Frequently asked questions.
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By color. Every tool, glaze, slab mold and piece of equipment in the building carries a color mark, and the rule is one sentence long:

So a Purple Level Member uses purple, yellow and green. A Yellow Level Member uses yellow and green. Nobody has to ask permission, look anything up, or check with an instructor. If the mark is your color or lower, it’s yours to use.

• Green Level: our basic glazes and the smaller slab molds. Green Level Members bring their own basic tools and a sponge, since tools are the one thing Green doesn’t include.
• Yellow Level: adds hundreds more tools, dozens of premium glazes, and more slab molds.
• Purple Level: adds thousands of high-end tools, hundreds more exclusive glazes and underglazes, the handheld extruders, six of the seven dipping glazes at no upcharge, and almost every slab mold we own.
• Black Level: adds the most exclusive tools in the building, the highest end glazes we make available to members, the seventh dipping glaze, the giant and complex slab molds, and the wall extruder.

Orange and red mean off limits to members entirely. Those are staff and studio-only items, and they’re marked that way so nobody has to guess.

Equipment is the exception. The wheels, the worktables, the slab rollers and the kilns are open to every level. Color marking covers the tools, glazes and slab molds you make your pottery with, not the machines you make it on.

Membership levels explained on video, if you’d rather be walked through it.

The full level-by-level breakdown · Every slab mold, sorted by level

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Upgrade whenever you like, including mid-month or before you’ve started classes. Downgrade starting the following month.

Upgrade your membership mid-month here. You pay for the upgrade online and we handle the rest.

For what it’s worth: across the three years our owner ran the smaller version of this studio, not one student ever downgraded. Not one stayed at Green Level for more than a month. And 90% moved up to Purple Level within their first year. That’s how much difference the higher levels make once you’re actually in the room.

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Not at a set price, but we’re happy to build you a custom one based on how much access you want and how much glaze you’ll be getting through. Text 385-241-5528 and we’ll work it out.

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Not currently. Punch passes are discontinued and we don’t have a date for bringing them back. Monthly membership is the only way to join right now.

Not to be confused with your rewards punch card, which every member gets and which is a completely different thing.

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It means you can travel without losing anything. It means a couple of hectic weeks don’t cost you money. It means catching a cold isn’t a financial event.

Each level comes with a number of classes a month. Miss them and you can use them next week or next year. There’s no limit on how many you stack up, and no expiry, for as long as you stay a member.

The catch, stated plainly: if you cancel, every unused class is void. Even if you sign back up later. This is the single most common thing people are surprised by, so we’d rather you read it here than find out later.

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They’re your classes. Come when you like, clumped or spread out.

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Talk to staff the moment you realize. If you’re staying on next month, we’ll usually just take the extra off next month’s allowance and call it even.

If it isn’t caught: you’re charged the difference for the current month and moved up to a level that includes those days from the following month. You can drop back down later, but we don’t refund overuse charges.

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Mostly, we don’t. This one runs on trust.

There’s no card to scan and nobody standing at the door with a clipboard. We’d rather not run the studio that way, and honestly, most people don’t need us to. They keep a rough count themselves and it works out fine.

The same goes for the color system. Nobody is auditing which tools you picked up or which glaze you used. If it’s your level or below, it’s yours; if it’s above, we trust you to leave it be.

Where it does come up: if it looks like someone is coming a good deal more often than they’re paying for, we’ll have a friendly word and check the attendance. That conversation is rare and it’s not a big deal when it happens. Usually it’s an honest miscount and we sort it in a minute.

So: keep your own tally, stick to your level, and enjoy the fact that nobody here is policing you. If you do go over, here’s what happens.

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Memberships are non-transferable. Every member signs up under their own name, email and phone number, and we can’t make exceptions to this one.

For a gift, buy a gift card rather than signing someone up under your details.

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If you’re a beginner potter, plan on about two months for your first finished piece, one you’re actually proud of. The timeline above breaks down where that time goes.

The short version: drying can’t be rushed without cracking, and every piece needs two separate kiln firings. Kilns are fired when there’s enough work to fill one, which can be several times a week or once or twice a month depending on how busy the studio is.

This is exactly why we don’t do one-off classes. An evening gets you a wet lump of clay; a month or two gets you a finished object you actually love.

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Two weeks from the day the kiln is unloaded. After that, anything still waiting to be collected is forfeit, and you lose the piece.

We would rather say that plainly here than have it be a surprise. Check the pick-up tables every time you come in, and the two weeks run whether or not you’re coming that week.

The deadline, what the card on your piece means, and how to avoid starting the clock while you’re traveling are all laid out on the pick-up and drop-off tables page.

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Every piece you make passes through four of them, in the same order, and you are the one who carries it between them.

• Bone-dry drop-off: your finished piece, one hundred percent dry, waiting to be bisque fired. Free
• Bisqueware pick-up: it comes back hard and pale. You collect it here and glaze it
• Glazeware drop-off: glazed, paid for and on a kiln cookie, waiting for a full kiln
• Final piece pick-up: finished. Take it home

Each table has a sign over it with its own rules, and the two pick-up tables both run a two week deadline. The full walkthrough is here, including a photograph of the pick-up shelves you can scroll along.

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During class times and open studio times only. Those are the hours the building is set up for members to be in it.

We are here at plenty of other times, and we are teaching, loading kilns, mixing glaze and running the place. A pick-up in the middle of that pulls somebody off what they are doing, so please keep it to a session.

• Monday daytime: 10:30 AM to 2 PM
• Monday to Thursday evenings: 6:30 PM to 10 PM
• Friday evening: 6:30 PM to 10 PM, open studio
• Saturday and Sunday mornings: 10 AM to 1:30 PM, open studio

Doors open 15 minutes before a session and no earlier. More on the tables here.

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No, not without their permission. It is one of the Unbreakable Clay Hole Commandments and the pick-up tables are where it gets tested.

Bone-dry pots are about as strong as a cracker, and a handle can be a week of somebody’s life. That includes moving other people’s work to make room for your own: if a table is full, find one of us instead of shuffling pieces around.

It also includes anything that looks abandoned. A piece past its deadline is still not yours. We clear those tables, not members.

What is fine is asking. Almost everybody here is delighted to hand you their pot and tell you how they made it. And if you find something broken, moved or missing, tell an instructor rather than tidying it yourself.

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Three main paths, and you can switch between them whenever you feel like it.

• Hand-building and sculpting: anything you can imagine, with thousands of tools to do it with
• Wheel throwing: the hard one, and the most rewarding once it clicks
• Slab molds: 248 of them, letting you make pristine bowls, platters, casserole dishes, bread pans and charcuterie boards on day one without touching a wheel. This is how most of our members make their best-looking work. Every one of them is in The Mold Room

If you want to see what that actually looks like in real hands, our member Show & Tell gallery is full of work made by people who walked in knowing nothing.

Hand-build one week, throw the next, slab-build the next, glaze the week after. Nobody is going to tell you to stick to one side of the studio.

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Four trainings, and you do each one just before you need it rather than all at once on day one. Each ends with a card you save to your phone and show an instructor. Do it once and it lasts as long as your membership.

• Brush-on glazes and underglazes. Required before your first glaze. About 30 minutes, most of it the video. Get certified
• Slab rollers and slab molds. Required before your first use, because plaster and wood mark and chip in ways that don’t look like damage until somebody’s bowl splits in the kiln. About 25 minutes. Get certified
• Dipping glazes. Required before your first dip, at every level. About 25 minutes. Get certified
• Raku workshop safety. Not required, and nobody is turned away from a workshop without it. It exists because knowing what happens next makes the night better. About 15 minutes. Get certified

Every raku workshop still opens with a safety meeting in person, card or no card, and you have to be there for all of it.

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Absolutely no outside clay. Zero tolerance, no exceptions.

Glaze is different. You can buy and use any glaze we offer that’s outside your membership level. For glazes we don’t carry, Glazes We Do Not Carry lists hundreds from the brands we already buy from, all rated for the heat our kilns run. You’re clear to buy any of them and bring them in, except the handful marked as not approved. The research on those is yours, because we can’t tell you how a glaze we’ve never opened will behave. Anything not on that list gets approved case by case, before it goes on a pot.

This isn’t gatekeeping. The wrong clay or glaze can destroy a kiln, the kiln shelves, and every other member’s work sitting in that kiln. That runs into tens of thousands of dollars you’d be responsible for. It also gives your own pieces crazing, crawling and pinholes. Any member who brings in outside clay is financially liable for the damage. So please don’t.

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Lusters and overglazes, yes, but we don’t stock them. If you want gold on a rim, you bring your own. Talk to us before one goes on a piece.

Alcohol inks and Pebeo paints are a different thing again. They are solvent-based and never fired, and they are only ever used at the outside tables. Never inside the studio.

The Clay Hole University has lessons on overglazes and alcohol inks in its Surface and Decoration area.

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650+ commercial glazes and 150+ underglazes, from brands including Amaco, Mayco, Coyote, Spectrum, Speedball and The Ceramic Shop. Each level up unlocks more of them.

Most are brush-on by design, so your results come out clean rather than cross-contaminated with whatever the last person dipped. Most have been fired onto test tiles so you can see roughly what you’re going to get on a real pot.

Roughly, because glazes are glazes. The kiln has a mind of its own sometimes, and occasionally you just go for it and hope the kiln gods are in a good mood.

Every one of them has been photographed on our own fired tiles and written up in The Glaze Bible: what it does over another glaze, which clay bodies suit it, whether it is safe for food, and what went wrong if yours came out different.

How to find the one you want · Glazing rules and certification · Which glazes are safe for food

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Three tools, and which one you want depends on where you’re standing.

• Standing at the glaze wall. Type the name, brand or family into the Glaze Finder and it shows you the exact shelf, row and slot it is sitting in.
• Picking glazes for a piece. The Mega Glaze Tool filters every glaze and underglaze by color, finish, behavior and your own level, with the real fired tile next to each one. Build a list, then save, print or share it.
• Deciding whether a glaze is right at all. The Glaze Bible has a page per glaze: our own fired tiles, what it does layered over another glaze, which clay bodies suit it, whether it is safe for food, and what went wrong if yours came out different.

Holding one of our test tile pots and wondering what is on it? The Test Tile Finder reads every tile on it in order.

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Seven of them, and they are not cheap homemade buckets. Every one is a high-end commercial glaze specially altered for our members, so a dipped piece still comes out looking professional. They live in their own area of the studio, nowhere near the bottles.

The seven: Blue Hole, Bronzealot, Clear as Mud, Creamed Ice, Sunny Charcoal, Tamjoda and Dan’s Secret Sauce. Dan’s Secret Sauce is the wild one. It comes out different with every firing and every form, so it is always a bit of an adventure.

Dip times are not the same for every bucket. They run from one second to four, and the time is printed on each lid. Read the lid rather than counting to three out of habit.

You need to be certified before your first dip, whatever your level. Here’s how that works.

Who pays what:

• Black Level: all seven included, nothing to pay
• Purple Level: six included. Dan’s Secret Sauce is a Black Level glaze, so it is $6 for a small or medium piece and $11 for a large one
• Yellow Level: $6 small or medium, $11 large. Dan’s Secret Sauce is $11 and $16
• Green Level: $10 small or medium, $15 large. Dan’s Secret Sauce is $15 and $20

Small or medium means 525 cubic inches or less, measured height by width by depth at the widest points. Anything above that is large. Upcharges are per piece, not per session.

The dipping buckets are the one place where Green Level and Yellow Level Members can pay to use something outside their level. We would rather open the buckets up than keep them behind a wall. If you dip more than a few pieces in a month, though, upgrading often works out cheaper than the upcharges. There is a calculator on the upcharge page that does the math on your actual month.

Everything else in the building is brush-on, which is a deliberate choice rather than an oversight.

Pay a dipping upcharge · Dipping rules and instructions · All seven, with their fired tiles and dip times

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Every member gets signed off before their first dip, whatever their level. It takes about twenty-five minutes and you only ever do it once.

• Watch the training video the whole way through. There is a password in it that you will need.
• Sign the dipping glaze agreement. Digital, like the others.
• Use the password to get signed off, and you are cleared to dip.

Start the dipping glaze training

That reads heavy written down, and in practice it is genuinely easy: clean piece, dry wax, rinse, mix well, dip for the time printed on the lid, let it drain fully, touch up, clean up. The training walks you through all of it, and anyone in a pink shirt will happily talk you through your first one.

One rule worth knowing before you even start: if you drop something in a bucket, do not reach in after it. Grab an instructor in a pink shirt and they will get it out for you.

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All of our regular studio pottery is mid-fire stoneware and porcelain. Glazes fire to cone 5½, which in practice means cone 5 with a twelve minute hold at peak. Bisque fires to cone 05. We don’t do low-fire studio pottery at all.

A cone is a measure of heat work rather than just temperature: how hot the kiln got, and for how long. That hold at the top is the part a lot of studios skip. Twelve minutes at peak evens the heat out across the whole kiln and gives glazes time to finish maturing and heal over their own pinholes. It costs more in electricity and in kiln time, and it is a large part of why our clays come out consistently well.

That single choice changes what you take home more than almost anything else we do.

At this temperature, clay vitrifies. The clay body and the glaze effectively become one dense, glassy material, so what you made is genuinely durable: watertight, oven-friendly and hard to chip. It’s a real object that lasts decades.

That settles the clay. The glaze on top of it is a separate question, and the answer is different from one jar to the next. Which glazes are safe for food, the dishwasher and the microwave.

Low-fire pottery doesn’t do that. Fired at much lower temperatures, the clay stays porous underneath its glaze. It looks fine on day one, then it crazes into a web of fine cracks, absorbs water, stains, weeps, and chips at the rim. It’s why so much beginner pottery ends up as a decorative object nobody drinks from.

So why does anyone fire low? Because it’s cheaper and faster. Less electricity, shorter firings, less wear on kilns and shelves, cheaper clay, cheaper glazes, quicker turnaround. For a studio running paint-your-own nights, it’s the obvious business decision.

It costs us more to do it our way, and some of that does show up in what you pay for clay and firings. We think it’s worth it, and so do our members. The whole point of spending weeks on something is that you get to actually use it afterward. A mug you drink from every morning for ten years is a very different thing from a mug you look at.

One practical upside: because everything in the building is fired on the same schedule, every clay and every glaze we carry is compatible with every other one. You can combine freely without checking a chart, which is a bigger creative freedom than it sounds.

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The clay is the easy half. At cone 5½ every clay body we sell vitrifies, so it is dense, watertight and not absorbing anything.

The glaze is the half that varies, and it varies jar by jar. So we looked up every glaze we carry, recorded what its maker actually states, and put it on one page you can search.

• 465 are rated by their maker for ware that holds food
• 144 are cleared on materials but not rated on the finished pot
• 17 should never touch food, at any thickness, with any clear over them

Three things void a good rating no matter what the jar says: crazing, that fine web of cracks, which lets liquid reach the clay; underfiring, which leaves the glaze not properly melted; and a thin or crawled coat, which leaves bare clay where you thought there was glaze.

Dishwasher and microwave are separate claims again, recorded separately on each glaze page because the makers record them separately. Anything with real metal in it stays out of the microwave whatever else the label says. And raku is never food safe and will not hold water.

Look up any glaze, and see where the answer came from

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Bigger than you think. We have four kilns: a tester, a Skutt 1027 at 7 cubic feet, a Skutt 1227 at around 10, and an enormous L&L bell lift at 42 cubic feet.

The big one fires up to 22″ wide by 44″ long by about 52″ tall. That’s properly huge pottery, and if you’re willing to pay the firing, we can probably handle it. Building something past that is worth a conversation with us before you start rather than after.

Two things that surprise people at the other end of the scale. Firing charges cap at $600, no matter how big the piece gets. Small approved projects that need a firing of their own go in the baby kiln. And small pieces that fit together on one 6″ kiln cookie, with a quarter inch between them, are charged as one piece as long as they total under 125 cubic inches.

Price an exact piece with the firing calculator

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Sometimes, in the baby kiln. It runs one approved project on its own for $30 a run.

The usable space inside is 9 inches wide, 9 inches deep and 5.5 inches tall, so it suits small work only.

There is no form and no text line for it. Ask the owner, the general manager or the studio manager, and if the project is a fit, they’ll book it in.

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Yes, but only if you take them home bone dry and do both firings yourself.

What you can’t do is use our free bisque firing and then take the piece home to skip paying for the glaze firing.

Two reasons, and we’ll be direct about both. The bisque firing isn’t actually free. Its cost is built into what we charge for glaze firings, because one charge instead of two keeps the whole system simple for everyone. Taking the bisque and leaving means the studio eats a cost that other members have already covered on your behalf.

The second is that production potters work out this loophole quickly, and start using a community studio’s kilns to cheapen their own output. That is not remotely what this place is for. Doing it is grounds for us to end a membership, so please don’t.

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We do, and it is easily the most dramatic pottery that happens here.

Raku is the one where your pot comes out of an outdoor kiln glowing red hot at nearly 2,000 degrees and goes straight into a can of combustibles. What the glaze does in there cannot be planned and cannot be got any other way: metallic flashes, crackle, deep coppery reds, iridescence. You open the can and find out what you made.

We carry 54 raku glazes, and they come in two kinds. This trips people up, so it is worth being clear about.

46 are brush-on, the same way you glaze anything else here, painted on with a brush. They come from four ranges:

• Spectrum: 28 of them, and by far the biggest range. Aqua, Cobalt Blue, Cosmic Copper, Metallic Flash, Nebula, Oxblood, Starry Night and plenty more.
• Georgies: 6, including Alligator, Beetle Juice, Copper Ridge and Midnight Luster.
• Mayco: 6, including Black Metallic, Copper Penny, Crackle White and Oil Slick.
• Amaco: 6 more, which Amaco has discontinued. They are still on our shelf and still usable, we just cannot reorder them once they are gone.

The other 8 are dipping glazes, the Laguna raku range, which arrived recently and are ready for the next workshop:

• R2 Tutti Frutti
• R9 BEGS, a white crackle
• R13 Copper
• R15 Dark Red
• R22 Awabi Shell
• R24 Dynasty Blue
• R26 Kingin, gold and silver
• R27 Shinju

Every one of the 54 is marked with a flame on our searchable glaze list, which is always the up-to-date source. Raku glazes are for raku workshops rather than regular class, since they need the raku firing to do anything at all.

Raku also needs a clay body that can survive that kind of thermal shock, which is why raku pieces are built in B-Mix with Grog or Berlin Gray.

One thing to know before you fall in love with it: raku pieces are decorative, not functional. The process leaves the clay porous and the glaze crazed, so they are not food safe and will not hold water. They are display pieces, and spectacular ones.

Sign up for the next raku workshop · What to bring, and what to expect. There are usually only a few spots, so they go quickly.

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Two large slab rollers, open to every level, and they will roll a slab up to 30 inches. That is what makes our slab molds work for anyone.

Handheld extruders are available at Purple Level and Black Level. The wall extruder is Black Level only.

Get certified on the slab rollers and slab molds. About 25 minutes, required before your first use. Then pick a slab mold.

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The Mold Room lists every one we own: 148 unique slab molds, 248 in total, shown as 75 tiles because a nested set shares a tile.

Each tile shows the mold on one side and what it makes on the other, plus the two numbers members ask about before anything else: how much clay to start with, and how thick to roll the slab. Filter by your level or by what you want to make, and tap the heart on anything you want to try so you can take the list to the shelf.

In the room itself, every mold has a colored dot on the bottom. Your color, or anything below it, never above. Almost all of them are open to you by Purple Level.

Plaster and wood are both softer than they look. Small molds start around $40 and the big Black Level ones run past $600, and some we simply cannot buy again, so a mold broken through carelessness is billed to the member who broke it. Normal wear is on us.

Open The Mold Room · Get certified first

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29 wheels: 24 electric and one kick wheel in the main throwing area, plus four more in the Black Level overflow. Always first come, first served.

A class can hold about 70 people. In practice 30 to 50 turn up. Of those, 20 to 25% are on the wheels and 75 to 80% are at the community tables using slab molds, glazing, hand-building and sculpting.

Because members come when they like, some nights are quiet and some are packed. Come up to 15 minutes early if you want a particular spot. There’s also an overflow classroom you’re welcome to use if the hand-building area is completely full.

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Two to three months to get reasonably proficient. Years to master. Master potters will tell you they’re still learning it.

Most people assume the wheel will be the easy part. It is the opposite of the easy part. It takes real practice and real dedication.

The good news: if that kind of dedication isn’t what you came for, our slab molds will get you beautifully shaped bowls, platters and boards on your very first day.

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Not as scheduled sessions any more. We used to run them, and it turned out people much preferred the open studio format they already had, so we stopped putting them on the calendar.

What replaced it is better, honestly. The owner is in classes often and is glad to help anyone push their skill to the next level: specific forms, fine-tuning technique, or the advanced fundamentals like centering and opening much larger amounts of clay. Our main wheel throwing instructor is also seriously advanced and happy to teach at that level.

No sign-up, no waiting for a date on the calendar. Come to a class, say what you’re trying to crack, and someone will work on it with you.

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Learn one thing at a time. That’s the whole answer.

You don’t need to know what anything is or does. You don’t need to understand our clays or glazes. You need to show up, and our team walks you through the process from beginning to end.

Yes, the studio is fully loaded. It’s also been thought through carefully so that being a potter here is enjoyable rather than baffling. When you get stuck, that’s what four instructors a class are for.

Two things help if you like reading ahead. The Many Myths of Pottery clears out most of what beginners are quietly worried about, and the tools on this site exist so nobody has to memorize a wall of 650+ glazes.

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36 lockers and cubbies, free for anyone to use, first come first served. We don’t allow locks on them.

Keep your apron folded on your shelf between classes.

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It’s been one of our most popular programs since we opened. A guest pass costs 25% of your monthly membership fee, capped at $42.50, and it covers one guest for one session.

Two things have to happen: you pay for them, and they sign the studio waiver.

Buy a Bring a Friend pass · Guest waiver

The full rules are all on the Bring a Friend page, including that your guest is your responsibility for the session, that each person can only ever use one guest pass, and that the fee is refunded if they join that same night.

You can’t bring a guest to your own very first class, since most of it is tour and setup.

Six weeks a year you don’t need a pass at all. Bring All Your Friends Free Week is exactly what it sounds like.

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Membership is 18 and over, or 14 alongside a parent or guardian who is also a member. There is no kids class and no drop-in for children.

The one route to clay in this building for anyone younger is a private party, which takes ages six and up, with every child under twelve beside their own adult. Families book it for exactly that reason.

For a weekly class for a child, our guide to kids and teen pottery in Utah lists every program we could confirm, the age each one takes and what it costs. Several of them are very good, and none of them are us.

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