Two years from now, the word "cone" will not mean a shape to you. It will mean a heatwork measurement you can feel from across the studio. "Consignment" will not mean "where my mug goes" — it will mean "when does my check actually clear." "Section 179" will mean dollars on a tax return that are not going to the IRS.
None of these are obvious right now. All of them are conversations you are going to have with people who assume you already know.
This is the glossary that gets you across those conversations without nodding and Googling later.
How this glossary is organized
Selling pottery is not one job. It is three.
The first room is the supply yard — your kiln, your clay, your glazes, the slow vocabulary of heat and chemistry that has been around since the Tang dynasty and is not going anywhere. The second room is the gallery — your buyers, your contracts, your commission splits, the language of getting paid. The third room is the tax office — Schedule C, COGS, depreciation, Section 179, the part nobody warned you about when you fell in love with the wheel.
Each room has gatekeepers who use these terms casually and assume you do too. The 36 terms below are the ones you are most likely to meet in your first selling year, presented in plain English first, with the practical "why this matters to you on a Tuesday" version right after.
Read it straight through if you are brand-new. Skim it later when a term ambushes you.
Room 1: At the supply yard
This is the room where firing logs live, where shrinkage is a real cost, and where a defect on the bottom of a glaze fire is a number on your end-of-month spreadsheet — not just a sad mug. The vocabulary here is older than the vocabulary in the other two rooms by about three thousand years, and worth respecting.
1. Cone
A pyrometric cone is a small ceramic test piece that bends at a specific heatwork point — the combined effect of temperature and time in the kiln. "Cone 6," "cone 10," and "cone 04" are not temperatures; they are heatwork measurements, named for the cone that slumps at that point.
The Orton Ceramic Foundation publishes a reference chart with typical temperatures attached to each cone (cone 6 around 2232°F at the standard heating rate; cone 10 around 2381°F). Two kilns can hit the same temperature and produce different heatwork because one held it longer. That is why studios use witness cones — small reference cones placed inside the kiln during the firing — to verify the fire actually reached the cone you targeted, not just the temperature.
Why this matters to you: Your kiln controller reads temperature, not heatwork. Witness cones tell you the truth about what happened in there. Buy a box of cones for every cone you fire to. They cost less than one cracked mug.
2. Greenware
Unfired pottery. Bone dry, raw, dust-fragile.
Greenware has three sub-stages potters talk about:
- Wet — straight off the wheel, still workable.
- Leather hard — stiff enough to carve, attach handles, trim feet. The most useful working stage.
- Bone dry — fully dried, lightest in weight, ready to fire. Also the most fragile state pottery is ever in.
Why this matters to you: Greenware represents all your labor and none of your finished cost. A dropped mug at the wheel is sad. A dropped bone-dry mug right before bisque is the same labor lost plus the dust hazard from the broken silica-heavy clay. Track loss at each stage if you want to know where you are bleeding.
3. Bisque fire
The first kiln firing, low-temperature (typically cone 04 to cone 06, around 1828–1945°F), which converts greenware into a porous but stable ceramic called bisqueware. Bisqueware is no longer water-soluble — you can dip it in glaze without it falling apart — but it is not yet vitrified or food-safe.
Most studios bisque-fire to cone 04 because the resulting bisqueware absorbs glaze well in the second firing.
4. Glaze fire
The second, higher-temperature firing (typically cone 6 to cone 10) that melts the glaze, fuses it to the clay body, and vitrifies the body itself. The piece comes out shiny, durable, and — assuming the glaze is properly formulated and food-safe — functional.
Why this matters to you: Two firings means roughly twice the kiln cost per pot. If your pricing assumes one firing, you are under-pricing every piece. Track firing electricity per cone-load and divide by ware-board count.
5. Cone 6
A common mid-fire temperature for stoneware, reached at roughly 2232°F at the standard 108°F-per-hour heating rate. Cone 6 hits the sweet spot for most American studio potters: glazes are well-developed, clay bodies vitrify, the kiln is not pushed to its mechanical limits, and the electricity bill is bearable.
Most commercially available mid-fire glazes are formulated for cone 6.
6. Cone 10
A high-fire temperature, roughly 2381°F, traditional for stoneware and porcelain in the wood-fire, gas-reduction, and atmospheric-firing world. Cone 10 produces dense, hard, often more elegant clay bodies, but demands a higher-rated kiln, more elements, more time, more electricity (or gas), and more refractory wear.
Why this matters to you: The cone 6 vs. cone 10 decision shapes your entire production economy — kiln type, glaze inventory, firing time, electricity cost, ware-board capacity, the wholesale price you can defend. Choose deliberately.
7. Reduction
A firing atmosphere where the kiln burns more fuel than the available oxygen can fully combust, pulling oxygen out of the clay and glaze in the process. Reduction produces the characteristic warm copper-red shino, the iron-rich Tenmoku black, the celadon green-gray — colors gas and wood kilns can do that electric kilns cannot, at least not easily.
The opposite is oxidation — plenty of air, which is what an electric kiln does by default.
8. Vitrification
The point in firing where the clay body becomes dense and glass-like, with very little water absorption (typically under 3% for stoneware, under 0.5% for porcelain). A vitrified piece is functional: watertight, dishwasher-safe, microwave-safe.
An under-fired piece will absorb water and weep over time, even if glazed.
Why this matters to you: When a customer asks "is this food-safe?" or "is this dishwasher-safe?" the answer is vitrified clay body + food-safe glaze, both. A non-vitrified piece with a food-safe glaze is not a food-safe piece.
9. Crazing
A network of fine cracks in a glaze caused by the glaze shrinking more than the clay body during cooling. Some potters use it deliberately as a decorative effect (especially on shino and celadon); on functional ware it is a defect because liquid can seep into the cracks and grow bacteria.
The two other glaze defects you will hear named: crawling (glaze pulls back from a section, exposing bare clay) and pinholing (small surface pits from gas escaping during firing).
10. Slip
Liquid clay — clay watered down to a paint-like consistency. Used to join two pieces of clay (slip + score), as a decorative coating (slipware), or as a casting medium poured into plaster molds.
You will also hear:
- Engobe — slip applied to leather-hard or bone-dry pieces, fired on as decoration.
- Underglaze — pigmented slip-like product applied under a clear glaze for colored designs.
11. Raku
A low-fire, fast-cool technique with Japanese roots and a heavily Americanized 20th-century variant. The piece is pulled glowing-hot from a small kiln, transferred immediately to a metal can full of combustible material (newspaper, leaves, sawdust), and starved of oxygen as the lid drops. The result is dramatic, smoky, metallic, and not food-safe — raku is decorative ware.
Why this matters to you: If you sell raku, label it clearly as non-functional. Customers ask. The answer is decorative or display, not functional, not for food.
12. Kiln wash
A thin protective slurry — usually a mix of kaolin and alumina hydrate — painted onto kiln shelves to keep glaze drips from fusing the pot to the shelf. The shelf becomes a sacrificial layer; chip and re-coat as needed.
You will also hear about kiln furniture in the same conversation: shelves, posts, stilts. All of these wear out and depreciate (see Room 3).
Room 2: At the gallery (and the craft show, and the wholesale catalog)
This room runs on contracts, splits, and a particular politeness about money. The vocabulary is shorter than Room 1, but each term covers more dollars per word.
13. Consignment
A sales arrangement where the gallery keeps your work on display but does not pay you until a piece sells. When it sells, the gallery keeps an agreed percentage of the retail price and pays you the rest, usually on a monthly cycle. You retain ownership of unsold work.
The standard consignment agreement covers commission split, payment cadence, length of the consignment period, insurance responsibility, who pays for shipping in both directions, and what happens if a piece is damaged.
Why this matters to you: Consignment is the most common entry point into gallery sales for a new potter, and the slowest path to cash. A piece can sit for six months before paying. Plan inventory and pricing accordingly.
14. Commission split
The percentage of the retail price the gallery keeps when a consigned piece sells. Common splits run 40% (gallery) / 60% (potter) at smaller independent galleries to 50/50 as a baseline, and up to 60/40 (gallery favor) at higher-end galleries or those offering representation.
If a gallery quotes you "30%," ask which side that 30% is on — it matters quite a bit.
15. Memo / on approval
A short-term loan of work to a gallery for a specific period, often for a buyer visit or a curatorial review, without a formal consignment agreement. Memo is more informal than consignment, with the expectation that the piece comes back unless the gallery commits to buy or move it to consignment.
16. Wholesale
A sales arrangement where the gallery (or boutique, or museum shop) buys the work outright at a discount, typically 50% off retail, and resells it. You get paid on delivery, not on sale. The buyer takes the ownership risk; the unsold pieces are their problem.
Why this matters to you: Wholesale and consignment are very different cash-flow shapes. Wholesale pays faster but at a lower margin per piece. Consignment pays slower but at a higher per-piece margin if you can wait for the sell-through. Most working potters end up running both, in different channels.
17. Artist statement
A short, written piece (usually one paragraph to one page) that explains who you are, what you make, and why. Galleries want it. Juried shows require it. Customers read the one on the booth card. It is part marketing copy, part autobiography, and part artist's logic.
Write it once, refine it twice a year, keep it in a file.
18. Tear sheet
A one-page product reference, typically with a photo, a short description, the retail price, the wholesale price, dimensions, materials, and your contact info. Galleries use tear sheets to remember which pieces are which when they reorder. Wholesale buyers ask for them by name.
19. Maker's mark
The signature, stamp, or impressed symbol on the bottom of a finished piece identifying you as the maker. It functions like a signature on a painting: provenance, attribution, and resale support.
Many galleries require a clear, consistent mark before they will take work on consignment. A maker's mark also signals seriousness to retail customers — it tells them this is a piece by somebody specific, not an anonymous studio object.
20. Jury fee
A non-refundable application fee charged by juried craft shows, gallery group exhibitions, and competitive open calls to cover the cost of jury review. Fees range from a token to several hundred dollars at top-tier shows. The fee is the cost of being considered, not the cost of admission — if accepted, there is typically a separate booth fee.
21. Booth fee
The amount you pay for the space at a craft show, market, or fair if you are accepted (or if there is no jury). Booth fees range from low double digits at a small farmers market to four figures at major juried shows like the Smithsonian Craft Show or the American Craft Council.
A working potter calculates the break-even sales figure for every show: booth fee + jury fee + travel + lodging + booth setup costs + percentage commission (if any), divided by your average per-piece profit. That is the number of pieces you need to sell before the show pays for itself.
22. Edition (limited)
A run of pieces made to a defined upper count — "edition of 25," "edition of 100" — that signals scarcity to collectors and supports a higher per-piece price. Each piece in the edition is typically numbered (e.g., 12/25) on the maker's mark or accompanying card.
Pottery editions are looser than printmaking editions because no two thrown pieces are identical, but the convention still applies and still raises prices.
23. Functional vs. sculptural
The two broad pricing categories in pottery sales. Functional ware (mugs, bowls, plates, vases) is priced against what comparable functional ware sells for — competitive, often utility-driven. Sculptural work is priced against the art market — scarcity, voice, gallery reputation, comparable artist sales — and can support much higher per-piece prices.
A maker who does both is essentially running two businesses with two pricing logics.
24. Food-safe / dishwasher-safe / microwave-safe
The three "is this functional?" labels that retail customers care about most. The full answer requires both a vitrified clay body (see term 8) and a food-safe glaze (no leachable lead, no leachable cadmium, properly fired). Dishwasher-safe and microwave-safe are the additional questions about thermal shock and surface integrity.
Why this matters to you: Use these terms only when you can defend them. If a gallery asks "is this dishwasher-safe?" the answer should not be "I think so."
Room 3: At the tax office
This is the room nobody warned you about. The vocabulary here is the smallest of the three rooms, but each term covers the largest dollar figure of any term in this glossary.
25. Schedule C
The IRS form a sole proprietor uses to report business income and expenses, filed with the personal Form 1040. If you sell a single mug for money, you file Schedule C — even if your "business" is a side hustle that nets a few hundred dollars a year.
Schedule C is organized into income (Part I), expenses (Part II), cost of goods sold (Part III), and a vehicle/mileage section (Part IV) plus a catch-all "other" line (Part V). Most of the rest of this room is the vocabulary you need to fill out Part II and Part III.
26. COGS (cost of goods sold)
The direct cost of producing the goods you sold during the year — clay, glaze chemicals, kiln-firing electricity attributable to those pieces, packaging that left the studio with a sold piece. COGS includes a beginning-and-end-of-year inventory adjustment, which is why your December 31 unfired clay count matters.
The simplified COGS formula on Schedule C Part III is:
Beginning inventory + Purchases - Ending inventory = COGS
Tracking COGS for a working pottery studio is not optional. It is the difference between seeming to make money and making money.
27. Inventory method
The accounting convention you use to value your ending inventory each year. The IRS accepts several methods; the two you will see in practice are FIFO (first-in, first-out — oldest clay sold first) and weighted average cost (average price across all purchases). Once you pick one, you stick with it.
For pottery, FIFO and weighted average usually produce close-to-identical numbers because clay does not change price as wildly as, say, fragrance oil. Pick one, document it, move on.
28. Section 179
The provision of the US tax code (Internal Revenue Code §179) that lets a small business deduct the full purchase price of qualifying business equipment in the year you place it in service, instead of depreciating it over several years.
For potters, that includes the kiln, the wheel, the slab roller, the pug mill, ware carts, and most studio equipment over a defined dollar threshold. Annual deduction limits are set by the IRS and updated each year; the current cap, qualifying property list, and bonus depreciation interaction live in IRS Publication 946.
Why this matters to you: A new electric kiln is a four-to-five-figure purchase. Whether you expense it in year one (Section 179) or depreciate it over seven years materially changes your tax bill. Coordinate with a tax preparer before you sign the kiln invoice in December.
29. Bonus depreciation
A separate, additional first-year deduction (also covered in IRS Publication 946) for qualifying business property. Bonus depreciation has been phasing down under current law and stacks differently with Section 179 — the two are not interchangeable. Again, coordinate with a tax preparer; the percentage and rules change frequently.
30. Useful life
The IRS-defined number of years a piece of equipment is expected to remain in productive use, used for depreciation calculations when Section 179 does not apply or only partially applies. For studio pottery equipment, the IRS general category is "Office Furniture, Fixtures, and Equipment" with a 7-year recovery period under MACRS, though kilns can sometimes fall under other categories.
The point is: useful life is an accounting fiction matched to a real-world expected lifespan. Your kiln might last 25 years. The IRS depreciates it over 7. Both can be true.
31. Hobby loss rule
The IRS test (Internal Revenue Code §183) that decides whether your pottery activity is a business (where losses can offset other income) or a hobby (where they cannot — and where expenses cannot exceed income).
The IRS considers a list of factors: profit motive, the way you carry on the activity, your expertise, time and effort, history of profit, and whether you depend on the income. The plain-language summary is at IRS — How to tell the difference between a hobby and a business.
Why this matters to you: If you are claiming pottery losses against W-2 income, the hobby loss rule is the rule that decides whether the IRS lets you keep doing that. Recordkeeping, a separate business bank account, a written business plan, and consistent pricing discipline are the things the IRS looks for. Tracking purchases, sales, recipes, and inventory in a real system — like the one at Ardent Seller — is part of how you make the case.
32. Home office deduction
A deduction for the portion of your home used regularly and exclusively for business. For a working pottery studio in a garage, basement, or dedicated room, this is one of the larger maker-business deductions available, and one of the more flag-prone if mis-claimed. The IRS offers a simplified method (a flat dollars-per-square-foot calculation) and a regular method (actual expenses prorated by square footage).
33. Mileage deduction
A per-mile deduction for business use of a personal vehicle — driving to the clay supplier, to a craft show, to a gallery delivery, to the post office for shipping runs. The IRS publishes the standard mileage rate each year; it is the most common method most makers use.
Keep a contemporaneous log (a notebook or an app), not a year-end reconstruction.
34. SE tax (self-employment tax)
Social Security and Medicare contributions for self-employed people, calculated at 15.3% of net self-employment income (12.4% Social Security up to the annual wage base, plus 2.9% Medicare on all of it). Filed on Schedule SE alongside Schedule C.
Why this matters to you: A potter who nets $50,000 owes roughly $7,000 in SE tax before any federal income tax. SE tax is the line item that surprises new full-time potters the most.
35. Estimated quarterly tax
The IRS requires self-employed people to pay federal income tax and SE tax in four estimated installments throughout the year (April, June, September, January), not just on April 15. Missing an estimated payment, or under-paying significantly, triggers an underpayment penalty even if you eventually settle up by April.
Most working potters set up an automatic transfer to a separate "tax" savings account every time they get paid — a percentage of every sale, parked, untouched, ready for the quarterly payment.
36. Resale certificate
A state-issued certificate that lets you purchase clay, glaze materials, packaging, and other resale inputs from your suppliers without paying sales tax on the purchase — because the eventual finished piece will be sold to a retail customer, who pays the sales tax instead.
Each state has its own form and application. The certificate sits on file with your supplier. It is a non-trivial savings on every clay order across a year, and one of the cleaner administrative wins available to a new pottery business.
What to do with this glossary
Pin it somewhere you can find it. Read it once now, when nothing is on the line. Skim it again the first time a supplier, a gallery, or a tax preparer drops a term you do not recognize.
Then start using the terms in your own conversations. Vocabulary is half of what gallery owners and accountants test for when they decide whether to take you seriously — not whether your work is good, but whether you can describe what you do in the language they expect.
You can already throw a pot. The rest of this is a different kind of skill, and worth claiming.
If you are setting up the inventory, costing, and tax-trail side of a pottery business and feeling outnumbered by the vocabulary, Ardent Seller is built for working makers selling across channels — gallery consignment, craft shows, wholesale, online — with the kind of multi-location tracking, recipe costing, and audit trail that survive a year-end inventory count and a tax-preparer call. You can start a free trial and have it up and running on your studio laptop in an evening.
Related reading
- Pottery Kiln Costs & Pricing Ceramics — The next step after vocabulary: the real cost-per-firing math that turns "cone 6" and "cone 10" from words on a chart into numbers on every mug you price.
- Equipment Depreciation for Small Makers — The full version of the Section 179 / useful life conversation, with a worked kiln example and a replacement-fund framework.
- Hobby vs. Business: Taxes and Record-Keeping for Handmade Sellers — How the IRS actually applies the hobby loss test, and the records that make the difference between a business deduction and a denied one.
Free resources
A few free downloads from the Ardent Workshop library that pair well with this post:
- Small Business Tax Deduction Cheat Sheet — Every Schedule C line that matters to a maker, in plain English, with the deductions pottery sellers most often miss highlighted.
- Schedule C Tax Expense Tracker — A working Excel tracker organized by IRS Schedule C category, with a year-end Schedule C view and a mileage log built in.
This article is provided for educational purposes only and does not constitute legal, regulatory, financial, or tax advice. Section 179 limits, bonus depreciation rules, hobby loss factors, sales tax rules, food-safety labeling requirements, and consignment terms vary by jurisdiction and change frequently. Consult a qualified accountant, attorney, or food-safety consultant before making financial, tax, or compliance decisions based on this content.