---
title: "Stoneware and the Everyday Table"
url: https://springpottery.com/
description: "A stoneware bowl and a factory dinner plate are both fired clay, and they behave almost nothing alike once they are in daily use."
---

# Stoneware and the Everyday Table

Pottery at Home

A stoneware bowl and a factory dinner plate are both fired clay, and they behave almost nothing alike once they are in daily use. The difference begins in the kiln.

Pottery at Home · About 5 minutes

A piece of handmade stoneware is an odd object to own. It is heavier than the plates sold in sets, it is rarely perfectly round, and the glaze does not repeat exactly from one pot to the next. None of that is a flaw in the work. It is a straightforward consequence of how stoneware is made and how hot it is fired, and once the reasons are clear the pots become much easier to choose and to live with.

Stoneware is not a shape or a style. It is a description of what the clay becomes at temperature. Clay bodies are classified by the heat at which they mature, and stoneware matures high, usually somewhere between 1200 and 1300 degrees Celsius. At that heat the particles in the clay begin to fuse and a portion of the body turns glassy. Potters call this vitrification. The fired result is dense, it rings when tapped, and it absorbs very little water.

Earthenware, by contrast, matures several hundred degrees lower. It stays porous. That is why an unglazed terracotta pot sweats and why an earthenware dish will eventually take up water through a crazed glaze and stay damp for days. Porcelain sits at the other end, fired as high as stoneware or higher, whiter and more translucent because of what is in the clay rather than because of any difference in principle.

The density that makes stoneware durable also makes it heavy. A thrown stoneware bowl carries more material than a pressed plate because it has to: a wall thrown on a wheel has to stand up while it is soft, and a foot ring has to carry the weight of whatever the bowl holds without flexing. Factory tableware is made by pressing a slab of clay over a mould, which permits a thinner and more even wall than a hand can pull.

[Continue reading Stoneware and the Everyday Table](https://springpottery.com/stoneware-and-the-everyday-table)