Buying new pottery, whether it be for the coffee lounge at the office or for the banquets at home, you should have a basic understanding of pottery.

A set of mugs at the office will be subjected to a lot more wear than the fine bone porcelain you put on the table on Christmas day.

Do you have to use it often? Will you be using it every day? Is there a heightened risk that you’d drop a piece on the kitchen floor? Those are questions that you will have to ask yourself when you want to buy pottery, and when you have made a functional decision you should look up the eBay store that sells the type of pottery that you are after.

In my store The Northern Home Shop I sell new pottery for everyday use. I sell a particular kind of pottery called stoneware because it is very durable, and there is a reason why it has to be durable. The kind of pottery you want if you contact me is the kind you can eat off, scrape with cutlery, drop to the floor, wash every day for many years.

You wouldn’t approach me if you wanted a set of faience set from the eighteenth century.
 
Material and pottery type then becomes the paramount consideration in any purchasing decision. We can have a look at what kinds of pottery there are. There are basically two different main types.

• Stoneware
• Earthenware

Each has its advantages and disadvantages.

Stoneware
Most pottery that are used as eating and drinking utensils are stoneware pottery. To be a bit technical now, the definition of Stoneware is that it is “an impervious type of pottery distinguished primarily by its firing temperature (from about 1200°C to 1315°C)”. Simply put, it is man-made stone.

The clay, which refers to “minerals of a plastic quality formed primarily of alumina and silica”, can be different from pottery to pottery and from potter to potter. Potters refer to combinations of clays mixed with other materials as clay bodies. Different kinds of clay bodies are created by mixing additives, such as sand, fluxes, grog, temper, flint, spodumene, wollastonite, or additional silica, to modify natural clays. All this will of course temper the resulting pottery one way or the other.

Take porcelain as an example. It is an exellent example of stoneware where the choice of clay, temperature and additives (or lack thereof) produce an entirely different pottery than for instance the clay that Höganäs uses.

Kaolin, or China Clay, which occurs in various parts of the world, is often 95% free of impurities, which gives the pottery its white colour. It is also fired to a vitreous state, transforming the constituent silica to glass.

Stoneware pottery is excellently suited for jobs in your home that require strength and durability. The plates that you eat off every day needs to be able to resist scratching, hot water, and perhaps even being dropped onto the floor. Stoneware is excellent for this, but earthenware is not.

Earthenware
Earthenware is fired at lower temperatures than stoneware, and thus is more brittle and more porous in its consistency and structure. Earthenware is a ceramic made from potash, sand, feldspar and clay. It is one of the oldest materials used in pottery.

Some good examples of earthenware are terra cotta, majolica and faience. Unless the earthenware is treated it will not be watertight because of its porosity. And it will more easily break, making this type of pottery more suited for decoration and for china that is not used very often.

Different strokes for different folks
As you can see, it is important that you decide what use you have in mind for the pottery you want to buy. If you want to buy a vase to keep flowers in, you can buy a glazed earthenware vase, but if you intend to serve food on a plate for the next ten years then stoneware is the way to go. Just like you would by fine clothes with a delicate fabric for your teen to his or her graduation, you would buy a pair of jeans for your child’s play in the yard.