From Clay to Shelf: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at How a Piece Is Made

Most objects in your home arrived via a factory, a conveyor belt, a container ship. You'll never know whose hands touched them, or whether any hands touched them at all. A handmade ceramic piece is different. Every single one passed through the same pair of hands, start to finish. Here's what that actually looks like

It Starts With the Clay

We work primarily with stoneware: a dense, durable clay body that fires at high temperatures and produces the kind of weight and solidity that feels grounding. Before anything is shaped, the clay is wedged: kneaded firmly on a work surface to remove air pockets and align the particles. It's meditative, repetitive work. It's also essential, a single air bubble left in the clay can cause a piece to crack or even explode in the kiln.

Shaping: Wheel or Hand?

99% of my work is produced by hand-building, this allows for more sculptural and irregular shapes. Often starting from a big pinch pot which then gets texture applied before being “cracked” open to produce the signature look my work has. The carved pieces do through a similar start but are allowed to firm up for a couple of hours before having pieces cut away with knife-like tools.  

This is where a piece begins to have a personality

Drying — The Part Nobody Talks About

Once shaped, a piece needs to dry slowly and evenly before it can be fired. Rush this stage and the clay warps or cracks. We cover pieces loosely with plastic and let them dry over several days, sometimes longer in humid weather. There's no shortcut here. The clay decides the pace

When a piece reaches leather-hard stage, firm but not yet bone dry, it goes back on the banding wheel for trimming. Excess clay is carved away from the base, feet are defined, and the form is refined. This is also when handles are attached, if the piece calls for one. After this process pieces will once again get covered with plastic until they are bone-dry

The Bisque Fire

The first firing, called a bisque fire, takes the bone-dry piece up to around 1000°C. This burns off any remaining organic material and transforms raw clay into ceramic: hard, porous, and ready to accept glaze. After the bisque fire, a piece is fragile in a different way. It's no longer clay, but it's not yet finished.

Glazing

Glaze is where colour, texture, and surface character come from. We mix our own glazes from raw materials: oxides, feldspars, silica,… and apply them by dipping, pouring, or brushing. The colours you see in the finished piece often bear little resemblance to the raw glaze. A pale grey slip can turn deep teal. A milky white can break to amber at the edges. You learn to read the materials, but you never fully control them.

That unpredictability is part of what makes each piece unique

The Glaze Fire — and Raku, and Obvara

The final firing takes glazed pieces up to 1280–1300°C for stoneware, vitrifying the clay body and melting the glaze into a glassy surface. This is where the piece becomes what it will be for the rest of its life.

Some of our pieces go through alternative firing processes instead: Raku, where pieces are removed from the kiln while glowing hot and placed in a container of combustible material, producing dramatic smoke patterns and metallic surfaces; or Obvara, a rare Baltic technique where the hot piece is dipped into a fermented flour-and-water mixture that burns onto the surface, creating a distinctive matte, organic texture found almost nowhere else in contemporary ceramics.

These aren't decorative choices. They're commitments to process, to accepting that the fire has the final say.

Cooling, Inspection, and the Ones That Don't Make It

After firing, pieces cool slowly in the kiln — opening it too soon risks thermal shock and cracking. When the kiln finally opens, it's always a moment of anticipation. Most pieces survive. Some don't. A crack along the base, a glaze that crawled and pooled in the wrong place, a warp that appeared overnight,… these pieces get set aside. We don't sell work we're not proud of unless it’s minor flaws that we will sell at a discount 

The ones that make it through are cleaned, inspected, and photographed. Then they go on the shelf.

From That Shelf to Yours

By the time a piece reaches you, it has been touched, shaped, trimmed, glazed, and fired, often over the course of two to three weeks. It has survived heat that would melt steel. It carries the marks of the process: the slight variation in glaze, the fingerprint pressed into the foot ring, the weight that no machine could replicate.

That's what you're holding when you hold a Ferus piece.