Handmade vs Wheel-Thrown: Why We Never Use a Pottery Wheel

Walk into most pottery studios and you'll see wheels — rows of them, spinning, with clay rising into shape under a potter's hands. Walk into the Doppiocotto studio in Waterloo and you won't see a single one. Every piece in the collection, and every piece made in a Doppiocotto workshop, is slab-built by hand.

What Slab-Building Actually Is

Slab-building is a hand-construction method, not a shortcut version of wheel-throwing. Stoneware clay is wedged by hand, then rolled into consistent, calibrated sheets using a slab roller — thinner for an espresso cup wall, thicker for a mug or plate. Component forms (base, walls, handle, foot) are cut from those sheets using templates developed for each piece in the collection, then joined by hand once they've firmed to a leather-hard state: firm enough to hold shape, soft enough to bond.

It's slower than throwing. A wheel-thrown mug can be pulled up in a couple of minutes. A slab-built one takes considerably longer, across several stages, with drying time built in between.

Why the Slower Method

Wheel-throwing produces round, symmetrical forms with tapered walls — that's the nature of centrifugal force acting on spinning clay. Slab-building produces something different: walls that are even in thickness rather than tapered, edges that carry the visible evidence of hand-cutting, and a geometry that simply isn't possible to achieve on a wheel. A slab-built espresso cup has a distinct presence in the hand — not more "perfect", just genuinely different.

It also means every piece can carry a precise, considered form. The 56ml espresso cup in the Doppiocotto collection isn't approximately the right size for a single shot — it's built to that exact volume, because the template was designed for it. That level of dimensional control is part of why the technique matters, beyond aesthetics.

What This Means for Variation

Because every piece is built by hand from individually cut components, no two are identical. Slight differences in glaze distribution, surface texture and form between pieces aren't a manufacturing inconsistency — they're the direct result of a real person making each one, start to finish, without a mould. If you've bought two of the same espresso cup and noticed they're not perfectly identical, that's the process working as intended.

Learning the Technique

Slab-building is also what's taught in hand-building workshops at the Waterloo studio — the same technique, the same tools, the same process used to make everything in the shop. No experience is required, and no wheel is involved. You'll leave a two-hour session having built a piece from raw clay using the exact method behind the Doppiocotto collection.

Curious what the result looks like? Browse the full collection, or read more about the process on the About page.