Owner molds Bruning Pottery into lasting success in downtown Snohomish

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, June 3, 2026

EVERETT — Entering Bruning Pottery just off Snohomish’s historical downtown strip is like stepping into a rainbow.

Wood shelves lining the shop’s walls are filled to the brim with mugs, vases, dinnerware and plant pots, each glazed, marbled, or speckled with bright colors. Whether it’s a deep red coffee mug or a lilac dinner plate, it was handmade and fired in the back studio portion of the 115 Avenue D location.

Larry Bruning and his wife, Judy Bruning, opened Bruning Pottery on May 15, 1983. Larry Bruning had an interest in pottery since he was a child, collecting pottery shards from his ranch, Judy Bruning said in an email. During college in Colorado, he began making pottery.

“My husband taught me everything. I didn’t really know anything about pottery,” Judy Bruning told The Daily Herald in May.

After Larry Bruning, who died in 2021, worked for several years at a pottery place in Oregon, the couple, with their son Ky Bruning, decided to move to Washington and opened up Bruning Pottery.

Their first shop was on 32 South Horton Street in Seattle, where Larry Bruning built their first kiln out of a pile of bricks and an old kiln frame.

“We didn’t really have any startup money, so we just made do,” she said.

After spending 13 years in their first location, they spent 10 years in another location in Seattle’s SoDo neighborhood before moving to the downtown Snohomish building in 2006.

“It’s a neat place,” Judy Bruning said about the business’s current location. “If you go out of town, and then you come back in town, you still feel like you’re on vacation, because it looks kind of like that.”

Currently, the business is busier than ever, Judy Bruning said.

Ten employees, including Judy Bruning, work at the studio. On any given day, they can be found throwing clay on a potter’s wheel. The finished creations are sold either online, in the shop or wholesale to other vendors.

In 2018, when John Kish founded Somewhere That’s Green Indoor Plant Shoppe in Bend, Oregon, he placed the shop’s first small order around then, Kish said in an email. Now, the shop orders from them at least once a month.

“We are very thankful to feature their beautiful work in our store as one of our standard suppliers,” he said. “Also, sourcing from a PNW maker of this quality is the best. Customers are always requesting a restock and we’ve had zero complaints about Bruning Pottery over the past 8 years.”

Everything that Bruning Pottery sells starts as a lump of clay, before being shaped, or thrown, on a potter’s wheel.

Once the clay has taken shape, it gets its first firing until it’s 25% vitrified, or glass-like, said Ky Bruning.

At this stage, the piece is soft enough to scratch but just right for adding glaze, contained in large buckets in the center of the studio. Each container has a taped-on label describing the color. Since Bruning pottery doesn’t use artificial dyes, there is no way to know without the label what color the creamy grey glaze will become post-firing.

Once in the kiln, pyramid-shaped pieces of ceramic material called a Pyrometric cone let potters know when the pieces are done. Each cone has a number carved into its side that corresponds to the exact temperature at which it melts.

Potters can look through a peephole on the Kiln to see different numbered cones melt at regular intervals. At Bruning Pottery, when cone 11 melts at 2,385 F, the firing is complete.

“We started with cone nine, and it was so disappointing,” Judy Bruning said. “So we tweaked it up to cone 10, and that was better. Then it even looked better at cone 11.”

For Judy Bruning, her favorite part of the process is creating the landscapes seen on many of the pieces in the shop. This is done by layering different colored glazes, often with a turkey baster.

When Larry and Judy would go on vacations, she said she would take notes of the landscapes they passed to recreate them with what they had in the studio.

“Then it lasts for 3,000 years or forever,” she said. “Unless somebody drops it.”

If you go

Bruning Pottery is open seven days a week from 10 a.m. to 5 a.m, except select holidays. Visitors can stop in to browse the shop’s selection of pots, dinnerware, serving pieces, vases, planters, wall fish and other unique pieces. Or, book a paint-your-own pottery session on the business’s website, bruningpottery.com.