One Writer Fired Tiny Pottery in Her Microwave and Learned Some Hard Lessons

When Ceramics Gets Even Smaller — and More Chaotic

Ceramics, it turns out, is an emotionally devastating hobby. Pieces get ruined at every stage — on the wheel while throwing, on the wheel while trimming, with a paintbrush while glazing. For writer Nicole Carpenter, the logical response to all that heartbreak was to make everything more difficult. So, of course, she made it harder by making everything smaller.

After taking lessons on making ceramics on a pottery wheel for a few months and playing around with polymer and air dry clay, she has made a lot of polymer clay hockey skates since a post she wrote in May, and has gotten pretty efficient at it. But efficiency wasn't enough. After toying with polymer and air dry clay for a few months, she picked up a miniature pottery wheel and a microwave kiln. The miniature journey had officially leveled up.

The Science — and Chaos — of a Microwave Kiln

The appeal of a real kiln comes down to something specific: the satisfying clink of fired ceramics. In a kiln, clay becomes vitrified — clay particles get fused together — and whatever you've made is no longer porous, producing that satisfying sound when tapped. Air dry clay and polymer clay simply can't replicate it. A microwave kiln bridges that gap — at least partially.

The microwave kiln makes the process something you can do at home, in a much shorter amount of time. But it comes with real trade-offs. You can't make food-safe ceramics in the microwave kiln, because it doesn't get hot enough to fully vitrify the clay, and you also can't really choose what temperature you're firing it to. The process demands patience and precision — two things that don't come naturally when you're excited to see your tiny pots come out glowing.

Carpenter glazed some bone-dry pieces and immediately started heating up the kiln with no ceramics inside — a necessary step to make sure the kiln itself doesn't heat up too fast, since rapid temperature changes can crack it. She heated it in three-minute increments, increasing the microwave's power level each time. Then came the moment of truth. Everything immediately exploded inside the kiln. It sounded like popcorn popping. Fortunately, the little explosions stayed contained inside the kiln. The culprit? The glazes add moisture — and she had also used water to clean the bottoms of the pieces so they wouldn't melt onto the kiln base.

Lessons Learned the Hard Way

The next day, she put the pottery pieces into a regular oven for an hour or so at its lowest heat to really dry them out, then brought them back outside to the microwave kiln and heated it up the same way. When she pulled out the microwave kiln immediately after the cycle was over and lifted the lid with fireproof gloves, the pieces looked like lava. Then came another hard lesson: she let everything cool — though not as patiently as she should have — and the kiln cracked a little from thermal shock. It's still usable. She's since learned to leave the kiln in the microwave untouched for a half hour or so before even opening the microwave door.

She has now fired the kiln several times with different glazes and gotten adorable results — though there are plenty of mess-ups, broken pieces dropped before even reaching the kiln, and bad paint jobs. She's also having issues with underglaze and clear glaze, with nothing coming out shiny. It's a problem she's actively trying to solve, and she's openly asking readers for advice.

Tiny Pots, Big Satisfaction

There's something deeply satisfying about having little pieces of pottery jingling around in your hand — pieces you made yourself. She doesn't yet know what she'll do with the things she's made, which now number in the dozens. For now, she's put them in her pockets to show friends, and her friends and family will certainly receive tiny gifts.

The important caveat is that these aren't functional in any meaningful way. Because they are not fully vitrified, water will eventually soak through the clay, making them unsuitable even as vases — perhaps only useful for dry flowers or as trinket dishes. Still, Carpenter thinks it would be very cute to put a little stand outside her house and pass out tiny pottery to her neighbors, pay-what-you-can or free, especially since there's little to no function to them except being cute. Sometimes, that's more than enough.