How I Track My Wedging, Glaze Batches, and Kiln Firing Results Without Losing My Mind
I started keeping a dedicated pottery logbook about four years ago because I kept forgetting which glaze recipe made that nice celadon crackle pattern on the stoneware cups. Turns out I'd written it on a scrap of paper that ended up in the trash alongside a coffee-stained napkin from lunch. That was the last straw. Now everything goes into the book, and it has saved me more than once when a batch of glaze turned out oddly and I needed to go back and check what batch number it was, what the firing temperature was, and whether I accidentally swapped the silica and feldspar measurements. It is simply a systematic record-keeping method for your studio practice. Some people call it a studio journal, a kiln log, a pottery notebook, but the functional purpose is the same. You write down what you did, how you did it, and what happened as a result. The word "aesthetic" in this context refers to the visual and qualitative outcomes — how the piece looked, felt, and performed after firing, not just the raw numbers on a spreadsheet. A complete entry typically covers clay body and origin, forming method and dimensions, glaze recipe with batch number, drying time and conditions, firing schedule including temperature curves and atmosphere, and final results noting any warping, crawling, pinholing, color shifts, or surface texture changes. You might also note tool wear, wheel adjustments, or a particular glaze application technique that seemed to work better than usual that day.
Why Spreadsheet Fails at the Glaze Level
I tried Google Sheets first. I made columns for everything and thought I was being very organized about it. Within a month I stopped using it because I would forget to open the laptop during a throwing session and then forget to go back and fill it in later, and the data was always two days stale by the time I bothered to enter it. Paper is immediately accessible and does not require a power source or an app update. The tactile nature of writing also helps with recall. There is something about physically writing down that the glaze ran on the bottom rim and collected in a dark pool that makes you remember the exact circumstances more vividly than a checkbox in a row.
The Entry Format I Actually Stick With
I use a plain A5 moleskine-style notebook with thick unlined paper. The size matters because it fits on my studio bench next to the wheel without taking up too much space. I keep a fine-liner pen clipped to the cover with a rubber band and a separate mechanical pencil for sketching cross-sections of pots that had wall-thickness issues. Each entry gets a date at the top, followed by sections. I do not write paragraphs. I use short fields with bullet points. Here is what my standard entry looks like for a typical glaze test: Date: March 14, 2025
Clay: Enders OM4 stoneware, ball-milled, aged 3 weeks
Form: Hand-coiled cylinder, 12cm tall, 8cm diameter, leather-hard trim
Glaze: Batch #47 — Copper Red Reactive, cone 10 reduction, applied by dipping twice
Firing: Program 3, 9-hour cycle, oxygen probe reading 2.1 at cone 017
Result: Good copper red development on vertical surfaces, slight crawling on horizontal ledges, pinholing near the base rim where glaze pooled, overall surface texture is matte with metallic flecks. Score 7/10 for this batch.
Get the Full Details
That takes about two minutes to write after the kiln has cooled enough to open. I do not spend more than five minutes per entry. If an entry is taking longer, I am probably overthinking it or describing something I can verify by looking at the piece again.
Integrating the Aesthetic Pottery Logbook Into Your Daily Workflow
The hard part is making it a habit. I solved that by attaching the logbook to a clipboard that hangs on the wall right next to the kiln loading shelf. Every time I load or unload the kiln, the book is within arm's reach. I fill it in while the kiln is still warm rather than waiting until I have gone home and made tea and then remembered nothing. For entries that require sketches of warping or detail about a particular glaze interaction, I photograph the piece with my phone and paste a small printout into the book using a photo adhesive sheet. The printouts are roughly 4x6 centimeters and they adhere flat without buckling the pages. This keeps the book from becoming too bulky while preserving visual reference material that would otherwise live only on my phone gallery where I would never look at it again.
A Problem I Ran Into and How I Fixed It
About a year into using the logbook, I realized I had no way to cross-reference a glaze result with the humidity level in the studio on the day I applied it. I had been applying a particular slip trailing technique and noticed the lines were cracking more frequently during a dry winter stretch. My entries did not include ambient conditions, so I had no data to confirm whether the cracking was related to low humidity or just the thickness of the application. I started adding a hygrometer reading to every entry after that, and it took about three extra seconds to write down. The hygrometer I use is a cheap digital one from Amazon for twelve dollars. It sits on the shelf above the glaze storage cabinets and displays both temperature and relative humidity. I check it before I start any glazing session and jot the numbers down in the upper margin of the entry page. This turned out to be one of the most useful pieces of data I collect now. I have since identified that my white slip cracks consistently when humidity drops below 30 percent and the drying time needs to be extended by roughly forty percent.
Counter-Intuitive Things Beginners Miss
Most potters think the firing schedule is the most important thing to record. It is not. The application method matters more. Two pots glazed with the exact same recipe fired in the same kiln on the same shelf can look completely different if one was dipped and the other was brushed, because the brush stippling creates a different glaze thickness profile. I learned this the hard way when I spent an entire weekend debugging a glaze that looked bad, only to realize the batch was fine and I had switched from dipping to spraying without updating my process notes. Another thing people overlook is recording what you did not do. If you intended to fire a test batch at cone 6 but switched to cone 5 mid-cycle because the pyrometer reading seemed off, write that down. Half the entries in my book contain notes about what went wrong or what I changed from the plan, and those entries end up being the ones I refer to most often.
Where This System Breaks Down
The logbook approach is not suitable for high-volume production work. If you are throwing fifty identical mugs a week, the overhead of documenting each one is going to eat into your throughput significantly. For that volume, a simple batch-tracking system with labeled boxes and a master spreadsheet is more practical. The logbook shines when you are working in small batches, doing experimental glaze work, or producing one-off pieces where the variation between items is significant enough to warrant individual records. The other limitation is that the logbook only captures what you choose to write down. It is very easy to skip an entry because you are tired or in a rush, and then two weeks later you cannot reconstruct what happened. I have lost entries this way and had to throw away pieces that might have been salvageable because I could not remember the exact firing profile that produced the desired result.
Practical Tips for Keeping It Useful
Use a consistent shorthand. Abbreviate clay types, glaze families, and firing programs so that each entry can be written in under three minutes. I use abbreviations like "HC" for hand-coiled, "DB" for dipped twice, "C10R" for cone 10 reduction, and "WS" for white slip. Once you establish your own code, it will feel fast and natural rather than cumbersome. Number your entries sequentially and date them. This makes it easy to flip to a specific entry without scanning every page. When I need to find the entry for a particular glaze batch, I can usually locate it within ten seconds by referencing the batch number in the index at the front of the book. Reserve the first and last few pages for an index. Write the date, batch numbers, and a one-line summary on the index page as you go. This turns the logbook from a chronological diary into a searchable reference document. I can find any entry in about fifteen seconds now, which is faster than scrolling through phone photos or searching through Google Drive folders.
Building Your Own Aesthetic Pottery Logbook System
Start with a small notebook and try it for two weeks. Do not overcomplicate the format. Write down the basics and see what information you find yourself needing to look back on. Then adjust the entry structure based on what you actually found useful rather than what you think should be useful. The system that works is the one you will actually continue using after the novelty wears off, which is usually the simplest one that captures enough detail to be actionable.
