How I started to be a potter. Second month. July 2020

4 min readSep 9, 2020

Hi there, I am Kate, beginner potter from Hilversum, Netherlands.

I began my pottery journey in June 2020. I decided to keep notes of my working process and publish monthly updates. I think doing it will motivate me to move on and maybe it will help someone else to start their own pottery journey. This is an article about the second month of me doing pottery. You can check the article about the first month here.

Organizing a Studio

I had already bought all necessary equipment during the first month. Since then I have found some handy gadgets and useful tools that can make the life of a potter easier and improve the quality of work.

Tools

Over-the-Wheel Russian Doll Batt System. This system by Hartley & Noble speeds up the working process and helps you to save space in your studio.

Giffin Grip Versatile and practical tool. Giffin Grip is a very useful and no longer replaceable for me. I enjoy working with this. It saves time centering the object. You can use it for trimming, waxing the bottoms of your pots, glazing them with a brush, etc.

Hand Extruder I bought a hand extruder to make mug handles. It has ⌀ 52 mm, cost varies between € 30–60. There’s a set of extruder dies by OldForgeCreations which are really good. Hand extruder feels like a way more convenient thing rather than a large wall extruder that may cost you a lot more and does exactly the same.

Glazes

After a first bunch of glaze firings I decided that making my own glazes would be cheaper and would give me access to try out any glaze recipe that is open sourced at glazy.org.

Keep in mind that you should always wear a 3M mask when mixing and diluting glazes! There’s a real danger of getting sick with silicosis so you should always follow the rule and wear a mask.

Here is a list of glazes which I mixed:

✅ Floating Blue;

✅ Floating Orange;

✅ Heath Ivory;

✅ June Perry Pink;

❌ Peacock Nebula;

❌ Raspberry Ripple

Raspberry Ripple didn’t work well for me, it didn’t go pink. I am not that good in chemistry yet so I don’t know for sure what went wrong here, but I think added all the ingredients properly.

The only SiC I could find in the Netherlands was 45 mesh so Peacock Nebula didn’t had the proper color. It was pale blue with black silicon carbide particles.

Progress

I managed to make two bisque firings that month: 36 and 23 mugs.

Firing

I fired the test tiles with the glazes that I’ve mixed myself and had good results. However after the glaze firing of the first bunch of mugs I found out that most of the glazes have run on the shelves. This was a very disappointing moment. I will describe how I am solving this type of issues in another article.

Only 4 cups have survived.

For the second batch, I tried to make mugs of a similar form and size.

10 August. Second batch after bisque firing

During the second glaze firing I was using dripcatchers and some other techniques to prevent glazes from running. It resulted in only one glaze dripped: