Most of these members walked in knowing nothing.
These are real photos from real classes at The Clay Hole. Nobody styled a table. Nobody swept first. Nobody was asked to look like they were having a nice time.
Scroll a while and you will see wet hands, crooked first attempts, and the occasional genuinely beautiful thing made by somebody who had never touched clay a few months earlier.
A normal class night. Nothing moved, nothing tidied, nobody asked to smile.
Class photos.
Our instructors take most of these mid-class. Dan takes a few. Members send us plenty of their own. There are four instructors on the floor in every class, so somebody usually has a hand free for a camera.
A couple dozen load at a time, pulled at random from hundreds. No best-of, no particular order, no favorites.
Deals a fresh handful from the pile. The page stays where it is.
Three ways to make something here.
Almost everything in both galleries came off one of these three. You never have to pick one, and you can switch between all of them in a single class.
The pottery wheel
Hard at first, then quietly addictive. Two or three months before it really clicks, and every hour of it does something to your brain that no app has managed yet. There are 29 wheels here, so you will not sit waiting for one.
Hand-building & sculpting
Big shared tables, thousands of tools, and no limit past what you can picture. This is where most of the work in this studio actually gets made, and where most people accidentally find their people.
Slab molds
Press clay into one of our 150+ slab molds and walk out of your first class with a bowl, platter or casserole dish that looks like you have been doing this for years. We are not going to tell anyone.
About 80% of people walk in wanting the wheel.
Most of them fall for the other side of the studio instead. That surprises people, and it is worth knowing before you decide the wheel is the whole reason you would come.
Finished work, fresh out of the kiln.
There is no ceremony to this. A piece comes out of the kiln, the member brings it back in and sets it on the table, and one of us takes a photo. That is the entire system. Nothing to sign up for, nothing to submit.
Worth knowing before you scroll: none of this happened in one evening. Clay goes wet, then dry, then bisque fired, then glazed, then fired again. Plan on roughly two months before your own first pieces come out the other end.
Deals a fresh handful from the pile. The page stays where it is.
What the photos do not show.
Galleries are flattering by nature. They only ever contain the things that survived. Here is the rest of it.
Almost nobody’s first pieces look like this
Every photo above is a survivor. Bowls collapse on the wheel. Handles crack while they dry. Glaze does something nobody predicted and the piece comes out of the kiln looking like a decision you did not make. That happens to everybody here, including the people whose work you were just admiring, and it keeps happening long after you get good.
You will not take anything home the first night
Pottery is slow in a way that surprises people. Pieces dry for days or weeks, then get bisque fired, then glazed, then fired again, and kilns run when there is enough work to fill them. Plan on roughly two months before finished work starts coming back to you. Tell an instructor on day one if you want to speed that up and they will steer you toward pieces that move quickly.
Clay and firings are not included
Membership covers the studio, the classes, the instructors, the tools and the glazes at your level. Clay and firings are billed separately, because folding them into everyone’s rate means paying for somebody else’s habit. Bisque firings are free. The honest math on the rest is laid out on our FAQs page.
There is no way to try just one class
No drop-ins, no date nights, no one-off evenings. That is deliberate rather than greedy. An evening gets you a wet lump of clay and nothing to take home, and community does not happen in one visit either. It happens because the same people keep showing up on Tuesday. What we do instead is keep the first month cheap enough to be a real trial, and you can cancel yourself by the 24th of any month.
Nobody tidied up for the camera
The tables in these photos are the tables. Tools everywhere, water buckets, half-finished things parked next to somebody’s water bottle. That is what a working studio looks like at eight o’clock on a Wednesday night, and it is a much better sign than a spotless one.
What a night in here actually feels like.
The photos catch the pottery. They are not much good at catching the rest of it, so here is the rest of it.
Four instructors, every class
Two on the wheels, two on hand-building. You are never stuck waiting for the one person who knows how to fix your rim.
No curriculum
Every class is open studio. You make whatever you want, every single time. No assigned projects and nobody grading your bowl.
No assigned night
Your level comes with a set number of classes a month and zero rules about when you use them. Unused classes never expire while you are a member.
Somewhere to sit down
There are soft couches all over the studio for when you need a minute away from the noise, and a studio dog named Mud whose entire specialty is people who need exactly that.
Almost everyone arrives alone
That is the pattern here, not the exception. You can sit and make things beside people for weeks without a single icebreaker, and nobody thinks anything of it.
Open seven days a week
Instructor-led classes plus open studio times for working on your own and catching up. Holidays excluded. Class times & holidays
The honest vibe check
In the evening classes there will be some cursing, plenty of irreverent joking, and people sometimes bring drinks to share. If that is your scene you will fit right in. If a freewheeling room is not your thing, the Monday daytime class is quieter and more reserved, with no alcohol and no cursing. Dan’s mom is there. LGBTQ+ friendly across the board. The one thing we genuinely do not tolerate is jerks.
Some of these are workshops, not classes
Both galleries mix in photos from our workshops, raku among them. Workshops are separate paid events rather than something a membership covers, so if you spot something in here that looks nothing like a normal class night, that is usually why.
If you would rather not be in these photos
We do our best not to share pictures of people who do not want to be shared. If you find yourself in here and would rather come out, text the studio at 385-241-5528 with the exact image file name and we will have it down within 30 days.
The file name is the part we genuinely need, because it is the only way to find one photo among hundreds. Tap any photo to open it full size, then press and hold on it (on a computer, right-click) and choose to copy the image address. The last piece of that address, the bit ending in .jpg, is the file name.
There is a version of this where you are in these photos.
Same tables. Same crooked first bowl. Same photo of somebody holding up a thing that did not exist until their hands made it. Everyone in this gallery started somewhere, and most of them started nervous.
Already a member? Bring your piece in and set it on the table. Somebody will grab a photo.
Questions about any of it, text us at 385-241-5528.