@pfooti · 2025-12-23

Pottery Year in Review

2025 was a pretty good year for me, pottery-wise. I have been making progress in throwing and decorating. Other things, not so much, so I’ll get it right out here: in 2026 my goal is to learn to make better handles. I also would like to regularize some of my styles (there’s a couple of types of thing I really enjoy making, so I want to get better at those), and be more patient with some builds. Sometimes I get most of the way through a build and will just rush the last bit, which ruins the overall aesthetic. This goes with the handles things, as handles are often the last thing you add on. Anyway, here’s some pictures of stuff I made this year.

This is probably the only good handle I pulled all year. I liked the glaze on it a lot- it is a light coating of a silver glaze that is mostly translucent over the whole thing, and then a double-dip in pink. I was experimenting with squaring off the mug a little after throwing and trimming, which gave it another pretty interesting feature. Unfortunately, after being in prime rotation as my work coffee mug, it started leaking- a hairline crack that went all the way through the mug. Not sure why, but stressing the clay with the squaring off after it was part dry didn’t help, and then many hot-cold cycles in use as a coffee mug did it in.

This one was a team-up with Chrissy. I threw the body (porcelain again) and she painted the leaves on with underglaze. I then glazed it (clear) and spattered on some copper oxide.

It turns out that I made a bunch of pots and did not document the process or the result at all. It went throw => fire => glaze => fire => give away and no real photos. Sometimes some blurry old stuff.

Honestly not the best photos. I experimented a lot with altering shapes and with layering glazes in 2025. The super-glossy green in the bottom right is the result of a basic green with a pink glaze on top. Turns out that the tin in the pink glaze reacts with the contents of the oribe green glaze to make a really glossy green. I like it; I found a couple of good glaze combinations this year.

This is a semi-chronological order kind of a post. I’m sort of going through my photos backlog and posting as I find stuff. This next pot was a lot later in the year, but continues the theme of layered glazes.

This is a speckled clay body, which I masked (the stripes) and dipped into a blue glaze. Then I removed the mask and poured a yellow/orange glaze over the whole thing (you should not dip an already-glazed object into another color, it will ruin the other color if there’s a bad interaction). I love the golden streaks and the way the underlying clay comes through.

The other glaze combination I really played with was using tenmoku (although I think in our studio we spell it temoku) glaze. It is a pretty old style of glaze with a lot of iron oxide. The one we have will turn greenish-yellow if you do it thickly. On the other hand, if you apply a really thin coating, it is reddish brown and not glossy at all. This works really well on the speckled clay body (same as the above vase); the objects get a satisfyingly unsmooth feel. I have been dunking the bisqueware in water before glazing, which keeps the glaze from adhering very thickly. Then a coating of a white glaze around the top, which drips is a very pleasing style. I love decorating schemes that can account for drips. Getting good drippage is actually kind of tricky- you don’t want things to be too runny, but also if you don’t put enough you’ll end up without any drips, just a boring rim around the top.

This is something like a drink set. Four cups and a pitcher. Of course, the pitcher isn’t big enough to fill the four cups fully, but that’s okay. The pitcher handle and the spout were done by Chrissy. You can tell, because it is a nice handle.

I really like cups and mugs that have that kind of tulip-esque shape. Rounded towards the bottom, cinched in near the top, but the actual top flares back out. It’s my standard mug shape. These were intended to be cocktail glasses from the start, but they’re not really highball or any other standard shape. That’s okay; I don’t precisely follow cocktail recipes either.

This is a return to the glaze mix from above- blue and gold, but this time on a porcelain clay body. This is from pretty late in the year; I have been obsessed with these bulbous or gourd-like vase shapes. I really enjoy throwing the form. I have an optimal shape in my head, and none of these are it. Someday, hopefully in 2026 I’ll get the perfect one done. I want the right ratio of bottom to top, the correct aspect ratio, and a narrow top neck.

The vases above are all a little squat, due mostly to the shape of my hands. If I’m throwing 1.5 pounds (or thereabouts), I have to throw it wide enough to get my hand inside, but that does not leave a lot of clay for the height (I am practicing throwing thinner and taller, but thin can be weak, and these shapes don’t like being weak at the waist, they’ll just collapse before they dry out). I did manage to throw one of these guys (not shown, still being fired so I’ll tell you later how it came out) pretty narrowly by using a sponge on a stick to throw with, but the real solution is to just throw more clay, so I can make something that’s comfortable to get my hand inside while throwing, but tall enough to look less squat. Hashtag goals!

More bulbous guys. These are in the speckled clay with the green / pink glaze treatment. I also did a red clay with a crawling white glaze version, but I didn’t get any photos yet (two of them cracked in the glaze kiln because I put too much stress on the clay by shaping it and adding the crawling glaze - I may try to kintsugi them, we’ll see).

I have this goal that maybe I could make stuff people would be willing to pay for. I don’t need another job, and I don’t really want to run an online store, but I do want to get critical feedback and understand what works for people, art-wise. My guess here is that these bulby vases probably could sell if I did them well enough. They’re interesting, and irregular enough that you could buy more than one of them as long as they all kind of work together color-wise.

On the other hand, I’m not sure these would find people willing to buy them, but they are more artistically satisfying. For whatever reason, I enjoy making objects that are kind of useless. They should make you ask “but what is that for?” The mugs I made because I kept seeing people hold mugs in their palm, with their hand opposite the handle, instead of using the handle. The one on the top has no handle, and is honestly my favorite. The spikes are really great for holding the mug when it is hot, and then once it cools a little the mug feels great in the hand.

The bowls in particular were inspired by hostile architecture; benches you cannot sleep on, railings you cannot grind a skateboard on. These are display-only bowls. If you try to put something in them (not their intended purpose), you’ll probably break them. Honestly, I wish the bowls themselves were a little nicer. I need to practice bowls in 2026 too.

I really like doing team-ups with Chrissy. I threw these two bodies, and then she decorated the one on the left (adding slip to the still-wet object in the form of the flowers) and I did the one on the right (slicing out a gouge in the wet clay, filling it back in with porcelain slip, and then trimming it back to mostly flat (ish)).

I make these mugs with three or four handles, in part because it is art, and in part because it’s an opportunity to practice handle making. In each case, I really need to do a better job of taking it slowly. Honestly, I think it’s part “I’m always in a hurry at the end of the time in the studio, and handles are always the last thing I do” and part “I am trying to do the Florian technique, where you attach a handle stub and then pull it while it is on the mug”. Florian is an expert with years and years of full-time pottery making. I’m not, so I should use a simpler, slower, and harder to donk up process. More hashtag goals

Yeah, so here’s some mugs. Overall., I’m getting okay at throwing mug bodies (the same tulip shape) but my handles are still lousy. There are fundamental flaws in each of these.

Okay, so I’ll leave you with this last bowl. It is from the same run as the bulby vases that are glazed in a similar fashion, but I tried to throw a bowl every so often. This was one of the two bowls that turned out. The other, I forgot to take a photo of. Silly me.

It has a real art deco vibe to it, IMO. The drippy bits were a choice, but then there’s the sharper masked lines. The circles at the bottom are tool marks, but I also like how they turned out in the overall shape. I wish the bowl was a little thinner, but that’s practice.

Here’s to a great 2025 in pottery, and a lot of fun stuff to do in 2026. Including, maybe, documenting more stuff as I make it.

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