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 plates off the hump: no trimming, no warping A plate thrown flat on a bat needs trimming, and trimming a wide flat disc is where warping starts. Throwing off the hump removes… Stoneware
25 minutes - 10 Iron satin tenmoku: eight percent iron and a surface you can feel Tenmoku is the family of high-iron glazes that fire to a dark brown or black, and the satin version is the most useful of them… Stoneware
1 hour - 03 Pinch pots with a 4 mm wall, and how to join two into a closed form Pinching is the oldest pottery technique and the one most often taught badly. The version taught in schools — press a thumb into a… Earthenware
30 minutes - 6 Rutile tan speckle: getting colour from titanium instead of stains Rutile is titanium dioxide with iron and other impurities left in it, and it is the cheapest way to get a glaze with depth. The… Stoneware
50 minutes - 6 Pulled handles: matching moisture and a 6 mm oval section A mug handle is the part that fails first in service and the part most often attached badly. The failure is almost never the… Stoneware
45 minutes - 04 Cobalt blue at cone 04: the most reliable colour in pottery Cobalt is the only common colorant that behaves the same in every atmosphere, at every temperature, and in every base recipe. That… Earthenware
40 minutes - 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
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 12 entries written and scheduled but not yet published. They appear on the scale on the day they are dated, starting 19 October 2026.
What the scale covers today
- Cone 06 A bisque schedule to cone 06 that does not blow up thick work
- Cone 04 Cobalt blue at cone 04: the most reliable colour in pottery · 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 03 Pinch pots with a 4 mm wall, and how to join two into a closed form
- 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 · Pulled handles: matching moisture and a 6 mm oval section · Rutile tan speckle: getting colour from titanium instead of stains · 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 · Throwing plates off the hump: no trimming, no warping · 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 · Iron satin tenmoku: eight percent iron and a surface you can feel · Shino: a glaze that is mostly feldspar and mostly technique