The booklet we hand you on day one.
When you walk in for your first class we put a printed copy of this in your hands, along with your rewards card. This is that same booklet, except you can read it now instead of standing in the doorway holding it.
It covers the things new members ask us in their first month: what happens on day one, what the four levels actually get you, how the color system works, what clay and firings cost, and the short list of rules that keeps this place worth coming to.
Jump to a page
Somewhere in the next few pages is the answer to the question you are about to ask an instructor. Have a read anyway.
Welcome to The Clay Hole.
Dan Pearce built this place in 2025 with three things in mind, and we think he landed all three.
That last one is why there is no curriculum here, no assigned project, and nobody at the front of the room telling forty people to make the same mug. You get four instructors on the floor and a studio full of people making completely different things.
Community first, even above the pottery. The clay is the excuse. The people are the point. Give it a few weeks and the room stops being somewhere you attend and starts being somewhere you go.
Dan is in the studio often, sometimes for a whole class, sometimes for a pop-in. Say hello when you see him. That is the entire reason he is there.
Everything we hand you on day one.
We run workshops in all sorts of art forms, but this booklet is for our pottery members, because pottery is the main event here.
It is one of the most rewarding things you can learn and one of the hardest to master. Whether you want to throw on the wheel, hand-build, or make precision pieces on our slab molds, there is a process to follow if you want ceramics that outlive you.
Read it in any order. Nothing here is a test. The pages that matter most in your first week are your first day, the levels, and what it costs to keep going.
Anything not covered here is almost certainly on our FAQs page, which is genuinely thorough. If it is not, text us on 385-241-5528 and we will answer during class hours.
What actually happens.
Nerves on the first night are completely normal and nobody is going to put you on the spot. Here is the whole thing, start to finish.
- •Sign the waiver. You cannot come to class without it.
- •Text us on 385-241-5528 and tell us which day you are coming.
- •Watch the day one orientation video. It gets you into clay up to an hour faster, and there is a password hidden in it you will be asked for.
- •Green Level Members bring basic tools and a sponge. Every level above that has tools waiting for you.
- •An apron if you want one. Optional, and not included at any level.
- •Watch the equipment videos for anything you plan to touch: the wheel video before you throw, the slab roller and slab mold video before you use either. Required for experienced potters too, because they cover how we do things here rather than how to make pottery.
Two things worth knowing. First wheel lessons only go to members who arrive on time, because an instructor cannot start one mid-class. And you cannot bring a guest to your own very first class, since most of it is tour and setup.
Look for the shirts.
Nobody expects you to work anything out on your own. There are four instructors on the floor every class, and they are color-coded.
There is usually one on the wheel side and one on the hand-building side, and they are shared across the whole class. If someone is mid-explanation with another member, grab the other one.
We do not know what you do not know. Nobody here can read minds, so the questions that feel too basic to ask are almost always the ones worth asking. Ask them.
Four levels. Tap yours.
Each level gives you more tools, more glazes, more slab molds, more shelf and more classes. Tap a card and this page fills in with what that level actually gets.
Pick a level above
Tap any of the four cards and we will lay out exactly what that level includes.
Upgrades are unlimited, downgrades are not. You can move up whenever you like, including mid-month. Moving down starts the following month.
Across the three years Dan ran the smaller version of this studio, nobody ever downgraded, nobody stayed at Green for more than a month, and 90% moved up to Purple Level inside their first year. Make of that what you will.
Everything in the building is color-marked.
Every tool, glaze and slab mold here carries a color. The rule is one sentence long.
You get your color, plus every color below it. Never a color above it.
So a Purple Level Member uses purple, yellow and green. A Yellow Level Member uses yellow and green. Nobody has to ask permission or look anything up. If the mark is your color or lower, it is yours.
Everything marked green
Pick a level above to see which colors are open to you.
Orange and red mean off limits to members entirely. Those are staff and studio-only items, marked that way so nobody has to guess.
Equipment is the exception. All 29 wheels, the worktables, the slab rollers and the kilns are open to every level, whatever color you are on. Color marking covers the tools, glazes and slab molds you make pottery with, not the machines you make it on.
Nobody is auditing which tool you picked up. This runs on trust, and it works.
Why this takes weeks, not an evening.
A wet blob of clay becomes a finished stoneware vessel in about two months. It genuinely cannot be done in a night, and that is the single biggest surprise for new members.
Kilns are fired when there is enough work to fill one. That can be several times a week or once or twice a month, depending on how busy the studio is. Nothing is sitting idle; it is waiting for company.
Firing to cone 6 is why your work comes out watertight, dishwasher safe, microwave safe and hard to chip. Low-fire pottery looks fine on day one, then crazes, absorbs water, stains and chips at the rim. It costs us more to do it this way. It is worth it.
One quiet upside: because everything in the building is cone 6, every clay and every glaze we carry works with every other one. Combine freely without checking a chart.
It is your journey.
There are infinite directions you can take this, and the only thing that matters is whether you are going in one you enjoy.
Dare to dream of the ridiculous. Be bold about it. Learn to not care one bit what anyone else in class thinks of what you make.
Spend two months on one absurd sculpture if that is what you want. That is a completely valid pottery education. So is making forty mugs. So is spending a whole evening glazing and talking.
Your pottery experience is for you and only you.
Nobody here is behind, because there is no behind to be. Miss a week and nothing happens. Switch from the wheel to hand-building and back again. Change your mind as often as you like.
The bit we did not expect when we designed it this way: because everyone is at a different skill level working on something different, the room runs on constant inspiration instead of constant comparison. That turns out to matter enormously.
What it costs to keep going.
Membership is not the whole bill, and we would rather you heard that here than found out on the 25th.
What will this firing cost?
Measure the box your piece would fit inside. Rounded up to the nearest cent, $4.80 minimum.
- •Dipping glaze upcharges if you are Green or Yellow Level, or if you use Dan’s Secret Sauce below Black.
- •Flux glazes and a handful of other specialty glazes, bought by the pint.
- •Raku and specialty pottery workshops. Separate events, separately paid, never included in membership.
- •Art workshops in all sorts of other mediums.
- •A clay cubby or apron hook, rented monthly, if your shelf is getting crowded.
- •Game nights, parties and contests. Some free, some not.
Pottery is not the cheapest hobby in the world. It is also one of the most satisfying, and well made pottery lasts for fifty lifetimes. Two months in, when you drink out of the first mug you made, the math stops feeling like math.
Your rewards card.
You got one on your first day. It gets punched every month you stay, and it never stops paying out. Stay long enough and this studio starts firing your pottery for free for the rest of your life.
Not two years. Two months. The first punch on that card is a free firing, and it only gets better from there.
Read that last row again. Three years in, we hand you a bag of clay every month for as long as you stay, and we fire three pieces a month for free on top of it.
Nobody has reached the lifetime rewards yet, and we should say so. We opened in March 2025, so the longest-standing members in the building are still working toward that first free-firings-for-life punch. It lands for the earliest of them later this year. Somebody is about to be the first, and we are looking forward to it more than they are.
You can use a reward the moment the month you paid for begins. No waiting until the month is over, no minimum number of classes first. Hit six months and your Bring a Friend pass is yours from day one of that month.
The one rule that catches people
If your membership is canceled at any time, for any reason, your rewards start over. You are always welcome back and we will get you a new card, but the clock restarts from zero.
This is exactly why pausing beats canceling. Months on pause do not count against you, and every punch you have earned is still there when you come back.
Do not cash a reward in until your card has actually been punched. On free firings the max inches applies to the piece’s longest side. Lifetime rewards do not roll over from month to month, and rewards cannot be shared, gifted or transferred.
Our studio clays.
Every one of these is a commercially made, de-aired clay body that matures properly in our kilns, and all eight are cone 5/6 so they fire happily together. Tap any bag to read its full page. Prices follow whichever level you pick.
Every bag is 25 lb except Berlin Gray, which is 27 lb and vacuum sealed. Tap any clay above for the full write-up: what it throws like, what it fires to, exactly how much it shrinks, and the honest list of what it is bad at.
Never bring outside clay into the studio
Not a bag from another studio, not something cheaper from online, not a block a friend gave you. The wrong clay at our temperature slumps, bloats or melts, and melted clay bonds itself to a kiln shelf and to everything else on it.
It is never only your piece. Everything on those shelves belongs to other members, and there is no way to give somebody back six weeks of work. Anyone who brings outside clay in is responsible for the damage it does.
Clay you bought here is yours. Take it home, work at your kitchen table, bring it back next week. Please do not recycle our studio clay, though. You are welcome to take your own clay home and recycle it there.
The five stages of clay.
Almost every pottery mistake is a right technique done at the wrong stage. Learn these five and most problems stop happening to you.
Clay fresh out of the bag. This is when you form it into something: throwing, pinching, coiling, rolling slabs, draping over a slab mold.
It is also the only stage where clay forgives you completely. Squash it and start again as many times as you like.
Firm but not dry, roughly the feel of a hard cheese. This is the stage for carving, trimming a foot, and slipping and scoring on handles or embellishments.
Attach a handle any later and it will pop off during drying. This is the window.
All the water has evaporated. The clay is at its most fragile here, lighter than it looks, and it will snap if you are careless carrying it.
It is also ready for the kiln. Nothing goes into a bisque firing until it is genuinely bone dry, because trapped water turns to steam and steam breaks pots.
Out of its first firing. Now it is properly ceramic and much stronger, but still porous enough to drink up glaze, which is exactly the point.
Bisque firings are free here. You only ever pay for the glaze firing.
Glazed and through its second, hotter firing. The clay has vitrified and the glaze has turned to glass. It is now hard as stone, watertight and dishwasher safe.
This is the one you take home and use every morning for the next decade.
Clay shrinks between wet and fired, by roughly a tenth to a seventh depending on the body. If a lid has to fit a jar, make both from the same bag on the same day.
Pottery, step by step.
The glazing rules are not us being precious. There is close to $100,000 of commercial glaze in this building and the rules are the only reason it stays usable. You will sign a glaze checklist before you glaze anything.
Plan on about two months from first touch to finished piece. Your fourth piece moves through much faster than your first, because by then you can judge thickness and drying without thinking about it.
Seven dipping glazes.
Everything else in the building is brush-on, which is deliberate rather than an oversight. The seven buckets are the exception, and they are not cheap homemade mixes. Every one is a high-end commercial glaze altered for our members.
What dipping costs you
Pick your level above and we will tell you exactly what you pay per piece.
The seven: Bronzealot, Blue Hole, Creamed Ice, Sunny Charcoal, Tamjoda, Dan’s Secret Sauce and a zinc-free Clear. Dan’s Secret Sauce is the wild one, coming out different with every firing and every form.
You must be certified before your first dip
Whatever your level. It takes about twenty-five minutes, you only ever do it once, and it is a video, an agreement and a password.
These buckets are shared by the whole studio and one careless dip can ruin one. Dust, unfired underglaze, brushed glaze, a dirty tool, wet wax or grit off the floor will contaminate a whole bucket, and some cost up to $2,400 to replace.
If you drop something in a bucket, do not reach in after it. Grab a pink shirt and they will get it out for you.
In practice it is easy: clean piece, dry wax, rinse, mix well, dip for the time printed on that bucket’s lid, let it drain fully, touch up once it is dry, clean up. If you dip more than a few pieces a month, upgrading often works out cheaper than the upcharges.
The pottery wheel.
Most people assume the wheel is the easy part. It is the opposite of the easy part, and it is deeply addicting once it clicks.
Push through the learning curve, which is genuinely challenging, and you will start making things you did not think you had in you. No matter how good you get there is always bigger, always a harder shape, always somewhere further to push.
Wheels are first come, first served. Come up to fifteen minutes early if you want a particular one. On a typical night 20 to 25% of the room is throwing and the rest are at the community tables.
If it is not clicking, that is not a verdict on you. Almost nobody gets on with the wheel at first. Try hand-building or a slab mold for a week and come back to it.
Watch the wheel introduction video before your first session. Required, including for experienced potters, because it covers how we run our wheels rather than how to throw.
Hand-building.
Most of our members are at the community tables, talking to their pottery friends and building whatever ridiculous idea turned up in their head that week.
Your imagination is the only real limit, and there is no better way to fill a social bucket while you are at it. Pinch, coil, slab, sculpt, or combine all four.
Work on something simple or throw yourself at something genuinely difficult. Either way you are going to have a good night.
This is also the easiest way to meet people here. Compliment somebody’s work. Ask how they made it. Most of the people near you are just as nervous about starting a conversation as you are.
Thousands of tools sit in the tool room, marked by level. Anything at your color or below is yours to use without asking.
Slab molds.
The wheel takes years. Slab molds have you making near-perfect bowls, platters, casserole dishes, bread pans and charcuterie boards on your very first day in class.
Roll a slab, drape it over the slab mold, let it firm up, and you have a form that would take a year of throwing practice to match. This is how the majority of our members make their best-looking work, and it is a runaway class favorite.
These are slab molds, not slip casting molds. We do not do slip casting here and we never will. You are rolling and shaping real clay by hand; the slab mold only decides the form it lands in.
The slab rollers themselves are open to every level, so nobody is locked out of making a slab.
Watch the slab roller and slab mold techniques video before you use either. Required for everyone, and it will save you the two mistakes that everybody otherwise makes on their first slab.
Raku workshops.
If you want a giant burst of pottery adrenaline, this is where it lives.
Raku is a Japanese method of firing in an outdoor kiln, opening it while the pottery is still glowing red hot, and moving it fast into a reduction chamber packed with combustibles. The pottery is so hot the combustibles catch fire instantly. What comes out has a look nothing else produces, and collectors chase it.
Raku is never part of your membership
Every raku workshop is a separate event, booked and paid for separately, with its own release of claims to sign. Purple and Black Level Members get a discount on workshops, but nobody gets them included.
Raku pottery is not food safe and not watertight. It is made to be looked at, and it is worth making anyway.
How classes work here.
This trips up nearly everybody in their first month, so here it is plainly. We run two different kinds of session and they are not the same thing.
Open studio time still counts as one of your classes for the month. It is not a bonus session, it is the same session without instructors on shift.
You cannot start with open studio time, and there is a short wait before you can use it at all. New to pottery? Come to two instructed classes first. Already knew your way around clay when you joined? One is enough. That way you know the layout, the rules and the cleanup routine before turning up somewhere there is nobody to ask.
Everyone cleans up. Every time.
Your own space, plus one other part of the studio that needs attention. It is a five to ten minute job and we ring a bell thirty minutes before class ends so you can pace yourself.
At open studio time it matters even more, because there are no instructors to catch what gets missed. Ask the onsite manager for the checklist.
Your classes never expire while you are a member, so a busy fortnight or a holiday costs you nothing. Cancel, though, and every unused class is void, even if you sign back up later. That is the single most common surprise we hear about.
The unbreakable Clay Hole commandments.
- Thou shalt always clean thine own mess
- Thou shalt always clean another messy part of the studio
- Thou shalt follow every single glaze rule
- Thou shalt pay for all clay and firings
- Thou shalt not bring constant negativity or drama to the studio
- Thou shalt not touch the pottery of thine classmates without permission
- Thou shalt not touch thine classmates without consent
- Thou shalt not sexually harass others
- Thou shalt not gossip endlessly
- Thou shalt celebrate human differences
Basically, don’t be an A-hole at The Clay Hole.
It matters to us that this stays a liberal and ridiculously free environment, and it matters just as much that it stays a place people feel safe in. Those two things are not in tension here. They are the whole design.
We do ask people to leave, and we are not shy about it. It does not happen often. When somebody hurts the experience for their classmates or our instructors, they go, and there is no refund.
Follow these and you will always have a place with us.
Everyone in this building started at a bag of clay and no idea what they were doing. Ask questions, take your share of an instructor, and make the thing you actually want to make.
Still got a question?
Text us on 385-241-5528 and we will answer during class hours. Or grab a pink shirt next time you are in.
Swipe, or use the arrow keys. The bar above follows you down the page.
That is the whole booklet.
None of it is a test, and nobody expects you to have memorized any of it before your first class. The only things that genuinely matter on day one are that you signed the waiver, you told us which day you are coming, and you turned up. The rest you will pick up by being in the room.
Pottery is slow in a way almost nothing else in your week is. Your first piece will take about two months and it will probably not look like the thing you pictured. The one after that will be better, and somewhere around the fourth you start to recognize your own hands in the work. That is the part nobody can hand you in a booklet.
So take your share of an instructor, ask the question that feels too basic to ask, and go make something.
Still stuck on something? Text us on 385-241-5528 and we will answer during class hours. There is no such thing as a question we have not already been asked twice this week.