Glazes
All four are food-safe, lead-free and fired to 1260°C in an oxidising electric firing. They were developed to sit on one table together, which is why none of them is a bright colour.
Why They Vary
A glaze is a suspension of minerals in water. It goes on thicker where the wall is thinner, pools where the form turns, and breaks — thins out to show the clay beneath — over every edge the potter left crisp.
So a glaze does not have one colour. It has a range, and where a given pot lands in that range depends on how it was thrown. This is the part of pottery that cannot be specified, and it is most of why people buy handmade.
A satin white with a fleck of iron from the clay showing through. The workhorse: it takes food staining better than anything else we mix, and it is the glaze we recommend for a first set. Over a crisp rim it breaks to a warm buff.
Even, forgiving, quietly different pot to pot. The closest thing we have to a predictable glaze, which is not the same as predictable.
Made with wood ash from the workshop stove, washed and sieved. Ash glazes move in the firing — they run, they pool green in the well of a bowl, and they will occasionally give a pot a drip on the outside that we then have to grind off the foot. Roughly one in fifteen ash pots does not make it to the shop.
Unpredictable in a way that is the whole point. Two ash bowls from the same firing can be visibly different, and neither is wrong.
Iron-saturated, near-black in the body, breaking to rust and amber wherever the glaze thins. On a thrown tumbler with throwing rings left in, the rings come out as bands of rust — the effect people photograph most and the one we can least control.
Dramatic on crisp forms, muddy on soft ones. We do not put Tenmoku on the wide-rimmed bowls because it has nowhere to break.
A pale grey-blue from a small cobalt addition, named after the road the workshop is on. The most recent of the four and still being adjusted — the current mix is a touch greyer than the 2024 version, and if you are matching an older piece, say so when you order.
Soft, even, slightly translucent where thin. The only glaze here that reads as a colour rather than a surface.
| Piece | Best in | Avoid | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dinner & side plates | Oatmeal, Blue | Ash | A running glaze on a flat surface pools in the centre |
| Pasta bowls | Ash, Oatmeal | — | The well is where ash looks best |
| Mugs & cups | All four | — | Vertical walls suit every glaze we mix |
| Tumblers | Tenmoku | Blue | Throwing rings need a glaze that breaks |
| Serving bowls | Ash | Tenmoku | Large soft forms give Tenmoku no edge to work with |
Crazing is the fine network of lines that appears in a glaze when it contracts slightly more than the clay beneath. On our Oatmeal it happens occasionally with age; on Ash it is present from the kiln and is part of the surface. It is not a crack in the pot, it does not weaken it, and on a vitrified stoneware body fired to 1260°C it does not make the piece unhygienic. Full explanation on the care page.