Nurtured Clay
A workshop notebook for hand-thrown pottery, hand-building and glaze chemistry. Every entry records the clay body, the cone, the wall thickness and the ways the thing went wrong, because those are the four things a photograph never tells you.
Nothing here is sponsored and nothing is affiliate-linked. Where a material is named, it is named because it is what the recipe was tested with, not because anyone supplied it.
Firing scale, cone 03 to cone 10
Every entry is placed at the temperature it is fired to. Choose a tick to open it.
The gaps are real. Cones 02 to 4 are named but carry no entry yet, and their positions on the scale come from the same Orton table as the rest — the axis is a temperature scale, not an index of how many notes happen to exist.
Recently pulled from the kiln log
- 6 Throwing a 24 cm cylinder from 1.5 kg: the proportions that keep it standing A cylinder is the test piece every throwing class uses because it exposes everything: wall consistency, water control, and whether… Stoneware
40 minutes - 10 Copper red: the reduction window is the whole recipe Copper red is not difficult to mix — this recipe has nine materials and one of them is the colourant. It is difficult to fire. The… Porcelain
1 hour 30 minutes - 6 Rolling slabs to an even 8 mm and joining them so the seam outlives the pot Hand-built work fails at the seams, and the seams fail because the slab was rolled in one direction. A slab carries the memory of… Stoneware
50 minutes - 6 Opening and flooring: how thick the base actually needs to be The floor of a pot is the part that fails first and the part makers think about least. Open too deep and you cut through into the… Stoneware
20 minutes - 6 Reading a glaze fault: six defects and what actually causes them A glaze fault is evidence. Pinholes, crawling and crazing all look like surface problems and all have different causes, and… Stoneware
40 minutes - 6 Trimming foot rings: the cheese-hard window and a 4 mm ring Trimming is where a thrown pot becomes a designed object, and it is also the fastest way to destroy one. Cut too early and the clay… Stoneware
20 minutes - 10 Celadon at cone 10: colour from thickness, not from iron The most common mistake with celadon is adding more iron to get a deeper green. It does not work. Celadon colour is a function of… Porcelain
1 hour 15 minutes - 04 Coil-building a 30 cm pot over four sessions without a slump Coil building is the slowest and the most reliable way to make a large pot, and it fails for one of two reasons: the coils are… Earthenware
4 hours
How the log is kept
Every entry is written from a real firing and a real piece of work, then kept the way a workshop keeps things: the vessel drawn in section at the four dimensions that decide whether it stands up, the process parameters in a fixed card, the steps numbered, and a two-column table at the end pairing each failure with the cause that produced it.
Entries are grouped by the cone they are fired to, not by subject. A glaze recipe and a trimming technique sit next to each other when they belong to the same firing, because that is how a kiln load is actually built.
Temperatures are Orton cone equivalents at a 108 °F per hour rise. The cone number is what the entry is filed under, because the cone is what the kiln actually measures; the degree figure is a convenience and will vary by twenty degrees either way between firings.
There are 18 entries written and scheduled but not yet published. They appear on the scale on the day they are dated, starting 4 October 2026.
What the scale covers today
- Cone 06 A bisque schedule to cone 06 that does not blow up thick work
- Cone 04 Coil-building a 30 cm pot over four sessions without a slump · Leather-hard joining: spouts, lugs and feet that do not pop off
- Cone 5 Throwing an 18 cm bowl with a 6 mm wall and no S-crack
- Cone 6 Centering a 1 kg ball: wheel speeds, hand positions and the wobble test · A five-material cone 6 clear glaze that does not craze on stoneware · Glaze thickness by the numbers: specific gravity, dip seconds and grams per area · Reading a glaze fault: six defects and what actually causes them · A magnesium satin matte for cone 6 that is hard enough for tableware · Opening and flooring: how thick the base actually needs to be · Rolling slabs to an even 8 mm and joining them so the seam outlives the pot · Spiral wedging a 5 kg batch without trapping air · Throwing a 24 cm cylinder from 1.5 kg: the proportions that keep it standing · Trimming foot rings: the cheese-hard window and a 4 mm ring
- Cone 9 Pulling even walls in porcelain: three passes, 6 mm, no collapse
- Cone 10 Celadon at cone 10: colour from thickness, not from iron · Copper red: the reduction window is the whole recipe · Shino: a glaze that is mostly feldspar and mostly technique