Have you ever done something when you shouldn’t have and experienced the consequences for it? Well, in ceramics, if you don’t wait for your piece to dry at certain stages, you can cause your work to crush itself, or you might end up crushing it. There are three stages of dryness. The first one being wet, which is easy to mold and form because of how soft it is. But that also makes it really weak, so after molding/forming it, you have to wait for it to be leather-hard. Leather-hard is much sturdier, and when you can start adding/taking things out of the piece without risk of it collapsing or breaking. For the final stage, it is called bone-dry. That is when a piece is ready to be fired in the kiln, and similar to its first stage, it is very fragile, which can cause it to break/crack really easily, so you have to be really careful when handling it during this stage. After all this process, you finally get your unglazed piece that, hopefully, survived the bisque fire, and after that, you have the choice of glazing your piece, which is what my next story I will be about.