How to Care for Handmade Ceramics, Daily Use to Deep Clean

Handmade ceramics need three things: hand washing, protection from sudden temperature change, and storage that keeps unglazed feet away from glazed surfaces. Get those right and a piece will outlast you. Everything below is detail on those three, plus how to tell a genuine fault from a characteristic of the process.

Daily washing

Hand wash with warm water and a soft sponge. Dishwasher detergent is far more abrasive than washing-up liquid. Over repeated cycles it dulls glaze and fades hand-painted decoration, and the drying cycle stresses thicker pieces.

Avoid abrasive scourers. Steel wool and harsh pads leave fine scratches in glaze which then hold stains, so scrubbing hard today makes the piece stain faster next month. This is the most common way people accelerate the ageing of a piece while trying to look after it.

Dry the foot before putting it away. The unglazed ring on the base absorbs water. Stacked while damp, it will mark whatever is underneath and can develop a musty smell that is very difficult to remove once it sets in.

Wash before first use, then use it. The single biggest threat to a good ceramic piece is not damage, it is being considered too precious to take out of the cupboard.

How do you avoid cracking a ceramic piece?

Almost all cracking in handmade ceramics is thermal shock: the clay expanding unevenly because one part heated or cooled much faster than another. It is entirely preventable.

• Warm a mug before pouring boiling water. Rinse with hot tap water first. This matters most in winter and with thicker walls.
• Never move a piece from fridge to oven, or oven to cold water.
• Do not put handmade ceramics in the microwave unless the maker confirms it. Uneven wall thickness means uneven heating.
• Let a hot piece cool on a cloth or wooden board, not on cold stone or steel.
• Watch pieces made from more than one clay. Where two clay bodies meet they shrink at slightly different rates, so that join is the weak line. This applies particularly to nerikomi, where coloured clays are layered through the body.

Lower-fired bodies are more vulnerable than higher-fired ones. If you want to understand why a terracotta piece behaves differently from a stoneware one, our guide to stoneware, porcelain and terracotta explains how firing temperature drives everything.

Storing without chipping

Most damage happens in the cupboard rather than at the table.

Put felt, cloth or paper between stacked plates. The unglazed foot of one plate against the glazed face of another is the single most common source of scratching. A cheap felt pad solves it permanently.

Hang mugs or stand them upright, do not nest them. Nested mugs jam and chip when pulled apart.

Store heavy platters flat, not on edge. On edge, the full weight rests on a small point of rim.

Leave space. Most chips happen during retrieval, not during use, and a tightly packed cupboard makes retrieval clumsy. If you have to move three things to reach one, that one is at risk every time you use it.

Which imperfections are normal?

Worth knowing, because handmade pieces are frequently returned for characteristics that are inherent to the process rather than faults.

• Glaze pooling. Glaze runs while molten and collects in hollows, going deeper in colour there. Expected, and often the most beautiful part of a piece.
• Wandering painted lines. A hand-painted line is not a printed one. Slight drift is the evidence it was painted.
• Crazing. The fine web of lines in the glaze surface, caused by glaze and clay cooling at different rates. Normal on many handmade glazes.
• Variation between pieces. Colour depth, height and pattern placement differ across a batch.
• Small unglazed patches on the foot. Deliberate. The piece has to stand on something in the kiln, and glaze would fuse it to the shelf.
• Slight rocking. A very small amount is normal in hand-formed work.

What is not normal: a crack through the body, a rim chip, a piece that rocks badly enough to spill, or a glaze that feels rough and gritty where it should be smooth. Those are faults and worth raising.

If you want the fuller argument for why this variation is the point rather than a tolerance failure, we set it out in handcrafted versus mass-made.

Can a chipped ceramic piece be repaired?

A clean break can be glued with a food-safe epoxy, but the repaired piece should be treated as decorative afterwards rather than returned to daily food use, since the join can harbour bacteria and will not survive repeated washing.

Kintsugi, the Japanese method of joining breaks with lacquer and gold, treats the repair as visible history rather than something to hide. For a piece with meaning, it is a better answer than the bin, and it turns a damaged everyday object into a Curator one.

A realistic maintenance rhythm

After each use: hand wash, dry the foot, put away with space around it.

Monthly: deal with tannin staining in the two or three mugs that get daily use. Five minutes with bicarbonate of soda.

Seasonally: take everything out of the cupboard, check for chips that have appeared unnoticed, and re-pad any stacks where the felt has shifted.

Our ceramics are hand-painted and hand-finished, so expect the variation described above. It is the reason two pieces of the same design are never quite the same.