The Everything Page
Dan has built a lot of good stuff around here. Guides. Tools. Certifications. Calculators. A searchable glaze wall. A book we literally call the Bible. So much stuff that even we stopped being able to find it all.
So here it all is, on one page, two taps from anything. Bookmark it and never think about it again.
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One list, no spam, unsubscribe whenever you want. Add yourself right here. No new tab, no second screen, no hunting for a form. Curious what lands in it? Read the announcements page.
There are two more lists besides this one: new member emails, and one affirmation card every morning. Pick whichever ones you want.
Studio news only. Nobody sells this list, nobody else sees it.
You’re on the list.
Stay tuned! Next time something changes around here, you’ll know before you drive over. Add somebody else
Seven hundred and sixteen jars, and we wrote down what every one of them does.
The Glaze Bible is the whole wall, written out. Every glaze and underglaze we stock, fired on our own tiles in our own kilns at cone 5½, with what it does over texture, what it does under another glaze, and what the maker will and will not say about eating off it. Underneath it are the four tools that get you to a jar.
The Glaze Bible
It used to be a binder on a table and a PDF on your phone. It is now a page for every glaze we own. Search by name, family, brand or test tile number, then follow it wherever it goes: what the surface does, which clay bodies it likes, how it moves, what it does layered under or over something else, and where it sits on the shelf.
Read it before you glaze and your kiln openings stop being a surprise. Read it after and you will know why the last one went the way it did.
Also in there: what each Level opens, straight answers on food safe, and the glazes the owner reaches for.
The Mega Glaze Tool
Every glaze and underglaze in the building in one filterable list. Type a color and watch it find things, cut it down to what your Level opens, then build a list and print it.
Filter the wall
The Glaze Finder
You already know which jar you want. Type the name and it tells you the shelf, the row and the slot it is sitting in, so you stop reading the same six shelves over again.
Find a jar
Layering Glazes
One glaze over another, and the part nobody tells you: which pairs are worth firing, which order they go on in, and how many coats each one wants before it will behave.
See the pairings
Offerings to Icarus
You picked the glaze, you did the math, and the kiln still gets a vote. Leave an offering: a secret, something good about somebody else, or something great about yourself.
Leave an offeringThe Glaze Finder
You know exactly which glaze or underglaze you want. You picked it days ago. And now you are standing in front of six hundred and seventy-three jars that all look like jars, reading the same shelf for the fourth time, wondering if somebody moved it.
- No more twenty-minute lapsReading the same six shelves over and over because it has to be here somewhere.
- No more hunting a pink teeYou should not have to find a human before you can find a jar.
- No more settlingGrabbing the one you could actually see is not the same as getting the one you wanted.
Destroy the glaze wall
Six hundred and eleven jars, stacked six shelves high, and a row of icons underneath begging to be tapped. Pick one and watch the wall come apart. A gorilla, a tarantula, an alien, a cannon, and a few things we are not going to spoil.
A different set of effects every time the Glaze Finder loads, so the wall never comes apart the same way twice.
Every slab mold we own, in one place.
A slab of clay laid over one of these comes off as a bowl, a platter or a tray with an even wall and a shape that looks like somebody meant it. First try.
- 148unique slab molds
- 248on the shelves
- 75tiles, nested sets share one
Each tile shows the slab mold on the left and what it makes on the right, plus the two numbers members ask about first: how much clay to start with, and how thick to roll the slab. Filter it down, heart the ones you want, and take the list to the shelf.
Slab molds need the slab roller and mold certification first. It runs about fifteen minutes. A slab mold broken through carelessness is billed to the member who broke it, anywhere from about $40 to past $600. Normal wear is on us.
Ten more you’ll want to use.
Less glamorous than a glaze wall, more useful than they look. Cleaning up after yourself, keeping track of what you have already earned, telling us when we get something wrong, doing the math you were going to guess at, working out what went wrong in the kiln, and watching people who are far better at this than we are.
The Clean-Up Checklist
Tap the side you worked on and it hands you your list. Five minutes, every visit, and it is the entire reason this place looks the way it does.
Open the checklist
Clay Hole Rewards
Tell it when you joined and which level you are on, and it lights up everything you have already earned and what lands next. Free firings, free clay, a shirt, and eventually free firings and clay for life.
See where you are
Suggestions, Complaints, Compliments & Ideas
Say your piece and hit send. It goes straight to Dan, not into a queue somebody gets to on Thursday. Put your name on it or stay completely anonymous. Both get read.
Tell us anything
Incredible Videos Worth Watching
Eight core skills, 24 free videos, 15 of the best potters on YouTube. None of them ours. We just did the digging so you don’t lose a Saturday to the algorithm.
Start watchingPottery Calculators
Shrinkage, firing cost, shelf space, drying time, bag math, a cone machine, and the full clay spec table. All tuned to the clays we actually stock.
Run the numbers
How Much Clay Do I Need?
Starting weights for sixty-seven forms, thrown and hand built, from an espresso cup to a fourteen inch platter. Plus how many of each you get out of a 25 lb bag.
Open the chart
The Which-Level Quiz
Green, Yellow, Purple, or Black? Four questions, honest answers, and shelves drawn to actual scale. Let the quiz decide so you don’t have to.
Find your levelTap Centering Practice
Getting a pot true for trimming is a rhythm, not a shove. Four techniques, plus a practice wheel that runs in your browser so you can find the beat while you wait for coffee.
Find the beat
Glaze Combination Groups
The four Facebook groups where the best combos live, plus the one search trick that makes them ten times more useful. Borrow recipes from a quarter million potters.
Find combos
Why Did My Pottery Do That?
Forty-five faults diagnosed, from cracks and warping to glaze that ran onto the shelf. Find the symptom, get the cause, and find out whether the piece can be saved. Some of them cannot.
Find the faultFind something broken on this site and we pay you for it. Typos, dead links, a tool that will not load: $1 to $7 a find, first report gets it. How the bug bounty works.
Walk the whole studio from your couch.
Seventeen stops, start to finish, in 360 degrees. The wheels, the slab rollers, the glaze wall, the kilns, the shelves, the wash pit and the rooms most people never think to ask about.
- 17stops in one walk
- 360°look anywhere you want
Tap the bubbles as you go and they answer the thing you were about to ask: what that machine does, where your shelf would live, how the clay gets reclaimed, which glazes are which. Some of them open the tool that goes with the spot you are standing in. A few of them are not information at all, and those are the ones worth hunting for.
Nobody picks their own card.
Every class here starts the same way. Before anybody walks in, a positive affirmation card is already sitting at every seat. You do not get to pick yours. You get the one that was waiting for you.
Now the whole ritual lives here too. Tell the cards what to call you, answer two small questions about how today is actually sitting with you, and one of them comes and finds you. Three more land on the table after that, the same three for everybody, everywhere, until midnight.
There are a hundred of them.The hundred and first only ever happens in person.
There is also a version that emails you one a morning until all hundred have found you.
It’s 1 a.m. and you suddenly have the most important question ever.
Good news: somebody already asked it. Prices, hours, what to wear, what to bring, how firing works, whether your teenager can come, what happens if you have never touched clay in your life. It’s all in there.
The one everybody asks quietly: am I going to be terrible at this? Yes. Gloriously. For about three weeks. Then something clicks, and you start texting photos of a mug to people who did not ask.
We built a whole university and left the doors unlocked.
More than two hundred written lessons across seventeen pottery areas, ordered the way a pot actually gets made. Free for anyone, member or not, with no login and no email to hand over. It is the largest thing on this website by a wide margin.
Every lesson opens on its own page: what to do, in what order, and the parts that quietly go wrong. None of it sits behind a membership, because Dan wanted it open to everybody rather than walled off for the people who pay us.
Seventeen pottery areas, in the order a pot actually gets made.
Tap any one and it drops you at that shelf. Inside each area the lessons run in the order you learn them, which is why tap centering sits with trimming rather than with throwing. The last one is not lessons at all.
The catalog is one way in. These are three more.
Same material underneath, sorted three different ways. By what you are trying to make, by what you can already do, and by what a word actually means. Pick whichever one matches the question you have.
The Pottery Library
309 guides, tools and posts on one shelf, sorted by what you are trying to do rather than by where they live. Search it, or pick a shelf and read down it.
The Pottery Skill Tree
66 skills in the order they depend on each other. Tick what you can already do and the board shows what just opened up, and what is still waiting on something earlier.
The Pottery Dictionary
254 words, defined plainly. The ones everybody in the room uses and nobody stops to explain. 64 of them link out to the full lesson.
It quizzes you, and it keeps score.
The catalog is the least of it. There is a layer underneath that most people do not find until the second time they open it.
- A quiz on every lessonMore than fifteen hundred questions across the catalog, graded A+ to F. Nobody sees the result but you.
- It remembers what you studiedTick a lesson off and its area shows a percentage. Come back in a month and the ticks are still there.
- Search the whole catalogType handles, or cracks, or teapot, and the catalog narrows to the lessons about that.
- A skill level on every lessonBeginner, intermediate or advanced, marked before you open it.
- Every lesson, two lengthsComprehensive when you want all of it, Nutshell when you want the same teaching in far fewer words.
- Our numbers, not a stranger’sBisque to cone 05, glaze to cone 5½. Every temperature in there is what our own kilns run.
Read these three first and the other two hundred make sense.
Pottery Foundations is the first area for a reason. About an hour of reading, and the whole process stops being a mystery.
The Full Pottery Process, Start to Finish
Every stage a piece moves through, in order, with the waiting written in.
The Five Stages of Clay
Slip, plastic, leather hard, bone dry, fired. Which stage you are looking at decides what you can do to it next.
The Many Myths of Pottery
Seventy things potters swear are true, fact checked one at a time. Air bubbles do not make pots explode.
Free for everyone, member or not. Ticks and quiz grades save in your own browser on the one device, so private browsing or clearing your history starts you over. Missing something? There is a request box at the foot of the catalog.
Six things members buy when they want ’em.
No digging through menus. In, out, back to the wheel.
Fresh Clay
All eight house clays by the bag, priced by your level color. Grab, pay, go make things.
Shop clay
Flux Glazes
The optional troublemakers. Fluxes make glazes melt, run, and get weird in the best possible way.
Shop fluxes
Helpful Pottery Items
The short list of gear that has to be yours: apron, wire, clippers, approved kiln stuff.
See the list
Grab a Drink
Honor system, both of them. The fridges aren’t locked and the Keurig is yours. Take what you want, tap the matching price, checkout and get back to your wheel.
Pottery Gift Cards
The one on this list that is not for you. Twelve amounts, delivered by email, and it never expires. It spends on classes, clay and firings, and the page is straight about the three things it cannot do.
Send a gift cardEverything a membership comes with, explained.
Whether it’s your first day or your five hundredth, these six cover the machinery. Your level. Your options. The ten rules that keep this place kind.
The classes you did not use are still yours
Miss a week. Miss a month. Miss a whole rough winter. Unused classes stack up with no cap and no expiration, and they are still sitting there whenever you get back to it. Canceling is the one thing that erases them, and nothing brings them back after that. How rollover works, and the one way to lose them.
The Welcome Booklet
Your first day, page by page. What to bring, where things live, how your first class actually goes. Read it before you walk in and you’ll feel like a regular by week two.
Open the booklet
Options for Couples
Two ways to do this together: one Shared Membership you split between you, or the Shared Shelf Pass, two full memberships sharing one shelf and saving 20%.
Compare both options
Upgrade Mid-Month
Outgrew your level three weeks before renewal? Pay the difference between your level and the one you want, and the new perks start the same day. No waiting for the 25th.
Upgrade your level
Membership, Fully Explained
Levels, prices, shelves, the dot system, pausing, canceling, and what actually happens after you tap Join. Written so a twelve-year-old could follow it. You are at least that smart.
Read the explainer
The Clay Hole Commandments
Ten rules in fake King James English, printed on the wall and enforced with love. Four are about the studio. Six are about each other. Basically, don’t be an A-hole at The Clay Hole.
Read the commandments
The Heroes Discount
Teachers, military, first responders, healthcare workers, students, seniors, nonprofit staff, foster parents. 10 to 15% off every single month, forever, no code to remember.
See if you qualifyScream it into the void.
You centered it. You pulled it. Best wall you have ever had. Then it got weird, wobbled, and folded over on itself. Six weeks of work, one firing, and it is gone.
Some days it has nothing to do with clay at all. Either way, getting it out of your head is only the first half. The second half is choosing how it dies, and there are fifteen ways to do that, from a plain smash to a meteor to a black hole.
- Nothing saves itNo draft, no history, no database. Close the tab and it never existed.
- Nothing sends itWhat you type never leaves your screen. Let loose without filters.
- Nobody reads itNot us, not the internet. Type the part you have been being polite about.
Best used loudly. All caps is encouraged.
Earn your way into the good stuff.
Some of our equipment asks for half an hour of your life before it will love you back. Watch a video, learn the rules, sign your name. Then it’s all yours.
Dipping Glazes
The buckets. Glorious results, expensive to ruin, guarded accordingly. Get certified, then dunk away.
Get certifiedSlab Rollers & Slab Molds
248 slab molds, from tiny trinkets to giant bowls. Some cost $600 to replace. The training is free, which is a much better deal.
Get certifiedBrush-On Glazes & Underglazes
Required before your first glaze day. The video, the rules, the signature. Your future mugs will thank you.
Get certifiedRaku Workshops
Open flame, hot tongs, big drama, unforgettable pots. Get safety certified before the next workshop lands on the calendar, and read how one actually runs while you wait.
Get certifiedMore ways to ruin a good pot here than anywhere else.
Glazing is the last thing you do and the easiest thing to get wrong, so it gets its own topic upstairs. Five lessons, in the order they help. Same catalog, same quizzes, same two lengths.
Two of these have a certification attached
Brush-on glazes before your first glaze day, and dipping glazes before the buckets. The lessons teach the technique; the certifications are what open the shelves. Both live in Graduation Day.
Glaze Brushing, Coat by Coat
Why the coat count matters, which direction each one goes, and what a glaze looks like when you have put on too little.
How to Use Dipping Glazes
The technique itself, separate from the certification. Tongs, the count, overlaps, and what a dipped surface should look like before it dries.
When to Use Celadon Glazes
Celadons pool in carved lines and vanish on flat walls. Knowing that in advance is the difference between a great pot and a disappointing one.
Glazing Big and Intricate Pottery Faster
Getting a large or heavily carved piece covered evenly without spending your entire night on one pot.
Getting the Most Out of the Mega Glaze Tool
A step by step walkthrough of the search tool, well past what most people use it for.
Pages nobody asked for. You’re welcome.
Somewhere along the way we started writing guides that have no business existing. We regret nothing. People read these at 1 a.m. and show up to class two weeks later.
The Many Myths of Pottery
Air bubbles do not explode pots, and cone 5½ is not even a temperature. Seventy things potters swear are true, fact checked one at a time against Orton, the FDA, OSHA and actual published research.
Half of what beginners are afraid of turns out to be somebody repeating something they heard. This is the page that clears the air before your first class does.
Bust some myths
Pottery & the 16 Personalities
All sixteen types, honestly profiled: what you’ll love, what will drive you nuts. Find yours, then read your ex’s.
Find your type
Pottery & the 5 Love Languages
Whichever language you lead with, pottery serves the whole plate. Five deep dives and a two-minute quiz. Yes, we cited actual studies.
Take the quiz
Pottery by Zodiac Sign
What every sign does at a pottery wheel, what will test them, and what to buy them. There’s a birthday decoder. It knows about cusps.
Read your sign
The Clay Hole & Every Other Studio
Fourteen Utah studios side by side, every fact from their own websites. The matcher will send you somewhere else when somewhere else fits better.
See the comparison
Third Places in Utah
Not home, not work, the third one. Utah is short on them. Eleven kinds you can get to from the Wasatch Front, six questions that sort a real one from a nice one, and an honest note that we are not the cheapest answer on the list.
Find a third placeWhatever the calendar says, there’s a project for it.
Kilns are slow. Start your holiday pieces before the holiday sneaks up on you. Ask us how we know.
Mother’s Day
Twenty gift ideas moms actually keep: love note dishes, herb strippers, garden markers, and more.
Make mom something
Halloween
Monster mugs, witch boots, jack-o-lantern bowls, haunted lanterns. The kiln loves spooky season.
Get spooky
Christmas & Holidays
Ornaments, gift pieces, and holiday projects worth the kiln wait. Start in October. Trust us.
Deck the shelvesClass photos & member show & tell.
Real nights, real people, real pieces out of the kiln. Eight at a time, pulled at random from hundreds. Deal yourself a new hand as many times as you like. We’ll wait.
What’s happening this week.
The Studio Calendar
Classes, open studio, demos, workshops, and closures, all on one living calendar. Check it before you drive.
Open the calendar
The Weekly Class Schedule
The rhythm of a normal week: instructed class nights, open studio evenings, and weekend hours.
See the scheduleWhich nights teach, and where your pottery goes.
One of these decides whether an instructor is standing next to you. The other is the four tables every piece of yours passes through.
Open Studio, Explained
An open studio class has four instructors on the floor teaching whatever you brought. Open studio time has nobody teaching, on purpose. Both spend one of your monthly classes.
See the difference
Pick-Up & Drop-Off Tables
Four tables around the kilns, and every piece you make passes through all four. Which one is which, why your maker’s mark matters, and what happens to work nobody collects.
See how pieces moveHelp your future Clay Hole friends find you!
A stranger’s Google review helped you find this place. Right now somebody is googling pottery studios at 1 a.m., wondering if they’d fit in here. You’re the stranger now.
Leave an honest review. Not a glowing one. An honest one. Warts and all.
Who is Dan Pearce?
Author, blogger, potter, single dad, and the guy who built this place. Dan spent years writing Single Dad Laughing for an audience of three million before trading most of his keyboard time for a pottery wheel and a very large glaze wall.
This studio is what happened next.
Mud
Thirty-five pounds of miniature Australian Labradoodle. He is Dan’s dog, and on the days he decides to come to work he is the most popular person in the building.
That is not modesty. Members have walked straight past Dan without breaking stride to get to him. Dan said hello. They did not hear him. They were already on the floor.
We’re always looking for our next instructor.
Not because somebody is about to quit. Because people move, go back to school, have babies, take the other job. The studios that end up scrambling are the ones with nobody on the list.
Trade instructors, most of all.
One shift a week, either side of the studio, in exchange for a Purple Level Membership. No teaching background required, and you do not need to throw.
This is the door most of our instructors came through.
There are three ways in: wheel throwing, hand-building, and the trade program. Evenings and mornings are separate lists. The whole ask is one email, and the trick is sending it before there is an opening. Also, there is a dog.
Pause it. Don’t quit it.
Money gets tight. The calendar fills up. Something happens that nobody planned for. None of that has to cost you the one night a week that is actually yours, and a hard month is exactly when a person needs it most.
What a pause actually keeps ▾
- Your shelfRight where you left it, with the half-finished piece still sitting on it.
- Your classesEvery class you have stacked up is still there waiting. They do not expire.
- Your rewards clockPaused months simply do not count. The clock stops instead of resetting.
That last one is the whole argument. A pause runs about a sixth of your membership and covers up to three months in a calendar year. Cancel, and the rewards card goes back to zero and starts over at one month, which is a real amount of money to hand back over a rough eight weeks.
And if you do need to go, go. We mean that warmly, and we made that page just as carefully as this one.
Pause My Membership
Pay for the months you need and that is the end of your to-do list. No portal, no cancelling, no texting us to confirm.
Take the break
How to Cancel
Three taps in your own account. No phone call, no retention conversation, nobody to talk you out of it. The instructions are the first thing on the page.
See howBring 10 people. Bring 48. Watch what three hours of mud does.
Real clay, real wheels, real instructors, and three hours where nobody in the room can be on a phone. Everybody is equally bad at it on purpose, and shared incompetence bonds people faster than shared success ever has.
Team Events & Corporate
Your people stop performing. The org chart quietly disappears for three hours, and the escape room never did that. Fair warning: we might steal one or two of them.
Plan a team event
Private Parties
Family reunions, girls’ nights, birthdays, bachelorettes, and online groups meeting in person for the first time. Ages 6 and up, up to 48 people.
Plan a private partyWhatever it is, just ask.
A question, a problem, an idea, a weird noise your pot made in the kiln. You are always welcome to reach out, any time, about anything. That’s not a policy. It’s just how this place works.
A real human answers. Usually one with clay somewhere on their person.