Setting up a home pottery
- Amelia K Fulton
- Apr 15
- 21 min read
I set up my home pottery studio in our spare bedroom when we moved to Cornwall in 2022. When I say 'I set it up' I mean Hugo did a lot of the actual work to bring everything together, but I did all the research and directed him on what I thought I needed. We're a good team like that.
Since then, I've changed a few things and we're starting again from scratch by building my fancy new dream garden studio at the time of writing (April 2025). I have also had some students ask how to go about keeping up their new pottery hobby from home so here we are; this is my how-to!
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SAFETY
First things first, safety is paramount. There are some risks with ceramics as a hobby or occupation that you cannot ignore, namely silicosis. Clay contains silica. It's the glassy mineral that gives ceramics their strength and also that gives glaze it's glossy, gorgeous glaziness. When clay and glaze is wet, the silica is bound to the water and is safe to handle and be around, but when clay or glaze is dry/powdered the silica is light enough to puff into the air and has a penchant for being inhaled... and inhaling silica is bad. You know how miners back in the day got horrible lung diseases? It's called silicosis, and it's not reserved just for miners. Ceramicists are at a high risk of the long-term pulmonary disease and it's essential you're aware of it if you're going to be working with clay and glaze.
It sounds scary, and to be fair, it is pretty scary but there's a simple precaution to take; water. Clean with water - mop, wipe with wet sponges and cloths, clean your tools in water, wash your hands and keep dust-free towels or paper towel to dry your hands on afterwards. Have a high quality filtered dust mask in the studio that you keep free of dust itself. Whenever you cannot avoid dry powder, wear your mask. That means if you're mixing glazes, get that mask on your face and preferably do this outside or in a well-ventillated area. If you're reclaiming bone-dry clay, open a window, do it outside and/or wear your mask. If you must vaccuum or sweep (please choose to mop if you can), wear a mask and again, open a window. Avoiding making dust or inhaling dust is the best and easiest step to keeping healthy lungs.
Okay, with that big one out of the way there's a couple more risks. Throwing on the potter's wheel is labour intensive and demands a lot of force from your body. Learning about making it ergonomic for you will save you a lot of pain. This means finding a chair that is the right height for your wheel is super important and building in rest/stretching periods will prolong your productivity and protect your body long term. I wedge and weigh all of the clay I'm going to throw in batches. That means maybe 10 balls of clay at a time which I'll throw all together but I'll be forced to get up, stretch and start the process again. This just gives your back and hands a break and changes what muscles are working so as not to over-stress them. I learned all of this the hard way and having to stop making all together to recuperate was boring, frustrating and painful.
Another little tip is to throw with warm water - it's just infinitely more pleasant in the cold months!
Lastly, kiln safety is a big one. Most potters have had a small scare with their kilns. It either happens early on when you're still learning how to treat the beasts, or way later in a potter's life where complacency gets the better of us. Mine came pretty early when I ran the kiln hard for a few days, overloaded the plug it was connected to and it resulted in a bubbled, cracked and broken socket. While the 13amp kilns are fine to be plugged into normal house sockets, the constant draw of power over 12+ hours generates a lot of heat and the plastic cannot handle it. Most plugs have fuses which will cut the power if it's overloaded or too hot, but you can never, ever be sure they're going to work. Since the plug burned out, I check my kiln every 2 hours, to 1 hour as it gets to the hottest stage of the firing. Obviously a machine that's generating 1200 degrees of heat is a risk and it's common sense to be cautious when running them, but it really can't be overstated. If you've got the means to, hire an electrician to wire your kiln directly into mains. Definitely never run your kiln on an extension cord. I don't really get the science behind it, but the longer the cord to travel, the more resistence, the more heat = more danger.
The electrics are important to note, but so is the surrounds. Kilns require an exclusion zone around them of anything flammable - that means putting them on a concrete/tile/brick floor and away from any walls. I heard a story of a potter warming their socks on the kiln, just for a moment but inevitably being sidetracked and forgetting their socks... low and behold those socks were charcoal in no time and the potter had the fright of their life. Always do a check of surrounds when firing. You should also ensure ventilation around a firing kiln. Carbon is burned and sent into the air during firings as well as glaze matter being evaporated and fumes being released in a glaze firing. These aren't great to inhale, so having ventillation is always a good idea, especially if you're working in the same space as your kiln.
I think that's all the safety covered... onto the fun stuff!
TOOLS
The shopping section... If you didn't already know, ceramics is an expensive hobby. Setting yourself up can be really pricey as you learn about all the different components you need to be independantly making. However, you can do it on the cheap pretty easily if you are hand-building and you have access to a community kiln.
Firstly, tools to actually model and make are everywhere online. You can get beginner's sets on ebay for a few quid, but initially you don't even need them. Yes they're good to have and they make the making a lot easier, but forks, spoons, kitchen rolling pins, wooden chopping boards, cookie cutters, knives, and so many other kitchen utensils you probably already have will do the job just fine. It can be quite liberating finding alternative tools from things in your house - play is 90% of creation right, so have a dig through your cutlery drawers and baking drawers and you'll find all sorts of useful clay tools. That being said - I did end up buying a lot of tools.
Bearing in mind I mostly throw on the wheel, my most used tools are:
scoring rake (a fork or cerrated knife will do)
potter's needle (knife or thin skewer will do)
rubber kidney
leather chamoix
cheese wire (preferrably twisted)
set of scales (for wedging balls of clay and for glaze mixing)
Then, of course there's a potter's wheel. I started on a cheap wheel I bought on Facebook marketplace for £80. It had a smaller motor, a smaller wheel head and didn't like big weights being thrown, but it was perfect to learn on. If you're just starting - a cheap wheel is absolutely fine! I upgraded about a year ago which was good timing for being better on the wheel and throwing larger pieces. I now have a £300 wheel from Airgoo which is still considered amateur. The pro wheels with the big motors, the adjustable legs, the silent spinning and the nice broad wheel heads can be over £1k. Oneday I'd like one, but for now my budget is limited and the wheel I've got is fine.
Kilns... they're ridiculously pricey and not something you want to get a knock-off version of if you can avoid it. I got my kiln on Facebook marketplace as well from an old potter who was retiring. She'd barely used it, and even when she did it was only fired to very low temperatures. It came with kiln furniture and a lot of different accessories (I'll explain this later) and it cost me £700, plus 8 hours of driving to get it. This was an absolute bargain. Most kilns are at least £1k, with most pushing £3k for the small ones brand new. Granted, the new ones are better insulated so they're cheaper to run and they have amazing new controllers that you can be really specific with and some even have an app where you can monitor your firings remotely. Again - it's a dream to get a nice big fancy kiln but I simply cannot afford it, so my tiny little old workhorse is doing the job for now.
Kiln's do have an expiry on them - they get old, they get tired and it's not feesible to replace certain parts. My kiln works hard and will no doubt die in the next 2 years. I'm constantly looking on marketplace for a new kiln, keeping an eye out on forums and facebook groups of other potters who sell their stuff... it's one of those things you get addicted to watching out for.
Other nice tools to have include:
a banding wheel - don't ask me why they're so expensive. I have no idea.
ball ended tools and loop tools for sgraffito
paint brushes
diamond sandpaper
slip trailer
rolling pin and thickness strips
wooden bats - LOTS and preferably thick ply
a bunch of sponges
a bunch of wooden ribs
hole cutters
STUDIO EQUIPMENT
I have been adding to the studio over the last 3/4 years, so this may seem very overwhelming. Please keep in mind that I make majority of my income from ceramics now, so that means I need to really have my stuff in order, efficiency is key and that usually means LOTS of things are essential. If you're just starting, scale back everything I'm suggesting!
Another thing to keep in mind is that my partner, Hugo, is very good at finding free things, building and improvising. I couldn't have done what I have without him, but there's ways around not having a handy person in your house! Facebook marketplace is a game changer and Hugo got good at asking tool and garden suppliers if he can fish in their skip bins out back. We got a lot of free plywood and other woods, including pallets, which I'm still using today as my benches, bats and furniture. Again, ceramics is a pricey game and anything you can scrap and improvise with will save you!
The number one most important thing to have in your studio is wooden bats. 'Bats' I guess is just the pottery fancy term for pieces of wood you can make and dry your work on. I have a lot of random off cuts of ply wood of all sorts of sizes that I use as shelving, on-table work surfaces and even tiny pieces for individual bits that I need to pick up and work on without touching the pot itself. Wood is the best as it slowly absorbs water and lets the pot pop off the surface when it's dry enough. Plastic, glazed ceramic and glass are awful for pots - your clay will stick to it and you'll have to tear the piece to get it off. I ruined a lot of work early on as I left them on plates to dry...
The next thing I have an inordinate amount of is lidded buckets! We found it strangely difficult to buy lidded buckets but I slowly accumulated a few, then a lot, now I have more than necessary and they're very much taking up space in a silly way, but I'm loath to get rid of them as I slowly gather different wild clays, make my own glazes in larger batches... lidded buckets are an essential in my book. I use big buckets for my transparent glazes, my pre-wedged clay balls, my wild clays, anything I need to keep moist. Yogurt pots, butter tubs, jars etc. are also really useful for keeping slips, glazes and other foraged things you might want for your clay adventures. I'm essentially encouraging you to hoard.
Shelving is the potter's best friend. Having safe, dry, warm, not too drafty space for your pots to dry is priceless and the more of it the better. Pots take up a lot of room. In my first spare-room studio I had approximately 24 x 1 meter shelves I could store all of my pots on and sometimes during my busiest season that wasn't enough. It helps to have the shelves in a modular format - I rest my long plywood bats on dowls so that I can move them about if I have particularly tall pots that need more height. Again - I'm making pots to earn a living, so this might not be the case for a hobby potter. My new studio, I'm hoping, will have at least double the shelving to also host all of my glazes. You really can't ever have too many shelves I think.
I'll explain reclaiming clay in a moment, but you'll want some plaster bats as well as wood. You can buy ceramics plaster which is finer and better than plaster of paris, but it doesn't matter too much. Make a plaster bat the same way you'd make any plaster mould. You can also purchase them. TOP TIP - plaster explodes in kilns. Try not to use any metal tools on plaster and avoid any little crumbs getting into your clay.
THE BUCKET CLEANING SYSTEM - this is a big one. Clay destroys plumbing. No doubt, no questions, it's awful for your plumbing and there's no way to clean yourself or your tools in your bathroom or kitchen sinks without really screwing your house up. SO there's 2 main options for you. I have used the 3 bucket system for the last three years and it's worked beautifully.
Take three big buckets (these ones don't need lids) and fill them with water. Order them so that one takes your dirtiest, most caked tools and hands first. Wash off as much clay as possible in there. Then move to the next bucket and rinse everything in there until they're as clean as possible. Then if you need it, use the third bucket as your cleanest water for a final rinse. NEVER use soap in these buckets.
What you will find is that the clay settles to the bottom of the buckets overnight/a few hours, and the top water keeps remaining clean for your washing. As the bucket slowly has less water and more clay in it you can start to reclaim that clay - it's not waste, it's just waiting to be reused. Reclaim the first bucket's clay, and refresh your bucket system so that the empty bucket is now your cleanest water... you can cycle through your buckets in perpetuity and never have to wash your hands in a plumbed sink.
NEVER wash your glaze tools in these buckets. They can be in a separate bucket. You can experiment with the glaze sediment, but otherwise it's best to take that waste to the tip and dispose of it like you would old paint. It's not good for the environment so try avoid washing in/pouring down normal sinks.
Your second option is to create a clay trap. I am planning on doing this in my new studio (keeping glaze separate again), where you have a sink but you divert the plumbed water via a bucket system that does the filtering for you. As I've not tried it, I'm not gong to advise you on how to do it but if you google clay traps you'll see some you can buy or make online. Again - avoid all contaminants as you want to be able to reclaim as much clay as possible.
CLAY
Clay has a few ingredients in it. Kaolin, quartz and feldspar - essentially a glassy component, decayed granite and a flux (lowers the melting point of the quartz). That's kind of unimportant if you're not making clay from raw materials.
Purchasing clay can still be a bit confusing though. Your first decision should be if you're using earthenware or stoneware.
Earthenware
Earthenware is clay that matures at a lower temperature. Usually around 900 - 1150 degrees. It usually means the pots are slightly less durable than their stoneware counterparts, they're often lighter and they can give better glaze results becuase pigment burns off easier at higher temperatures. Terracotta is a good example of earthenware, but you can get all sorts of coloured, textured clays that fire to these lower temperatures.
Stoneware
Stoneware is clay that matures at higher temperatures. Usually 1150-1300 degrees. Stoneware is much more durable, can be left outside and survive frosts and does some funky things with glazes at higher temps. I use a cornish buff stoneware - buff usually means it's unbleached so it's more of a sandy colour.
Grog
Grog is an additive to clay like sand or paper which gives it different properties. It makes it rougher, but also increases its plasticity and can make for great sculpting bodies. My clay has a little bit of grog in it.
What kiln do you have access to? If it's predominantly used for earthenware (some kilns don't fire high), you should buy earthenware. If you can fire up to 1200 degrees, then stoneware could be a good choice. Your kiln will dictate your clay.
The next thing to consider is what you're making. If you're mostly on the wheel, a fine particle clay could be a good choice. Do you like the speckled look? Do you want a dark clay body to experiment on? Do you like the look of terracotta? Aesthetics are also important.
If you're hand building and sculpting, you might want a clay with a bit of grog in it to give it strength and flexibility. Sites like Bath Potters or PotClays or PotteryCrafts will give temp ranges and what the clay is good for in their descriptions. Most potters I know source their clay from Valentines. If you're really not sure - ask your local potters!
GLAZE
Again, what glazes you buy depends on your clay body and your kiln. Glaze chemistry is a wild west world of testing, experimenting, hoping, praying and experiencing some disasters. I have barely scratched the surface of glazing as an art and I'm already overwhelmed.
It's easiest to start with pre-made glazes as they'll have the chemistry sorted for the temperature ranges you decide to use and will have examples of what the glaze will look like pretty reliably. They're also mostly food safe - there's debate about this. You can buy pots of wet brush-on glazes or you can buy bags of powdered glazes. Start with brush on.
My usual brands are Botz, Terracolor, Amaco and Scarva. Be warned, glaze is expensive. Shop around the major suppliers to try get your best price and try to order lots at once to save on shipping.
Some people glaze wearing gloves as they often contain metals and some funky other minerals - I don't bother, but I am careful not to finger paint. You'll want to keep your brushes away from clay dust - it can do some clumpy weird things to the glaze.
It's fun, it's messy, it's unpredictable sometimes and it's all about testing. I would recommend doing a lot of test tiles. Make a bunch, fire them to bisque and then do tests of each glaze and even layer different glazes. Fire these before you start using the glazes on pots you've made. I live by my test tiles.
If you're worried about a glaze, fire it inside a sacrificial pot. Also, on your tiles, do obvious different layers - I do 1, 2 and 3 coats on different parts of the tile to see how much I need to layer my pieces.
PROCESSES TO LEARN
RECLAIMING CLAY
Clay is infinitely recyclable before it's fired. This is great news as all making has a level of 'waste' clay and it's abhorrent to think that just goes on the bin. Instead, collect all of your scraps in a bucket and let them sit there til the bucket is full. That full bucket of trimmings and scraps wants to be bone dry - let it become crispy and dusty (don't breathe it in remember), then slake it. Fill that bucket with water and enjoy the fizzing and bubbling of the clay as it all starts rehydrating and settling into a lovely mushy mess. The slaking can take a few days, so let that clay sit for a bit in it's bath. Caveat - you probably want to make sure you've only got one type of clay per reclaim bucket.
When all your clay seems to be nice and evently wet - you'll probably have a layer of clean water at the top of the bucket - you can siphon off the excess water or let it evaporate away (depends how much time you can spare). This sludgy wet clay that's left is called slip. Scoop that slip onto your plaster bats and let them dry until they're the consistency you want - usually like playdoh. You may need to lift and flip over the cake of clay that's on there for an even drying.
You can also fill a pillowcase with slip and hang it outside, out of rain. This does the same thing as plaster but by evaporation. It takes longer and I find it difficult to keep the pillowcases usable, so I opt for plaster.
Once that slip has dried to clay consistency you need to learn...
WEDGING
I'm assuming you already know that air bubbles in clay can explode in the kiln, so to ensure you don't have air bubbles you need to wedge your lumps of freshly reclaimed clay. You should wedge all clay that you are about to use, no matter if it's purchased and fresh out of the bag, if it's scraps or if it's reclaim. Wedging removes air bubbles but it also has a bit of a waking-up-the-molecules process that gets the clay moving together, all the same consistency and wetness and also serves to warm up your hands.
There's three types of wedging -
Spiral wedging - I do this now
Ram's head wedging - I first started doing this
Cut/Slab wedging - I'll probably end up doing this when I'm fully arthritic.
I spiral wedge because I found ram's head hurt my wrists and required more arm strength. Spiral wedging feels more ergonomic for me, but to each their own. There's lots of videos on youtube about how to wedge. It's an essential skill, it takes practise and it's important to get right. Put time into this.
START TO FINISH OF A POT
The process of making a piece and finishing it off entirely at home goes as follows:
wedge your clay (on wood or plaster)
throw/make then place it on wood to dry
when it's leather hard (usually 24 hours), make any ammendments like trimming, adding handles, adding slip, carving, signing, etc.
leave to become bone dry - can be up to a week. You start to learn how to tell by feel - often if they're cold they're still wet. Their colour changes too.
once they're bone dry, you can bisque fire them. This is a 980-1000 degree firing where the pot semi-matures.
wash your bisque (a lot of carbon flies around in the kiln during a firing so they get a bit dusty) then glaze them.
let the glaze dry (can be a few mins or longer)
glaze fire pots. Depending on your clay and your glazes, fire up to 1300 degrees.
Wait for the pots to be cool enough to handle, then sand their bums! I use diamond sandpaper to make them nice and soft - helps to make sure the clay doesn't scratch wooden table tops etc. This step isn't essential but it's a nice touch.
If you're worried about the water-proofness of your pots, leave them sat on newspaper or papertowel overnight with water in them. If the towel or newspaper is wet the next day - you've got a leaky pot. Troubleshooting could range from your clay underfiring, your glaze underfiring, micro cracks... that's a topic for another day!
KILN FIRING
I'm going to explain how my kiln works, as it's my only kiln and the one I know best. I have a skutt 40L electric kiln. She supposedly fires to 1300 degrees but I've not pushed her that far. It uses what's called a 'kiln sitter'. This is an old school manual method of turning off the kiln when it's reached the right temperature:time scale. I don't have a controller or pyrometer - it's all manual.
The science? Raw clay begins to turn to 'stoneware' (stone essentially) when it is exposed to a lot of heat over a certain amount of time. Time is important. It's not enough to just spike it to1200 degrees and rapidly cool. It's like baking, you need a certain amount of time at the right temperature to fully cure and transform. It's proper alchemy! You don't want any sudden temperature changes - you can't drop a pot straight into a 1200 oven as the thermal shock will crack and break your pot, same goes for cooling it down. So kilns are designed to warm up slowly (ramp), spend a certain amount of time at full heat (soak), then cool down slowly too.
Kiln sitters rely on things called pyrometric cones to turn off the kiln. Cones are used in a lot of firings to guage what temperature the kiln got to if you don't have a thermometer in the kiln (pyrometer). Cones on different shelves/areas of the kiln indicate if you have cool or hot spots, and for really big wood firings they are important for knowing when to add heat or not. So big standing cones go on shelves, while kiln sitters have smaller ones sit in them...
The cones themselves are rated to certain temperatures and will start to bend/sag when they get to the right time:temp. For instance, I fire to cone 6 or 7 (around 1200-1220 degrees), and I use a mini Cone 6 in my kiln sitter that will start to sag when the pots have reached 1200. The sagging in the sitter, drops a lever which shuts the kiln off. It's extremely basic, but very sensitive. Once that lever drops, the kiln stops applying electricity/energy, stops maintaining heat and slowly cools down. You can usually predict the timings, but sometimes it goes awry and so the cones on the inside help to give a story of how the firing went. I often don't put cones in, to be honest, because they're expensive and my kiln has been pretty reliable, but it's good practise to do it while you get to know your kiln
Kiln's are chambers of fire bricks with elements wrapped around the inside that heat according to the kilns settings (the new kilns let you choose how many degrees per hour the temp increases by). These elements need changing after a lot of firings and will start to give you signs of them being tired when you under fire, over fire or weird things happen during the firing. You'll know very quickly when the firing is abnormal. Elements are expensive, fitting them can be expensive but you can learn to do it yourself with good ol' Youtube.
I had my kiln serviced after 100 firings - it needed new elements and the specialist told me she'll probably die in the next two years - hence me looking for new kilns. I highly rate the people I went with (Kilnsmiths)
You also need kiln furniture. These include props/stands, shelves and other bits that help to hold pots off the shelf if needed. They're not super pricey but it adds up especially if you have a big kiln. Another thing to learn about is bat wash / kiln wash. It's a chalky wash you put on all your kiln furniture to stop them sticking to eachother and to your pots. I'll admit I'm pretty lax on this front too, but it's essential for high, high firings.
LOADING A KILN
When you're doing a bisque firing (your first firing from raw clay to semi-cured), all your pots can touch and stack. Try not to let them lean on the kiln elements, but you don't have to worry too much about furniture unless your pots are very fragile or need to be fired in a specific way. I tumblestack my kiln - all the pots sitting ontop of each other - it's much more efficient than having wasted empty space in the kiln. Remember, the pots themselves, once they've been heated, retain that heat really well and help the firing be more thermally efficient so try to make your kiln absolutely full of pots if you can before doing a firing.
Glaze firings on the other hand are the opposite. NOTHING can touch eachother. Glaze is like twice-tough glue. If you have two pieces even touching by a micromilimeter, they'll fuse together and that's that. (In some cases you can break them apart but you didn't hear that from me). You can still be efficient, have your pots nearly touching, make them fit like a jenga game, use your furniture wisely and you can still get heaps of pots fired, but they're much, much less pot-full than a bisque firing.
Sometimes you'll have glaze runs, where your pots stick to the shelves. This is where bat-wash is important. It helps get those stuck pots off and you can then grind down with a diamond sanding disc any bits that are sharp. Remember, broken glaze is GLASS - it'll cut you and you won't even realise til you're bleeding everywhere. Be careful. I use 'cookies' on my shelves which are a thin sacrificial layer to protect my shelves. You can get huge ones, shelf sized, or individual little ones to place under specific pieces. You can sometimes use sacrificial pots to contain risky glazed pieces too.
END
So! You've had your safety brief, you know what tools you should look to start with, you know you need shelving galore and lots of buckets. Start learning to wedge, get yourself access to a kiln and the playing, making and experimentation can begin!
Pottery is one of my greatest pleasures in life. It does things to my brain that no other wellness, meditation, medication or therapy has been able to do and gets me all fizzly excited for the future. It's wildly addictive - you'll be selling at markets in no time simply to get rid of all the pots you've frantically made. One of the greatest lessons I slowly learned was to be okay with putting my pots in the bin before firing them. I started out firing everything but it was ultimately a waste of clay. Better to practise making and then recycle the clay until you're really happy with the final product. That being said, I'm glad to have evidence of how I used to make so I can see how far I've come.
If you ever have questions, please reach out to me or other potters. The community is here to help and start you on your own pottery journey and potters have been some of the most friendly and open makers I've ever had the pleasure of meeting. I'm always here for you. Good luck, have fun, stay safe and share your work!
TOP TIP RECAP
Throw with warm water in winter
Plaster explodes in the kiln - avoid contamination
Clay pieces will explode if they freeze - if your work has to be left outside, wrap them in bags, towels, cardboard etc. to try insulate them from the cold.
Keep your throwing waste/water. It's full of the smallest particles of the clay that keep it plastic and supple. Put all your throwing waste into your reclaim buckets.
NO CLAY DOWN DRAINS
Dispose of glaze at the tip if you can - they likely won't know what it is but just say it's hazardous paint.
Wear a good mask during powdered glaze mixing
ALWAYS clean with water/mop - don't inhale clay dust or glaze dust.
Never get attached to a pot til it's twice fired. But also don't be afraid to bin the things you make - not everything needs to be fired.
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