Archaeologists who study craft production, communities of practice, and craft traditions have argued that the way things were done (e.g. repeated motions in potting) were as important to community and individual identities, as the appearance of a finished product was. However, craft producers worked in complex, distracting, and real-world environments, and were subject to the agency of materials and objects. Potential manufacturing mistakes visible in micro computed tomography (CT) scans of Late Woodland ceramic pipes and pots highlight how manufacture was not a step-by-step perfect process, but was sometimes messy, with interaction between materials and craft producers as a give and take relationship. These sorts of interactions between people and clay are difficult to access by examining the exterior of ceramic objects, but micro CT offers a new way to examine these hidden steps in clay manipulation. There is a wealth of anthropological literature on apprenticeship, learning, skill, and specialization, but when it comes to archaeological ceramic objects in Canada it is often only in “juvenile” or “learner” objects that these notions can really be accessed. Using micro CT, we can begin to examine the notion of “error fixing” by potters and pipe makers and question to what extent this was the norm.