Why are handmade vases expensive?

Q: What’s involved in making a handmade vase?

Step 1: clay. Working with clay isn’t simple. If you get so much as a single air bubble in your clay, it is far more likely to explode when it’s fired (made solid) in a kiln. So clay has to be wedged to ensure air bubbles are pushed out, then made into a ball ready to use.

Just like anything that’s properly crafted by hand, the creation of handmade vases require time, skill and attention to detail.

Not a good enough answer? Fair enough. We’ll take you through everything that goes into making a handmade vase using a throwing wheel, compared with mass production.

What’s involved in making a handmade vase?

Step 1: clay

Working with clay isn’t simple. If you get so much as a single air bubble in your clay, it is far more likely to explode when it’s fired (made solid) in a kiln. So clay has to be wedged to ensure air bubbles are pushed out, then made into a ball ready to use.

Step 2: clay to vase shape

To turn a ball of clay into a vase, we use a throwing wheel. If you’ve ever seen ‘Ghost’ then yes, it’s just like that. If you’ve not, a throwing wheel spins round really fast while you use your hands to shape the clay.

If you think creating a vase shape on a wheel that’s spinning round really fast sounds difficult, you’re right! Many beginners (and occasionally for more experienced artists) have vases flop, go wonky or even fly off of the wheel altogether.

Anyway, once you’ve got your clay on the wheel there are stages to go through to ensure the vase is level/equal and to be extra sure there are no air bubbles. These include:

Sticking your clay to the wheel – this can be achieved by whacking it down in the middle, or sticking the edges down all around the ball of clay
Coning the clay up and down – encasing it with your hands and squeezing it up and down – to centre the clay (and remove any remaining air bubbles)

Then, to start making the actual vase shape by hand, the steps are:

Making a hockey puck shape before carefully making a hole in the middle, being careful not to go all the way through to the bottom, so that there’s a base for the vase. An important point here is to make sure the base of the vase isn’t too thick. Thick clay cracks and no-one wants a vase with a crack in the bottom
Pulling the walls of the vase up. This is one of the tricky bits and often involves holding your breath, especially on larger pieces. There’s lots to say about this but to not go on too much, the most important thing is to keep the walls even without too much or little clay at the top, which can cause them to collapse
Strangling the vase. Sounds exactly like it is! To make the neck of the vase you have to encase the walls in both hands or between your fingers and very carefully strangle it to create the neck of your choice. Another chance for everything to go spectacularly wrong, but also kind of fun
Finishing the rim – this involves using a sponge or rib (solid thin thing which smooths the surface of the clay) to make a nice even top to your vase. Sometimes you’ll need to cut the top layer away first, which involves using a needle as the wheel spins round

Once your handmade vase has dried a little bit, the next steps are:

Finishing the bottom – this can involve lots of tools, but the gist of this part is that you need to remove any excess clay from the base of the vase. A wooden knife pointed downwards or inwards can do the trick, or another type of rib
Trimming the vase – this is a step which can be extremely difficult with a vase because you generally need it to be upside down on the wheel. This stage trims away clay that’s hardened slightly but not fully dry, to shape the vase or smooth the outside. You’ll see this on the bottom of some pots and vases too, where a foot for it to stand on has been created by trimming. If a vase’s bottom isn’t trimmed on a wheel it’s usually smoothed using a knife by hand
Carving the vase – similar to trimming, not every vase is carved but those that are need to be carved during the same almost dry/still workable phase. Carving is done using sharp tools and can be a very satisfying (although sometimes worthy of breath holding) process
Drying out the vase – if you’re lucky enough to still have a vase that hasn’t flown off the wheel, crumpled during neck-making or had a hole gauged during trimming or carving, next up is drying the vase. This sounds simple right? Even at this phase there’s a chance for everything to go wrong – dry your vase too quickly and it’ll crack. So, it’s important to be patient and dry your vase until it’s base no longer feels cooler than it’s neck, before you fire in the kiln

Once your handmade vase is dry

Sanding is next – not everyone does this but we like to ensure all the edges are smoothed and the bottoms are as level as they can be. It’s just what it sounds like, sandpaper on hard clay!

Now to make your handmade vase more solid by firing in the kiln

The vase now goes into the kiln (usually with a load of other pots unless you’ve made a huge vase – there’s no sense in putting one in at a time because kilns are expensive to power) for the first time. This firing is to make the clay solid enough to glaze and usually takes around 36 hours from the point where you put the vase into the kiln until it’s cool enough to be safe to take it out again

This is another area where your vase could be ruined. If somehow there were air bubbles in the clay, or it wasn’t dry enough before you put it in for firing, your vase can crack enough to explode. If you’re really unlucky your vase can explode with such ferocity that it takes out the one next to it, too

Decorating your vase by hand

Assuming your vase made it out of the kiln in one piece, glazing is next. There are a few ways to glaze a vase: painting, dipping, spraying, sponging or spattering. We tend to hand paint the glaze onto vases for a precise and even coverage, but this isn’t the fastest process because using a paintbrush means the vase requires three coats of glaze, which each have to dry in-between the next coat, to avoid your glaze bubbling up and cracking in the kiln.

Glaze costs

Side note here: glazes are pretty expensive. You can make you’re own if you’re a wizard, chemist or very intelligent person who has all the right safety measures in place. We’re not any of those things and like many potters, we mix our glaze from powder or purchase ready made glaze. This can cost between £15 per litre to £30 per litre and above. And considering each vase or pot requires 3 coats of glaze, it doesn’t go a long way.

Back to the process:

It’s important to remove any glaze from the bottom of the vase (or wax the bottom to stop glaze from sticking to it) because if it goes into the kiln with glaze on the bottom it’ll stick to the shelf and both shelf and vase will become ruined
Drying again – now we wait for the glaze to be completely dry (usually overnight) before it goes back into the kiln

Your handmade vase goes back into the kiln

Now the kiln goes to a higher temperature for two reasons: to turn the glaze into something that hardens your vase and stays adhered to your vase permanently and secondly to make your vase even more solid than the first time. The first firing (called bisque firing) leaves your vase porous so that glaze can be absorbed, while the second firing heats the clay even higher so that it’s no longer absorbent.
This firing can take around 30 hours too, so now it’s just a waiting game, keeping your fingers crossed that the glaze doesn’t bubble and your clay doesn’t crack

As mentioned earlier, just turning a kiln on can be expensive. If you think turning your oven on to 200 degrees is one of the most expensive things you can do in your home, consider a kiln usually goes up to around 1000-1200 degrees for firings and each vase needs to be fired twice. Most potters (us included) will fill their kiln to the brim in order to make firing as cost and energy efficient as possible, but for small businesses this cost has to be factored into the cost of the vase.

Mass making vases

Not every vase is handmade. Practically identical vases can be made using a process called slip casting, where a mixture of clay and water is poured into a mould, to create a vase. Then there are machines used for imprinting glaze onto vases using conveyer belts.

We’re sure there’s more to it than that, but as all of our handmade vases are made using a throwing wheel, we don’t have first hand experience of mass production. However, we hope that by shedding a little light on what’s involved in both processes, you can see why handmade vases are priced higher than ones bought and sold in bulk!

See our handmade vases

Take a look at the handmade vases we’ve made and see if you can see where we’ve carried out some of the processes detailed above.

Questions about our handmade vases

If you have any questions about our handmade vases, please feel free to email us at hello@meadowmade.co.uk

About the author

Hannah loves sharing her knowledge about both the outside world and the interiors world, so that Meadow Made customers are as informed and entertained as possible. Find out more about Hannah.