Graham Taylor

So those are two ways that industrial pots were traditionally made.

These days, quite a lot of industrial pots are made with dry powder.

Clay has two kinds of moisture.

It has the moisture that makes it

moldable and it has moisture that's chemically combined and if you press it hard enough you can get that chemically combined moisture to do some of the work and join it together so you can take what is effectively gyre powder clay slam a huge press onto it and come out with a plate or a bowl or whatever and uh quite a lot of industrial pottery is made under high power pressures

So yeah, machines.

Basically, nothing that you're buying from a reputable dealer should contain free lead in any way.

We occasionally use what's called a lead fritted glaze on the outside of a medieval pot, but we try not to use it on the inside of any vessels.

And in fact, the medieval potters generally didn't.

They left that out.

But a frit is a glass.

So people will drink their whiskey out of their lead crystal glass quite happily.

Well, that's effectively what you're doing when you frit lead.

You mix it up, you melt it into a glass, and then you grind it back down into a powder.

And then you use it as the glaze, and it'll glaze the outside of the pot.

We only do that for a few museum replica medieval pots because...

Almost everything we make is unglazed.

But yes, lead was commonly used and lead was used in the form of crushed down lead ore.

And while in the lead ore form, I am told it's not terribly body soluble.

When the potters fired those pots, the fumes coming off the kiln were certainly lead laden.