Porcelain Mug Making Workshop

£250

Tuesday June 16th and Thursday June 18th -

10am - 4pm.

This two day porcelain workshop offers a focused and rewarding introduction to throwing and refining elegant mugs on the potter’s wheel. Porcelain is a uniquely beautiful and demanding material—renowned for its smoothness, translucency, and refined finish—and this course is designed to help you build confidence and sensitivity in working with it.

You’ll be guided through the full process of creating porcelain mugs, from throwing balanced, considered forms to refining, finishing, and attaching handles. We’ll explore the nuances of traditional pulled handles alongside more contemporary approaches, helping you develop both technical skill and a personal design language.

Your tutor will bring a thoughtfully curated collection of mugs by a range of potters, offering inspiration and insight into form, proportion, surface, and finish. These examples will help deepen your understanding of what makes a successful porcelain piece.

With a strong emphasis on repetition and refinement, the workshop encourages you to recreate forms—an approach that is both challenging and deeply satisfying, and key to developing consistency and control with porcelain.

While the course is ideal for improvers and intermediate makers looking to expand their skills, adventurous beginners are very welcome to experience the unique qualities of porcelain for the first time.

Day 1
After studying a selection of reference pieces, we’ll focus on throwing porcelain mug forms. You’ll experiment with shape, scale, and clay weight, aiming to create at least two mugs with closely matched forms, ready for refining.

Day 2
We’ll return to your leather-hard pieces to refine and finish them through turning. You’ll then learn how to attach handles, exploring both traditional pulled techniques and more contemporary variations. If time allows, we’ll also touch on decorative approaches such as slip application, texture, inlay, and carving—enhancing the delicate surface quality that porcelain lends itself to.