The workshop
How Bosmarlin works
Two mugs out of one batch are cousins, not twins. The kiln draws the line where the colours meet, and it draws it differently every time.
We start with the clay body, not the colour
Stoneware is the whole reason a Bosmarlin mug feels the way it does. It is fired hard and dense, so it holds heat longer than a thin porcelain cup and shrugs off the knock against a tap that would chip something finer. It is heavier in the hand, and we think that weight is a feature rather than a cost: a mug that sits still on a desk is a mug that does not go over when a cable catches it.
The trade is that stoneware asks for a thicker wall and a wider foot, and both of those shape the pieces you see here. Nothing in the range is delicate. Everything in it is meant to be used on a weekday.
The glaze is mixed to move
A reactive glaze carries mineral oxides that stay put at room temperature and travel once the kiln is hot. The band where two colours meet is not painted on. It is drawn by heat, by how thickly the glaze went on, and by where the piece stood on the shelf.
That is why the same Bosmarlin glaze can come out as a soft fade on one mug and a sharp break on the next, and why the photograph on a page is a fair picture of the glaze rather than a portrait of the exact piece that arrives.
Glazing is done by hand, and the foot is left bare
Pieces are dipped, then wiped back around the foot ring. The bare ring is not an oversight. Glaze is glass, and glass sticks: a piece glazed all the way down welds itself to the kiln shelf and comes off in pieces.
You can feel that ring on the bottom of every mug and bowl we make. It is the one part of a Bosmarlin piece that is still raw clay, and it is the quickest way to tell fired stoneware from something that was only painted to look like it.
Handles are big because full mugs are heavy
A 21 oz mug with coffee in it is a real weight, and a small handle turns that weight into a pinch between two fingers. Our large mugs carry a handle you can put a whole hand through, and the wide ones carry a low, deep pull rather than a narrow loop.
It is a plain piece of ergonomics that gets skipped often, and it is the first thing people notice when they pick one up.
Every piece is looked at before it is packed
Reactive glaze runs. Most of the time it runs beautifully. Sometimes it pools at the foot, or it crawls back from an edge and leaves the clay bare where it should not be, and those pieces do not go out.
We would rather send a smaller batch than teach people that a Bosmarlin glaze is a lottery. The variation you get is the variation we chose to keep.
