of just how dense I can pack each layer, and I should mention, as has been asked before, that the tubes you can see in the back of the kiln are actually the flues, so the flames, when they jettison inside from the bottom, go up around the pots at the top, then they are sucked back down through these flues, where they then exit and go out through the chimney. Once the kiln has been packed, I call it a day, as the following morning I'll come in very early to light it and fire the kiln. This in itself is another process that doesn't take too long. From start to finish, the firing takes about nine and a half hours. First, I ignite each of the four burners. There are two either side of the kiln, so sort of one in each corner. The lighting of the gas kiln is always done with the kiln's door wide open. This prevents the gas from accumulating in one enclosed chamber, which then, if ignited after being allowed to build up for a while, can result in some pretty dangerous situations. Once all four burners are lit, the kiln is closed up and sealed tight. At the beginning of the firing, I take it very slowly, just so all the moisture inside the pots and in the glazes has time to really evaporate away. Thereafter, to increase temperature, all I do is gradually increase the amount of gas and air pressure. After about four or five hours, and once the kiln is reading 850 degrees centigrade, I set the kiln into reduction. I do this by setting the gas pressure to 10 mbar and the air pressure to 0.4 bar. I then also slide the dampers to be about halfway closed. This limits the rate at which the burn fuel can escape the kiln and causes it to burn inefficiently inside. And the inefficiently burning fuel is seeking oxygen. This is why the flames start to come out of the flue and out of the spy hole on the front of the kiln too. And in doing so, the fuel inside that's burning inefficiently has to seek oxygen and it finds it inside the clay and the glazes themselves. It strips away an oxygen molecule from an iron molecule. And this is what creates the particular greens and blues created by reduction firing. And it's also responsible for the iron speckling you see too. As the firing and temperature progresses, the flames become stronger and stronger. I'm aiming to put cone 10 flat, which is about 1293 degrees centigrade, and I keep reduction firing the entire way up. Then, finally, once I've reached temperature, it's time to switch the kiln off, which is always accompanied by the glorious sound of silence after a very loud, long day. Finally, I crash cool the kiln back down to 1000 degrees centigrade and I do this by opening up the damper fully and by removing the two bung spy holes on the front of the door. Crash cooling helps to retain nice, vibrant colours. Otherwise, if allowed to cool for too long, they can dull off and become quite matte. Then, once 1000 degrees has been reached, I close the dampers and I close the bungs back up. And that's the process almost complete. First, I have to let the kiln cool down fully, back down to about 100 degrees centigrade, which takes about a day and a half or so. Finally, it's time to crack it open, which is always an anxiety-inducing moment. Even if the firing went smoothly, you can never really observe what's going on inside, so it's only when you finally get to crack the kiln open that you really know whether it was successful or not. As I'm unpacking, each and every pot is inspected and checked over. There's always a few surprises in there. Thankfully, this glaze is quite stable, so very rarely do any pieces stick to the kiln shelves. The pots at this point are still hot to the touch, the kiln shelves especially so, which can really retain the temperature for such a long time. And it's lovely opening a kiln like this in the winter, as all the warmth floods out of the kiln into the studio, filling it with warm air. The contrast between this end product, cups set in stone, glassy and hard like rock, is such a huge leap from the material we started with at the beginning, soft clay, turned into something which is practically the opposite of that. And it'll take millions and millions of years for this material to be ground back down and resemble the same thing that it once was. Once the kiln has been fully unpacked, I can begin the final step of the process, which is just a quick little cleanup of the base of each pot. All I do is submerge a little bit of wet and dry sandpaper, which is about 400 grit, into water, and then each pot is given a very quick sand. Not enough to make it glassy smooth, or to remove the colour, but simply to remove any fine particles of sand that remain, and that could still be quite sharp. And that's it, the end of a long process, that can take weeks or months depending on what my workflow is at the current time. With my current work model, I like to spend about two or three months making a huge variety of pots, then I bisque fire everything, and then glaze fire everything, and then finally photograph the work, and then upload it onto my online shop. And that's it, I'll leave you with three finished examples of the coffee cups that we started out with. Thanks for watching.