Luna asks: “If we put my pottery bowl in the dishwasher, how come it doesn’t melt?”
When you make a pottery bowl, the clay starts out soft and squishy. It comes back from the studio hard as a rock — and it’s easy to think it just dried. But if it just dried, water would undo it, right? The dishwasher would turn it back to mush.
The secret is that the bowl didn’t just dry — it went into a kiln, a super-oven hotter than lava. At that temperature, the clay particles fuse together chemically and become a whole new material called ceramic. Drying is something water can undo, but firing is a one-way trip that water can’t touch at all.
Featuring a rockabilly earworm about a bowl that’s been through fire and doesn’t care about a little dishwasher spray.