Here is a step by step look at how we make pottery. These are the steps we use every day in our studio. The process of making pottery at our studio is basically the same as you will find at any other true pottery studio in the world today. From raw clay to finished product we follow the steps that have been established over the centuries by potters on every continent. Every piece of pottery we make is hand crafted. We do not use the shortcut methods of press moulding, buying bisque ware from outside suppliers, or using mechanical devices to make the pots. Cindy does all the wheel throwing on an electric potter's wheel and all the slab pottery is built by hand. The only moulding we do is some slump moulding of platters, and even then each is made from a slab rolled on the slab roller and cut by hand before being draped into a mould.

Our clay is purchased from the Plainsman Clay Company which is located in Medicine Hat, Alberta. Plainsman processes clays from Alberta, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan, as well as Montana to provide raw materials for potters all over Western Canada. We work with different clay bodies depending on what we are building and to obtain a bisqued product with which our glazes will fit well. For wheel thrown pottery the red and brown clays are first "pugged" in a pug mill to thoroughly blend them. White clay is simply wedged straight from the box. Our pug mill was made for us by a local machinist and inventor, Guy Ells aka "Moonlight Manufacturing". This machine is made with two counter-rotating screw augers which take the clay we feed into the hopper and mix it thoroughly, then push it through a single 3" outlet pipe, accomplishing basically the same action as hand wedging. A good pug mill such as this forces almost all the air out of the clay. (Some more elaborate pug mills have vacuum pumps to try and remove every last bit of air.)