The Clay Hole University
Free pottery lessons and guides for anyone serious about clay: 209 of them, in the order you learn them, from wedging a bag of clay to selling what you made. Every one has its own quiz, and none of it asks you to sign up.
Everything at The Clay Hole University comes in two versions: Comprehensive or Nutshell. The only question is how deep down the rabbit hole you want to go.
Dan Pearce founded The Clay Hole, and he wanted all of it open to everybody rather than walled off for members. People have been making pots shoulder to shoulder for tens of thousands of years, showing each other what works. That is a long tradition we’d love to keep going. Browse what you like. Dive in where it interests you. Join us if you’re here in Utah. We can’t wait to see what you make…
- 209 lessons & guides written and live right now
- 17 pottery areas, ordered start to finish
- 1,532 quiz questions to test yourself on
The course catalog
Pick a pottery area, or search the whole thing.
The pottery areas run in the order a piece does, and inside each area the lessons and guides run in the order you learn them. That is why tap centering sits with trimming rather than with throwing.
You have studied 0 of the 209 finished guides. Tick them off as you go and this page will remember.
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Results
The whole catalog is still below this, and every match is ringed where it lives.
Pottery Foundations
Start here. What actually happens between a bag of clay and a finished piece, how to read the state your clay is in, and which of the things potters repeat to each other are true.
Safety and Your Body
The dust, the joints and the back. What actually carries risk in a pottery studio, which precautions are worth the effort, and how to keep working comfortably for years.
Studio Life and Etiquette
How to share a room full of people and equipment. Asking for help, saying what you need, looking after shared tools, and what to wear while you do it.
Before you dive deeper, a few thoughts from Dan
Because Dan built The Clay Hole for real humans. These are letters, not lessons. Nothing to tick off and nothing to practice. Our founder wrote all four himself, for you, the very real human reading this right now.
Preparing Your Clay
Wedging is the step people skip and then quietly regret four weeks later, standing over a cracked piece. The two techniques worth knowing, and what to do with the scraps once you have them.
The Pottery Wheel
The core skills, in the order you learn them. Nobody gets these on the first night, and the guides say so plainly rather than pretending otherwise.
Advanced Throwing
Once a cylinder holds up on its own, this is where the wheel gets interesting.
Hand Building
No wheel required, and plenty of people never use one. Pinch, coil and slab work, plus our slab rollers and the 150+ slab molds on the shelves.
Project Guides
Whole objects rather than single techniques, thrown or hand-built, in roughly the order they get hard. Each one runs from the first lump of clay to the finished piece, with the parts that catch people out written down.
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Hand-Built Footed Serving Bowls
Lifting a wide bowl off the table, and what a foot does to how it dries.
Open the guide →GuideSkill level: Intermediate -
Butter Dishes with a Domed Lid
Two pieces that have to fit each other after both of them shrink.
Open the guide →GuideSkill level: Intermediate -
Planters with an Attached Drip Tray
One piece instead of two, which sounds easier and is the opposite.
Open the guide →GuideSkill level: Intermediate
Take a break to have some fun
There is a lot on this page and nobody takes it in at one sitting. These four are for when your brain needs a minute. They are exactly as silly as they sound, and members love every one of ’em.
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Make an offering to Icarus, God of Kilns
Leave your offering. Ask for the glaze blessing you desire. Watch our kiln god come to life.
Open it →
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Scream it into the void
Whatever the kiln did to your favorite mug, whatever life brought to you outside of this place, tell the void. And then choose how to let it go.
Open it →
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Destroy our meticulous glaze wall
Scroll past the glaze finder and trigger your disaster via the icons below. Turn our most guarded area of the studio into a big, giant mess.
Open it →
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Take a peek at your daily Clay Hole card
The same cards members find waiting at their seat. One a day, and it picks for you. Come back daily or receive ’em by email.
Open it →
Trimming, Handles and Drying
Leather-hard work. This is where a decent pot becomes a good one, and where an impatient week turns into a crack you cannot fix.
Surface and Decoration
Everything you do to a surface before the glaze goes on. Carving, inlay, texture and resists, plus underglaze and engobes, which are the two products people mix up constantly.
Glazing
650+ brush-on glazes, seven dipping buckets, and more ways to ruin a good pot at the last step than at any other point in the process. Start with the rules.
Firing and Fixing
What happens in the kiln, what to do when a piece comes out attached to something it should not be attached to, and how to put one back together when it breaks. Bisque goes to cone 05 and glaze fires to cone 5½.
Other Ways to Find, Fire, and Form
Everything that happens away from a members' wheel, from digging your own clay out of a hillside to firing in a pit. Some of it we run as a workshop here, the rest needs a trip somewhere else, and all of it is worth knowing about. We do not slip cast and never will.
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Pit Firing
The oldest way anybody fired a pot, and still the one that gives colors you cannot get from a glaze.
Open the guide →GuideSkill level: Intermediate
Selling Your Work
What happens after the kiln, in the order it tends to happen. Take a decent photograph, work out what a pot costs you, then decide where and how to sell it.
Electives
Nothing here belongs to a single stage of the process, because all of it belongs to every stage. When a plan helps and when it gets in the way, finding your own work and the feelings that get in its way, how potters mess up their own pots, where the craft grew up, and what running a building full of potters teaches you.
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Overcoming Imposter Syndrome as a Potter, an Artist and a Human
The feeling that everyone else in the room knows what they are doing and you are about to be found out. Where it comes from, why the good potters have it too, and how to keep making anyway.
Open the guide →GuideSkill level: All levels
Graduation Day
The four certifications. Each one gates equipment or a process, each has a quiz and an agreement at the end, and each one ends with a card. Take them when you need them rather than all at once.
If you are anywhere near Draper, Utah
Everything on this page is free to anyone, anywhere. The studio itself is in Draper, and if that is close enough to you, the four links below are the whole story on joining it. We would love to have you making pots with us.
- Find the right membership for you A short set of questions that lands you on the right Level for how you actually want to use the place. Open it →
- Membership Levels, explained Green Level, Yellow Level, Purple Level and Black Level. What each includes and what each costs. Open it →
- Every question we get asked Hours, firing fees, what to bring, whether you need experience. All of it, answered plainly. Open it →
- Join The Clay Hole Monthly membership. Pick a Level and you are in. Become a member →
Something missing?
Tell us what else you’d like to see here.
This library keeps growing, and the best ideas for it have always come from members getting stuck on something at the wheel. If there is a technique, a form or a problem you keep running into and it is not here yet, say so and it goes on the list.
Bisque fires to cone 05 and glaze fires to cone 5½ here, so any temperature written into these lessons and guides is ours. If you are reading from another studio, check your own numbers before you copy anything.
- Choosing a selection results in a full page refresh.
- Opens in a new window.
New member deal
30 of 30 discounted spots left this month
Every month we discount 30 new memberships. Then that is it until the 1st.
Tell us where to send it and this month’s deal lands in your inbox. If this month runs out, you get next month’s before it opens.
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It should land in the next few minutes. One honest thing while you wait: we are members only and we do not run walk-in tours, so the virtual tour is the closest you can get to standing in one.
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One question
Would you want to know if a Clay Hole opened near you?
We started in Draper, Utah, and we would like to be in more places than that. Where they go next is the part we have not worked out yet.
Where are you?
The zip code is the part that counts.
That is how we work out where the demand actually is. The rest is so we know who to tell.
Got it
You are on the map.
Being straight with you: this could be a long wait, and we will not email you in the meantime. If your area is where the numbers land, you will be the first to know.
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