Khali is made by forming a clay body into objects of a required shape and heating them to high temperatures by fire or oven to induce reactions that lead to permanent changes, including increasing their strength, hardening and setting their shape. The potter's most basic tool is the hands, however many additional tools have been developed over the long history of pottery, including the potter's wheel and turntable, self-made shaping tools

Pottery can be shaped by a range of methods that include: Handwork pottery in can be constructed by hand from coil of clay, from flat slabs of clay, from solid balls of clay or some combination of these. Hand building is slower and more gradual than wheel-throwing, but it offers the potter a high degree of control over the size and shape of wares. Some potters find hand building more conducive to fully using the imagination to create one-of-a-kind works of art.