Famiware: clay, a hot kiln, and a glaze that refuses to sit still

What we make

We have made reactive-glaze stoneware for the table since 2017. The range sits on six shelves: dinner sets, mugs and cups, pasta and salad bowls, cereal and soup bowls, plates, and serving pieces. Across those shelves there are twenty-one collections, most of them named after something in the night sky. Star, Milky Way, Ocean, Nebula, Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, Mars, Saturn, Meteor, Pluto, Glacier and others appear across the line. There are 185 distinct glaze names across the range. Prices across the whole range run from $13.99 to $179.99.

Stoneware bodies are fired until the body vitrifies. Packs for the Star and Milky Way sets state 2340F held for 13.5 hours. The ring at the base is bare clay, left without glaze so the piece comes free of the kiln shelf. It also grips the table and will mark a plate stacked beneath it.

Why the collections are named after the sky

Names in the range are concise and descriptive. Each collection borrows a night-sky name to set an idea of color, contrast and movement rather than to tell a story. The reactive glazes behave in ways that suggest planetary tones, bands and scattered light. A double reactive glaze contains metal oxides that separate at temperature and travel across the surface. They pool in the well and thin toward the rim where the clay will show through paler. Iron in the body burns through as speckle. The result is a surface that responds to firing rather than a single painted finish.

You will therefore see variation both within and between collections. No two pieces are alike, and the packs say so. What a collection name fixes is not the pattern but the palette and the shape: Jupiter, Saturn and Venus carry a raised rim, the rest run coupe with the curve going to the edge, and Ocean is the only line that comes square as well as round. Star alone runs to 49 glaze names. So the name narrows the search to a family, and the firing decides the piece.

What stoneware costs you, and what it buys

Stoneware asks something in exchange for what it gives. It is fired until the body vitrifies — the Star and Milkyway packs put that at 2340°F held for thirteen and a half hours — and a body that dense is heavy in the hand and brittle at the rim. It chips rather than dents, and the chip shows pale clay against the glaze. The foot ring is left bare so the piece releases from the kiln shelf, which is why it grips a wooden table and why it marks a plate stacked under it.

What it buys is a tableware system that tolerates everyday use. Packs state lead-free and cadmium-free glaze, and nearly every line is marked dishwasher and microwave safe. Oven and freezer suitability are stated line by line in the pack. Serving pieces include platters sold in sets of three sizes up to about 15.6 inches, a 16 oz oil dispenser bottle, utensil holders, a 13 oz creamer, a 10 oz sugar bowl with a lid, and a butter dish. The foot ring will leave an impression on plates stacked beneath it. That is part of how the pieces sit and stack on real tables, not a cosmetic detail.

Who this is for

The range is built for a table in use rather than a cabinet. Depth is the practical difference between the collections: Ocean, Nebula and Milky Way reach all six shelves, Star reaches five with the widest palette in the range, and Venus reaches two. If you expect to add a sixth mug or two more plates in three years, that reach matters more than the surface you preferred on a screen.

Mixing collections works because the body, the foot and the plate profile are shared, so a Milky Way bowl on an Ocean plate reads as a table somebody set rather than a mistake. What changes between lines is the glaze recipe, and that is a tonal family rather than a pattern to match. Heat is the one thing to read line by line: nearly every line states dishwasher and microwave safe, while oven and freezer are stated per line and are not a property of stoneware in general.

How the range grew

The catalogue runs to 549 models and 185 named glazes, and it did not arrive whole. A glaze is a recipe rather than a paint chip, and a recipe has to come out of the kiln the same way often enough to be worth naming before it earns a second piece and a third. That is the slow part of 9 years: not the shapes, which change rarely, but the colours, which are still being added. Prices run from $13.99 for a single mug to $179.99 for a service that fills a cupboard shelf, and most of what sits between those two numbers is a set of four or six rather than one object.

Care claims come from the pack of the line in question and are attributed there: nearly every line is stated dishwasher and microwave safe, oven and freezer are stated line by line, and the Star and Milky Way packs put the firing at 2340°F held for thirteen and a half hours. The public standards behind lead and cadmium on a food surface are named, with the date each was read, on our updates page.

Where this page states what a pack claims about glaze or heat, the public standards behind that claim are named on our updates page.