Good questions.

For most people, a 12 ounce mug is the right buy: it takes a normal pour of coffee with room to carry it without spilling. Go to 8 ounces if you drink espresso, tea, or hot chocolate in small amounts, or if the mug is for a kid. Go to 16 if you drink one big mug a day, add a lot of milk, or eat soup out of it. Handmade mug sizes are usually measured to the brim, so a 12 ounce mug comfortably holds 10, and a full 16 ounce stoneware mug is heavy, close to two pounds in the hand.

Choose a bowl by the food you will actually put in it, then check the rim, the interior glaze, and the foot. Match the width and depth to what you eat most, not to how the bowl looks on a shelf. Run a finger around the rim and across the inside; both should feel smooth and even. Turn it over: a clean, sanded foot ring is a sign someone finished the whole pot.

Every pot sits in a slightly different spot in the kiln, so each one gets a slightly different amount of heat, and no two coats of glaze go on exactly the same. Hotter spots melt the glaze further and thicker coats run and pool more, so two mugs from one batch come out with their own color and movement. The form, the weight, the handle and the food safety do not change. Only the surface does.

The orange peel texture is glaze that formed on the pot inside the kiln, not glaze that was painted on. Salt thrown into the fire turns to vapor, lands on the bare clay, and reacts with it into a thin, dimpled glass that is fully fused, food safe, and permanent. The orange and rust blushes are called flashing, and they mark where the flame passed. Three bare spots on the bottom are wadding scars, proof the pot was salt fired. It will not wear down, because there is nothing sitting on top of the clay to wear away.

I price a pot by starting from what it cost to make, in materials, firing, and hours, then adjusting for how many of its kind survive the kiln and for what the piece is honestly worth next to the rest of my work. Small everyday pieces sit near $15. Large or complicated pieces that took several sessions and a hard firing run toward $200. The number changes because the inputs change: a new kiln, a better throwing day, a worse firing.

At cone 10, both stoneware and porcelain make strong, food safe, everyday pots when they are fired to maturity. Stoneware is more forgiving to throw, carries warm color from the iron in the clay, and suits heavier, sturdier forms. Porcelain is whiter, smoother and denser, and can be thrown thin enough to glow, but it is less forgiving at every stage from the wheel to the kiln. For a buyer, both work daily; the difference is feel, weight and look.

The best handmade pottery gift is the piece the person will pick up every day, not the most impressive one on the shelf. For most people that is a mug or cup. For cooks it is a bowl they will actually serve from. For the person who already has everything, it is something small and specific, like a little dish or a bottle for one stem. One good piece is a better gift than a matched set of four, and if it is for December, order by October 25 for shipping, because handmade stock is limited by definition.

Stop buying for taste and buy for use. Pick a piece they will handle daily, in a size that fits an ordinary hand and an ordinary cupboard, in a color that sits quietly next to whatever they already own. A medium mug or a small bowl is the safest gift in ceramics. Skip vases and planters unless you know they have the plant or the flowers, and choose quiet color: browns, greys, greens and off-whites go with every kitchen.

The best pottery gift for a couple is a pair, not a set: two pieces of the same form in two different glazes, so each person has their own and they still read as one gift. Small is better than grand. A pair of cups, a bowl made for sharing, or a single-stem vase gets used every day; a big serving piece comes out twice a year. Buy for how they actually drink, and check it is dishwasher safe before you give it, because a gift that has to be babied gets left in the cupboard.

With a few days left, the reliable last minute gifts are the ones that do not travel through a warehouse. Buy from the shop and pick up in Logan, choose something small that is already finished, or give a note that says a custom piece is coming in the new year. Local pickup at the studio in Logan works by ordering online, messaging me, and setting a time. Small finished pieces start at $15 and are the ones most likely to still be on the shelf. A custom order will not be ready by Christmas, but the promise of one can be.

Yes. High-fired stoneware handles the dishwasher and the microwave. Hand washing keeps the surface at its best over the years, and avoiding sudden temperature shocks, like a cold pot going into a hot oven, protects any piece of handmade pottery. Adam's full answer →

Handmade pottery is food safe when the surface that touches food is a fully melted, stable glaze fired to the temperature it was designed for, with no lead and no crazing on that surface. Most working potters in this country use lead free glazes as a matter of course, so the real questions are about how the glaze was fired and what condition it is in. The inside surface matters most, so judge the liner, not the outside. A smooth, glassy, uncrazed interior is the standard for anything that holds food or drink, and a potter who cannot answer the question is the warning sign, not the pottery.

The bottom of a handmade mug is unglazed because glaze melts into glass in the kiln, and glass on the foot would weld the mug to the kiln shelf. I wipe or wax the foot so it stays bare. At cone 10 that bare clay is fired hard enough that it is not porous in any way that matters, so it is safe, it is finished, and it is supposed to look like that. It will darken with coffee, tea, and table use over the years, and that is normal, not damage.

Unwrap it, turn it over, and look at the foot. Wash it once by hand with warm water and a little soap, then start using it. After that first wash, the dishwasher is fine for most stoneware. Handmade pottery fired to stoneware temperature is meant to be used every day, and an unglazed foot, small bare spots, and slight color variation are all normal signs of how it was made, not defects.

A small chip in a stoneware mug can usually be smoothed with a fine diamond sanding pad and the mug is still fine to drink from. Chips on the foot or outside wall can be sanded smooth and kept; chips on the rim need careful sanding, then check with your lip before trusting it. Retire the mug if it leaks, if a crack runs from the chip down the wall, or if the edge cannot be made smooth. A fired pot cannot go back in the kiln to fix a chip, and I would not glue the rim of a mug you drink from.

Probably better than the rest of the kitchen. Everything I make is stoneware fired to cone 10, which is about as hot as studio pottery gets, and at that temperature the clay is dense and hard. It handles a microwave, a dishwasher, and a roommate, and I put my own pots through the dishwasher. It is still ceramic, so dropped on a tile floor it breaks like anything else. It is not fragile; it is just not a plastic cup.

Yes. Every piece is thrown on the wheel, trimmed, glazed and fired by Adam in his Logan studio, in small batches.

Clay passes through seven stages on its way to becoming a pot: slip, plastic (wet) clay, leather hard, bone dry, bisqueware, glazeware, and glaze fired. Each stage has a job you can do and jobs you cannot, and most cracked or ruined pots come from doing something at the wrong stage. The first four stages are reversible; add water and you are back to slip. Bisque firing is the line you cannot cross back over, and glaze firing is where the clay itself finishes, not just the glaze on top of it.

A bisque firing is a low first firing that turns dry clay into hard, porous ceramic so it can be glazed without falling apart. A glaze firing is the hot second firing, cone 10 in my case, that melts the glaze into glass and finishes the clay body underneath it. Bisque makes the pot handleable; glaze firing makes it a finished, usable pot. Some potters single fire, but for me the bisque is cheap insurance, because a low firing costs far less than the pots it protects.

Small, thin pieces like mugs and cups usually take several days to about a week to go from freshly thrown to bone dry. Larger or thicker pots can take two or three weeks, and slow drying under plastic, cold air or very thick bases can stretch that to months, which has happened to some of mine. Clay is ready to fire when it has turned lighter in color all the way through and no longer feels cool against your skin. Firing damp clay turns the leftover water to steam, and steam cracks pots.

Most pots that crack after firing were already going to crack before they went in. Uneven drying, a base that was never compressed, a handle attached wetter than the mug it joined: the kiln only finishes what the making started. An S shaped crack in the base means the floor was left loose or dried slower than the walls, and a crack at a handle or a rim comes from two pieces of clay shrinking at different rates. The real exception is a dunt, a cooling crack that genuinely happens inside the kiln.

Mostly not making pots. A large share of the week goes to preparing clay, processing glaze materials, mixing and sieving glazes, and cleaning up, and none of it produces a single finished object. Reclaim and pugging turn a table of dried scraps back into clay you can throw, and sieving ash and mixing glaze are slow, dusty, and unavoidable if you want your own surfaces. It is the work that makes the next month of pots possible.

All three are atmospheric firings: the surface comes from what is moving through the kiln, not just from what you brushed on. Salt gives the most even coat and the classic orange peel texture, with colors from the iron in the clay. Soda is sodium without the chlorine, flashes harder and more unevenly, with smoother patches and shadowed sides. Wood leaves fly ash that melts into a glaze wherever it lands, takes days of stoking, and gives the most variation pot to pot.

Oxidation means the fire has all the oxygen it wants and burns clean. Reduction means you deliberately starve it, so the flame pulls oxygen out of the metal oxides in your glaze and clay to keep burning. Iron that fires amber and brown in oxidation goes grey, green, or near black in reduction, and bare clay picks up warm toasted color instead of staying pale. Oxidation is the default in an electric kiln; reduction needs a flame you can choke, like the salt kiln I am building.

So far the salt kiln I am building in Logan has cost about $7,750 in the three big lines I can point to: about $4,000 for the used kiln itself with its brick, furniture and burners, about $3,000 for hard brick, and about $750 for the concrete pad. Propane is the line still open, and there is a second list of smaller costs I have not totaled yet. The number is real, but it is not finished.

Ordinary kiln wash is mostly silica, and silica is exactly what sodium vapor turns into glaze. In a salt kiln that means the wash glazes itself to the shelf, flakes, and drops onto the pots. The coating that works is alumina hydrate with a little kaolin to make it stick, brushed on thin, on the top face of each shelf only. Two thin coats beat one thick one, because a thick coat is what flakes.

My best advice is about order, not engineering: find the kiln or the brick first, decide on fuel and site early, and put hard brick everywhere the salt will reach. Almost every expensive surprise in a salt kiln build comes from making those calls late. Shop used before you design, because what you find shapes the kiln more than any drawing, settle fuel, site and the pad before brick goes up, and keep one notebook for the whole build.

Yes, some. The one I have written about most was a matching set of mugs for the Summers family, each stamped with their name. A custom order is a different kind of work from a shelf of one-offs, because the pieces have to agree with each other. The most useful message says three things: what the piece is for, how many you need, and whether there is a date it has to arrive by. A photo of a pot you already love helps more than a paragraph describing one.

I say yes to custom commissions when the piece is something I would make anyway, when it is meant to be used, and when the person asking is comfortable with a kiln deciding some of the details. I say no when a request pulls against the way I work, because a pot I do not believe in rarely turns out well for either of us. A clear no, said early, is kinder than a reluctant yes that runs late.

I wrap the pot, pack it snugly in a small box with cushioning on every side, then float that box inside a larger one with more cushioning between them. Most breakage comes from a pot shifting or touching something hard over days in a truck, not from one big drop, so nothing hard should touch the pot and the pot should not be able to move at all. Double boxing makes the package bigger, which is what raises the postage, and the shake test at the end is the only quality check that matters.

If you want handmade pottery under the tree, order what is already finished and in the shop, and order it by October 25 for shipping before Christmas. In stock pieces ship from Logan within a few days of your order. Ground shipping is the safe, affordable option only if you order early; late orders mean paying for faster service or picking up in person. Anything custom is a spring project, not a December one, and custom work does not ship before Christmas.

Yes. Order online and arrange a pickup in Logan instead of paying for shipping. If you have your eye on a particular piece, send me a message first.

Yes, within the US. Pieces are wrapped by hand and insured. Pickup at the studio in Logan is available by appointment.

Send a photo within a few days of delivery and Adam will replace it from the next firing or refund it.

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