Is handmade pottery dishwasher safe?

High-fired stoneware usually is — the glaze is vitrified and the clay has no porosity left to absorb water. Earthenware and raku almost never are: they are fired lower, stay slightly porous, and dishwasher detergent will slowly dull and craze the glaze. Ask the maker, and if the answer is vague, wash it by hand.

Why does one mug cost £30?

Because a mug is five separate operations — throwing, trimming, pulling and attaching a handle, glazing, firing — spread over about three weeks of drying and two kiln firings. Add a 15–30% loss rate from cracks and glaze faults and the studio is making a normal hourly wage, not a margin.

How do I tell hand-thrown from slip-cast?

Look at the base. A thrown pot has a foot ring cut with a tool and often a spiral where the wire took it off the wheel; a cast pot has a smooth flat base and a seam line somewhere on the body. Then lift it: hand-thrown walls vary in thickness and the pot is lighter than it looks.

Why Hand-Thrown Pottery Costs What It Costs

I bought a mug in Seoul for the equivalent of £32 and my sister asked, reasonably, what was wrong with the £4 one. Nothing was wrong with it. It had a handle, it held coffee, it was the same colour as the other seven. What the £32 mug had was a wall thickness that varied by a millimetre and a half, and a handle that had been pulled by hand rather than cast in a mould, and a foot ring that had been cut on the wheel with a loop tool and then sanded.

That is the whole difference, and it is worth understanding before deciding whether to pay for it.

What actually happens in a studio

A potter throws a mug in about four minutes. Then it dries for a day, gets trimmed — the base turned true and a foot ring cut — which takes another three or four minutes. The handle is pulled from a lump of clay, left to firm up, and attached the next day. Then it dries for a week, slowly, or it cracks. Then it is bisque-fired to about 1,000°C, glazed, and fired again to 1,250°C.

Two firings means two trips through a kiln that takes eight to twelve hours to run and another twelve to cool. A kiln is fired full, so a mug occupies a share of it, and if a shelf is half empty the potter either waits or wastes the firing.

Add it up honestly and a mug is 25–35 minutes of skilled labour plus a share of kiln time plus materials. Now add the loss: somewhere between 15% and 30% of pots fail — a crack in drying, a glaze that runs onto the shelf, a handle that separates in the second firing. The failures cost exactly as much to make as the successes.

At £30, a studio mug is paying its maker a normal wage. At £8, a factory mug is paying a machine. Neither price is a trick. They are prices for different amounts of a person's time.

What the money buys you in use

The differences are small and they are all in the hand.

Wall thickness. Hand-thrown walls run 4–6mm and vary slightly. That variation is why a thrown mug feels warm rather than hot, and why it does not ring when you set it down.

The handle. A pulled handle is drawn from a lump of clay, so it has an oval section that fits between fingers. A cast handle is a round tube and it presses on one point of your index finger. You will not notice this in a shop. You will notice it in year three.

The foot ring. An unglazed, sanded ring at the base means the pot sits flat without rocking and does not scratch the table. It also means the pot was finished by someone who expected it to be used.

The glaze. Factory glaze is applied by machine to a tolerance of a tenth of a millimetre. Studio glaze is dipped or poured, so it pools slightly at the base and thins at the rim. That is what people mean when they say a pot looks alive — it is an uneven surface catching light unevenly.

What to check before you buy

Turn it over. The foot ring should be clean, sanded, and unglazed. A rough or glazed foot will scratch a wooden table.

Run a finger around the rim. It should be even in thickness. A rim that thins to a knife edge will chip, and a chipped rim on a mug is the end of the mug.

Look inside. Interior glaze should be complete, with no dry patches — a dry patch is where liquid will eventually seep. If the vase has an unglazed inside, it will weep through the wall and leave a mark on whatever it stands on.

Look for crazing: the fine web of cracks in a glaze. On vintage pots it is harmless and often beautiful. On a new pot it means the glaze and the clay are shrinking at different rates, and it will get worse.

And ask the one question that sorts the market: is it stoneware or earthenware? Stoneware is fired high enough to vitrify and will take hot water, dishwashers and twenty years. Earthenware is fired lower, stays slightly porous, and is a different object with different rules.

Building a shelf without buying a set

The instinct is to buy eight of everything at once, which is the most expensive way to end up with a cupboard you do not like.

Buy one. Use it for a month. If it earns its place, buy a second from the same maker — not the same day, so the glazes differ slightly, which is the point of handmade. A shelf built over three years has a coherence that a matched set bought in an afternoon does not, and it costs the same spread over time.

The practical version: buy plates in fours, mugs in twos, bowls in ones. Plates take the most wear and break in pairs. Mugs are personal and get used unevenly. Bowls are the ones you buy because a shape caught your eye, and you only ever need three or four.

Two constraints worth holding to. Pick one clay body and stay with it — stoneware with stoneware, earthenware with earthenware — because the two chip and age differently and side by side the difference reads as a mistake. And pick a maker whose work you can replace, so that a broken plate in year four is an order rather than a search.

Repair, and when not to

A chip on the rim of a mug can be smoothed with a diamond pad in two minutes and stops catching your lip. That is the whole repair, and it is worth doing on any pot you like.

A crack is different. A hairline crack in a mug will harbour bacteria and will eventually fail; retire it to hold pens. A crack in a bowl that only holds fruit is fine indefinitely. The question is not whether it is cracked but whether it holds liquid that goes in a person.

Never use superglue on anything that will hold food or drink. Cyanoacrylate is not food-safe once cured in a joint, and a repaired cup that tastes of glue is a cup you stop using. If a piece is worth real repair, a professional ceramics conservator uses an archival adhesive — and for most pots under £50, the honest answer is that it is not worth it.

Crazing — the fine web of cracks in a glaze — is worth one more note. On old pots it is harmless and often lovely, and it is where the tea stains settle, which is why old cups go brown inside. On a new pot it means the glaze is under tension and will craze further. It does not make the pot unsafe, but it does mean it will stain.

The chip that does not end it

Here is the argument I would actually make for paying more, and it has nothing to do with craft.

A chip on a factory mug makes it a mug you no longer want. A chip on a stoneware pot makes it a pot with a chip, and it stays in the cupboard for another fifteen years, holding pens or flowers or the thing you keep meaning to fix.

Objects that survive their first damage are the only ones that get old. And getting old is the only way an object becomes worth anything to a household — not in money, in the plain sense that you stop noticing it and start relying on it.