Pottery Breakages: What They Teach Us About Craftsmanship

It might sound a little cringe, but breakages really are a wonderful learning opportunity!

Breakages in the making or greenware stage are the most common, but also some of the easiest to fix and change. You can still carve back the clay to make a new shape if you need to, and there’s still a chance you can glue things back together either in the glazing stage, or just with glue at the very end (if the piece is just ornamental). If the breakage is really too bad to salvage, you can still recycle this clay and other than your lost time and the bump to your ego all’s well.

Sometimes things break in the bisque stage. This is frustrating for everyone because it’s harder to redeem now! BUT all is not lost! There’s still a chance things can be attached either with glaze or glue later, depending on what it is.

Often when things break in the bisque stage it’s because of two things – either the clay wasn’t compressed well enough (this is important in hand building, not just wheel throwing), or things weren’t attached well enough. Make those score lines strong!

Every now and again something breaks in the glazing firing. This is rarer, because it’s already been through a firing and we should have seen a crack or something at that stage, and been able to abort the pottery mission in the previous stage! BUT, sometimes things get missed, and this is mega disappointing! It totally sucks to think you’re getting a beautiful finished product and in reality you’re getting… nothing.

Finally, things can break from use once you’ve got them home! Thinner pieces of pottery, and ones with less study joins are more fragile, and more likely to break if knocked against something. What can we learn from this? Well, after having so many of my bowls and mugs we use in the house broken by my children being too rough with them, these days I just make them a bit thicker so they have a better change of surviving my ADHD kids!