A pottery handbook for people who have never touched clay
This is the book we hand every new member at The Clay Hole in Draper, Utah, on their first night. 56 pages, front to back: what happens on day one, how a lump of clay becomes a mug, what every tool does, how glaze works, what the kiln is doing, and the words potters use when they talk to each other.
Flip through the whole thing below. Nothing to sign up for.
Tap either side of the book, swipe, or use the arrow keys. Every page is readable at full size.
Written for the first bag of clay, and still useful on the fiftieth
It assumes nobody reading it has touched clay before, and it never talks down to anyone who has. The eight sections run in the order a pot does, from a first night in a studio to carrying a finished mug out to the car.
Welcome
Your first night, the people, and how visits work
Opens on page 2
Membership
Levels, saved classes, rewards, your shelf, costs
Opens on page 11
Pottery 101
How a pot gets made, and the words for everything
Opens on page 16
Make
Hand-building, slab molds, the wheel, drying
Opens on page 21
Glaze & fire
Glaze, kilns, and getting your piece home
Opens on page 29
Studio life
Safety, cleanup and the Commandments
Opens on page 38
Go further
Lessons, raku, the wall, and some very silly websites
Opens on page 41
Paperwork
Pausing, canceling, your tracker, the glossary
Opens on page 50
Some of it only makes sense inside our studio
Worth saying plainly, because a handbook that pretends to be universal is less useful, not more.
- The pottery is the pottery anywhere. Clay stages, joins, drying, glaze chemistry, what a kiln actually does, why a plate warps. None of that changes from one studio to the next.
- The rules and the shelves are ours. Membership levels, our clays, our slab molds, our cleanup routine. Read those as one studio’s answer, not the only answer.
- Prices, times and dates are deliberately not printed in it. They change too often. The links inside carry the current ones.
- It covers what we do, which is wheel work and hand-building. We do not slip cast, so there is nothing in here about it.
Flip it here, search it, or keep it
The flipbook above is the book exactly as it is printed. The text version is the same content as a web page, searchable, which is what most people want when they are looking for one answer. The PDF is 3.6 MB and yours to keep.
Booklet version 2026.09.23. The Clay Hole is a community pottery studio in Draper, Utah. Members get a printed copy on their first night.