Why We Glaze in Small Batches

Every glaze we use is mixed in batches of a few gallons at a time, tested on a handful of trial tiles, and then applied by hand to whatever's coming out of the bisque kiln that week. We could mix larger batches and get more consistency piece to piece. We choose not to, mostly because the glazes we like best are the ones with the most variation built into their chemistry.

Our ash glazes, made partly from wood ash collected at the Asheville kiln's wood-firing weekends, are the clearest example. Ash composition changes depending on what wood burned and how hot the fire ran, so no two batches of ash glaze behave quite the same in the kiln. One batch runs glassy and pools in the bowl's interior; the next comes out matte and even. We test each batch, but we don't try to correct it into sameness.

Placement in the kiln matters just as much as the glaze recipe. A piece near the firebox in a wood kiln will pick up flashing, unglazed color shifts from flame and ash contact, that a piece in the cooler back chamber won't show at all. Two mugs glazed from the same batch and fired in the same load can come out looking like they're from different collections entirely.

We photograph and describe pieces individually where the variation is significant, particularly in the Maker Series, rather than using a single stock photo for a whole batch. It's slower for us, but it means what you see is closer to what you'll get, and we'd rather manage expectations up front than field a return because a mug's glaze pooled differently than the one in a product photo.

The same logic applies to our natural-dyed textiles. A madder dye lot pulled in July will run warmer than one pulled in October, when the plants have had a full season to build up color compounds in their roots. We label dye lots on our woven goods for the same reason we don't over-standardize glazes: the variation is the material telling you something true about the batch it came from.

If consistency across multiple pieces matters for your use, wall hangings sold as a pair, place settings for eight, tell us when you order and we'll pull from a single dye lot or glaze batch where we can. We can't promise it in every case, but we can usually get close, and we'd always rather have that conversation before a piece ships than after.