How long does it take to make a mug?

This video is sponsored by Barkley. How long does it take to make a mug? This question is the bane of a potter's existence. My go-to answer is a long time. It takes a long time. The reason it takes us such a long time is because we typically work in batches. At least most of us do. This is the most efficient way to make like regular shmegular mugs. And these batches typically take multiple weeks if you count the drying and firing time. But forget all that because what you want to know is how many active hours or minutes it takes to make a singular mug. And I'd like to know that too. So today we're going to find out. I'm going to make a batch of 10 for easy math and I'm going to time each step. So far we're at 4 minutes and 55 seconds. Next step is throwing first one down. But don't be fooled because this is just the first step. We still gotta trim. We still gotta handle. We still gotta glaze. Okay, I threw 10 except I messed one up. So I'll have to weigh out some more clay, wedge it up again, throw that again. So that gets added to the total as well. I don't know if you noticed but I have a new apron and I'm pretty excited about it. This apron is thanks to today's sponsor, Barkley. Barkley is a brainchild of a home cook that you might know, Internet Shaquille, who by the way makes incredible cooking videos right here on YouTube. This apron was designed for both cooking and pottery and what I really love about it is it's got this split leg situation. I've never had a split leg apron before and I think this might be why I've never really gotten into aprons in the past. It's just like super practical because a regular apron doesn't cover both legs when you're sitting at the wheel. I also really love the construction on this thing. It's high quality, made of thick cotton and has big pockets. So Victor gave me three aprons and I really only need one. So I'm going to be giving away these two. To enter to win a Barkley apron, please leave a comment about what you'd like to make next, whether that's in the kitchen or the studio and I'll choose a winner at random in seven days. Thanks to Barkley for sponsoring the video. Now let's go back to our mugs. We are now 51 minutes in and yeah, basically an hour to throw all these. I'm not surprised by that number. There's still a lot more steps to do. So if you're new here, I can't really do anything else right now because they need to dry a little bit before we move on to the next steps. So I'm going to, yeah, let them dry out overnight, flip them and let the bottoms dry and I'll see you tomorrow. Good morning. It is so dreary outside right now. The lighting in here sucks. I've got my artificial light going. It is what it is. It's going to be dreary for a few days. Autumn in Germany. Anyway, I flipped these guys last night so that the bottoms could dry out. They're pretty much ready to trim. They're a little bit on the wet side, but it's going to be fine. So we're going to trim today. We're going to handle today. And I still have my timer. It was really hard for me last night to not like exit out, but I want to keep it continuous if possible. So let's trim. Okay, they're all trimmed. They're looking pretty good. One or two of them have slightly thin bottoms. I have to wait and see when they're fully fired, like if the bottom is going to survive. It's possible that the bottom is not actually too thin. It's just that this clay is still really quite wet. So it's kind of hard for me to tell. But we will know if we get S cracks that the bottoms on just one or two of them. Anyway, now it's time for my least favorite part, which is making and attaching handles. So I did something kind of stupid, which is that I'm using reclaim, which I love using reclaim. It makes a really nice effect, but I'm not sure if this reclaim is from the same batch. So it's possible that the handle doesn't fully match the body of the mug. I'm hoping it's going to be close enough and then the glaze itself will just obscure any sort of color difference. I'm hoping we shall see. It's going to be fine. The fact that I'm using reclaim is also why there's like a little on some of them, there's like a little bit of marbling, which is where I didn't wedge well enough, I guess. But it can look really cool too. Oh, by the way, we are at... I had to plug my phone in, but here we're at 124. I wonder... No, there's no way because handles take a long time. I'm thinking three hours is my guess. Something around there because I guess we're like halfway through. But handles and attaching handles, I think that's why I don't like it is because it's tedious as hell. So I'm actually curious how long this is going to take. Something like that, I think. OK, everything's handled. We're at two hours and four minutes. I don't know if you can see. I'm just going to tidy them up a little bit and then wrap them up in plastic for the evening. One thing I haven't really been counting is like the cleanup time and like the getting the tools together. I don't know. It didn't feel right to count that, but it is obviously something that takes time. OK, so what I like to do now with mugs is I like to wrap them in plastic for another overnight dry out session. This is going to homogenize the water content in the handles versus the mugs because the handles are still quite wet. I don't want to finish smoothing them out until they're completely dry. Like there's fingerprints on them right now. I don't know if you can see. And that's like impossible to smooth when they're wet. So I'm going to let them get leather hard. And then tomorrow, just quick round of tidying up. Signing them and then we're going to let them dry. So I'll see you tomorrow. OK, I just smoothed out and signed all of them. They are ready to go and we are at two hours and 24 minutes. So we still have to do the glazing. Still got to load them in the kiln and all that stuff. But we're getting to the end of it. And so far, I still have 10 pieces. So we'll see how many of them survive the kiln. I'm going to just let these dry out for about a week and then I'll see you when we load them into the kiln. OK, it's about a week later and we're going to time how long it takes me to load this in the kiln. They should be completely dry now, but just in case they're not, the bisque cycle is fairly slow. OK, I did pack a couple of other things in there, but it's mostly the mugs and the whole process took three and a half minutes. So mine's going to take 24 hours, so I'll catch up with you after it's done. Good morning. So I loaded these over the weekend. I didn't time it, but I'm just going to add on another minute for the unload because it doesn't take much time to like... It really doesn't take much time at all. So my next steps are to check over everything. I'm going to see if I need to sand any piece of the bisque. Like sometimes there's little parts that get stuck on the edge or I'm also going to check that my signature is nice and smooth. You can see an example here. There's like a little... Well, maybe you can't see. There's just like a little piece of slip that got caught on. So I always just check my bisque after I finish it, before I glaze it. So I'm going to do that now. And I guess we should time it. Here we go. OK, that was three minutes. So I'm going to go ahead and glaze these now. And what I like to use lately with these types of mugs, I found that this sky blue looks gorgeous with these mugs. So I'm just going to go ahead and glaze them all the same color. I did do a series of these mugs not that long ago in all these colors. Lighting in here is terrible. I don't know. I don't know if you can see very well. And I'm completely out of sky blue because I've been giving them away to my friends and neighbors. They were so pretty. So I think I'm just going to make this whole batch in the sky blue. So the next step is wiping the bottoms. I don't wax my bottoms because I don't know. I just feel like it's pointless kind of because you still have to wipe the bottoms. You do waste less glaze if you wax the bottoms. But I would rather save time. And also burning wax is no fun. Everything has survived so far. This is the one with a very thin bottom. We shall see if it survives. I'm not sure if I can even sell it, though, even if it survives, because I don't know. I don't want to sell something that might break easily. But we'll see at the end how it feels. Now we just load these guys back into the kiln. 15 minutes, exactly. Wow, that was actually... That's a lot faster than I really thought it was. I mean, most of the time, I suppose I'm doing a bunch of different crazy glaze ideas. So glazing all one color is not super common for me, I guess. But still, that's fast. Just over a minute per pot. That's pretty impressive. I dig it. Okay, let's fire these. Once again, this process is going to take 24 hours, maybe a little bit longer. I did put some other stuff in here just to pack it as tightly as possible. Whenever I fire a kiln, I try to fill it with as much stuff as possible. It's just the most energy efficient way of doing things. I'm just one person. I don't always have stuff lying around that I can put in. That reminds me, I have some samples I need to add to this. I would be very mad at myself if I had forgotten those. I think that's everything. All right, let's fire this bad boy. Okay, the kiln is cool. We can open it up and see the final result. Nice. Oh my goodness. Just look how sweet these are. So I've used this clay before with this glaze, and they turned out exactly how I wanted them to. I love the drips. Like, they look kind of like muddy and kind of dirty. Like, this is exactly what I was going for. I wanted this very earthy feel to them. I love how you can see all of these drips. The drips are on all of them, but they're all completely unique because of that. I just love this design. It makes me so happy. It's like the perfect tea cup, at least for me anyway. I'm so happy with these. Let us total up how much time this all took me. So if you remember, the making took two hours, 24 minutes and 30 seconds, basically. Loading the bisque took three minutes and 30 seconds. Unloading one minute, glazing and reloading, 15 minutes on the dot. So totaling it all up, we have two hours and 44 minutes. So my original plan was to divide this by 10, but I do want to exclude. Yeah, this is the one. I do want to remove the one that has a too thin bottom. Can you hear it? It's just like it's too thin and I don't feel comfortable selling that just because it could break if I put hot water in it. Also, I can just keep it for myself. So I'm not going to count that, though, because the whole reason that we're totaling this up is, you know, to calculate our prices and all that. And then there was one more I noticed when I was unloading it. This one right here. There's some, I believe it's kiln wash. Basically, some white chunk has stuck itself to the bottom of this piece. Really disappointed about it because it's a perfectly good mug, but I wouldn't consider this food safe because it's got this rough texture. And basically what that means is that bacteria, like you're never going to be able to clean around that rough texture very well. So bacteria can grow in there, making it not food safe. So I would say that I can't even use this at home. Maybe I'll put some pencils in it or something. This is not food safe, unfortunately. It's a perfectly beautiful mug. It is what it is. So we are down to eight. So dividing two hours and 44 minutes by eight. Oh God, math. How do I do this? I know how to make it into a decimal. How do I make it out of a decimal? Times 60, I guess. Okay, 20 and a half minutes per mug. I'm assuming I did that math correctly. Yeah, 20 and a half minutes per mug, which sounds like very little time. And I'm very happy with that number. But, and a huge, huge, huge but, this does not include the literal thousands, and I mean thousands of hours it took me to learn how to make mugs. From the throwing, to the trimming, to the glazing. All of that time has been literally thousands of hours. And, you know, anyone who's taken a pottery class knows that I'm right about this. And then on top of that, even after developing all of those skills, it took me at least tens of hours to come up with this specific design, to go through the iterations of different shapes, different glazes, figuring out what I like, you know, wasting time with failures. And then because I do this professionally, I have to at least double my time to do all of the other stuff I'm talking, the bookkeeping, the shipping, the photographing, all of that admin stuff takes a really long time. So although I do think it's like really cool and interesting to have gone through this little exercise to figure out how long it takes me to make a mug, I do feel like that number is a little bit deceptive. Not to mention that this is just my process. Like really, please don't think that you can apply this to other potters because all potters have different processes. And this is a very simple mug. Like I kind of reduced it down to the bare minimum for this exercise. What are the essentials that I need to make a mug? Any mug, a very simple mug. So I hope that that was interesting for you. That's all for me today. Thank you so much to Barkley for sponsoring this video. I hope that it was interesting for you. It certainly was an interesting exercise for me. I'll see you in the next one. Bye friends.