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Thanks to hospitality of Manufaktura factory - we can present those pictures showing subsequent steps of pottery making. Polish pottery is high quality product where the amount of hand work is essential and overwhelming. It also takes a lot of time and effort to create the complete product so please remember it when you use it .Polish pottery is one of rare creations that try to survive the mass production, mechanically reproduced deluge of cheap products. Because of so high human contribution during its making, we would even risk to say, that it has its own soul. The story starts from the heaps of clay as you can see on the left. This material is extracted from local sources , a few miles from Boleslawiec. The clay is ground, mixed with water and drained and on the purpose to produce the highly plastic mass, that is then used to make pottery. There are several levels of liquidity of the clay - from a liquid to dense mass, depending in what pieces are to be made.
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| Many people doubt that Polish pottery is hand made. Here you can see how they make plates - using pottery wheel and hand work. Only the wheel is powered by the electricity not by foot action. As you can see on the picture on the right - some smaller pieces are made by pouring liquid clay solution into the mold . | |||
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| On the left side you can see how the handles for mugs or teacups are made. First they are formed by special mold and then manually fixed to pieces.When pieces are ready they go through first firing - on extreme right you can see items just coming out from kiln . | |||
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| Once pre-fired, the pottery pieces go to the painting hall. Each painter (99% women) have big choice of stamps and brushes, as well as special wheel for rotating an item to help stamping. | After being painted pottery is immerged into glaze. Then on the green ribbon besides the excess of glaze solution is taken away to enable evacuation of humidity when fired. | ||
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| The last step is the second firing . The pieces are stocked on racks and moved on rails into the main kiln. Then they are fired for several hours in 2300 F. | |||