We make our pottery with a blend of stoneware clays and minerals  that we developed  in-house and iterate on non-stop. We source our materials from the American Southeast which helps minimize our carbon footprint and keeps our products rooted to the land we call our home.

East Fork’s clay is rich in iron, as it has been since the beginning, and through a process of limiting the oxygen in the kiln during part of the firing, iron molecules are drawn to the surface of the clay resulting in the  distinctive brown speckled surface our pots are known for.

We wouldn’t be where we are without a mold shop. The art of mold and die making is one of the most specialized processes we use, and there aren’t a lot of people that know this nearly lost craft. From new product development all the way to making the “working mold sets” for each of our machines, the mold shop is a critical part of the East Fork production process.

We process the clay through a pug mill to prepare it for forming. This machine homogenizes the clay body and removes air bubbles. After the clay is pugged it passes through an automated cutter with each form having its own unique parameters. One of our pug mills was made in 1949, where it was first used by a pottery factory in Pennsylvania, then by another in Indiana.  Another came to us from the Lenox China Factory in Kinston, North Carolina after the North Carolina plant was closed after new ownership chased better margins in factories overseas—a familiar story for many now defunct us dinnerware makers.

Today we use three main processes to form clay  into the various shapes we make. Each year we seem to introduce a new, more efficient process while other processes are retired. In our factory, where 99% of the pots we sell come from, we use ram presses, roller tools, and our newest processes: steel molds. In the next year we will introduce slip casting to make a variety of hollow shapes like vases and teapots, and further down the road we will bring in pressure casting to make mug handles and other forms that aren’t round.

If you have a dinner plate in your house that was made in a factory there is a good chance it was made on a roller tool. While there are other methods to make plates in high volume, this one is tried and true and quickly forms a beautiful dinner plate between a rotating plaster mold and a steel toolhead, also rotating. We have three roller tools now, one for plates, one for mugs, cups and small bowls, and one for our larger serving bowls.

The RAM press uses a large hydraulic cylinder to press two plaster dies (molds) together to form the piece.  Items we do not make in high volumes and shapes that are not round are all made on the Ram Press. Most of our RAM presses are quite old and were found in various factories that had gone out of business. The largest RAM uses 135 tons of pressure and we use it to make our large serving platters and is over 15 feet tall!

The newest, fastest, and most automated process that we use is a steel mold machine from Portugal. This process has been used for many years, and is still used by factories in Ohio making crocks, and before that flowerpot producers in Georgia. Our machine is a little more advanced. A very hard pug of clay is slid between two steel molds. The top mold slides down into the bottom while rotating, forming the bowl in half a second. An extractor arm then slides over to remove the bowl, and it is trimmed and stamped with small pneumatic arms. The piece is set on a board and loaded into the dryer where after about 20 minutes it is ready for the bisque kiln.

Once a piece is formed the “flashing” (the ragged edge of clay where the two molds met) must be removed. We currently hand trim the majority of pieces we make, however with the introduction of a new, smoother, clay we will begin to use sponge finishing machines which remove the flashing with a rotating wetted sponge.

Different forms undergo different drying processes—some go through our overhead dryer and others are put into a large room dryer. The drying process brings our drying time down to an hour or two and eliminates warping, in contrast with traditional air drying that can take days or more in the high humidity of a North Carolina summer.

Once the pots have dried to “bone-dry,” they are fired in a lower temperature “bisque” firing overnight, ready to unload the next day and head a few miles down the road to our second factory where they are glazed, fired, quality controlled, and shipped to you.

Once the pots finish their bisque firing, they’re ready to be glazed! All of our glazes are developed and mixed in-house. Our glaze team carefully dips each pot into the glaze and wipes the rims and feet clean to expose the clay body using a sponge belt or manually. Once the glaze dries, we load them into the glaze kiln for one final firing.

We fire the glazed pottery into our gas-fired kiln at Cone 10, a much higher temperature than bisque firing. Firing at such a high temperature gives our glazes a vitrified surface and results in pots that are consistent in color and quality from firing to firing, which creates uniform, stackable, and highly-functional dinnerware for homes and restaurants. We fire our glaze kilns full of pottery 6-7 times a week!

Lastly, when pottery is smooth, pristine, and clean, it is loaded onto the shelves where it waits for an unsuspecting customer to fall in love with our funny little company and place an order.  A “picker” takes the piece and puts it on a cart and brings it to a pack station where our “packers” wrap it carefully in a paper alternative to bubble wrap, place it in a box, and drop it on a conveyor belt which takes it down the line, and eventually into the back of a UPS truck.