The Clay Hole guide to a thin floor

How to move clay back into a bottom you threw too thin

The needle tool goes in, and it goes in a lot further than you wanted. There is almost nothing under there.

Here is what you can actually do about it at each of the four moments you are likely to find out, which methods are real, which ones are wishful thinking, and where the honest limits sit.

Here is the one question that decides what you can do about it, the single move for each of the four moments you might be standing in, and the point where the honest answer is to reclaim it and sit back down.

Hands working at a pottery wheel on a wet thrown pot, repairing a base that was opened too thin
x4 moments you can catch a thin floor, each with a different answer
x6 videos from potters who are not us, credited and linked
x2 videos from potters who are not us, credited and linked
1/4″ the floor you were aiming for, and the number this whole page runs on

Everything on this page, in order

The full guide. All four moments in detail, the anatomy diagram and six videos.

01 · Know the number

A floor is too thin under a quarter inch, and you cannot tell by looking

Nobody can see a thin floor. You can feel one and you can measure one, and those are the only two ways there have ever been.

Looking into a wet pot tells you nothing, because there is water sitting in the bottom of it making everything look like the same depth. That puddle has ended more mugs than bad centering has.

So here is the number we use in the studio. Leave a quarter inch of floor when you finish throwing. A real quarter inch of clay between the inside surface and the bat, measured after you have compressed it and before you have trimmed a thing off the bottom.

That sounds generous right up until you see it. Wrap a piece of tape around your needle tool a quarter inch up from the point, and you never have to have this argument with yourself again.

Why a quarter inch and not less

  • If a foot ring is in your plan, trimming eats straight into that number. A foot cut into a skinny floor leaves you almost nothing in the middle.
  • Clay shrinks as it dries. A thin floor stuck to a thicker wall shrinks at a different rate, and that difference is what an S crack is.
  • Anything that will hold coffee has to survive a dishwasher, a sink full of other dishes, and being set down harder than you would like.

You can go thinner on purpose. A small flat dish you never intend to trim is fine at three sixteenths. Under an eighth of an inch you are gambling, and the house wins most of those.

How to actually check, in four steps

  1. 1Sponge the water out first. You cannot judge a floor you cannot touch. Ten seconds with a sponge on a stick buys you honest information.
  2. 2Needle straight down, a little off center. Push until it stops on the bat. Pinch the needle against the clay surface with your thumbnail, lift it out, and look at the wet length below your nail. That is your floor, in actual units, instead of a feeling.
  3. 3Close the hole behind you. One pass with a fingertip or a rib and it is gone. Off center means the hole is not sitting at the exact spot a crack would most like to start from.
  4. 4Press the middle with a fingertip. Wheel stopped. A good floor feels like a table. A thin one gives, and once you have felt the difference twice you will never need the needle for anything but confirming.
1 2 3 4 5
  1. 1The floor. Inside surface straight down to the bat. This is the only number on the page.
  2. 2The corner, or the heel. On almost every pot, this is thicker than the floor and the wall both. It is the only place you get to borrow from.
  3. 3The wall. Clay that made it up here is spent. Getting it back down is the hard part of this whole page.
  4. 4Where the floor should have stopped. Roughly a quarter inch, before a trim tool takes its cut.
  5. 5The underside. Trimming removes clay from here, so what you end up with is what you left minus what you take.

02 · The uncomfortable bit

Clay goes up easily. It comes back down badly.

Everything about a spinning wheel is arranged to move clay outward and upward. You press in, the clay has nowhere to go but up, and the wheel does half the work for you. That is the entire trick, and it is beautiful.

Now try running it backwards.

There is no move in throwing that reaches into a wall and pulls clay back down into a floor. Not one. The people you watch on the internet do not have one either, and if you have been quietly assuming you just have not learned it yet, you can stop.

What you actually have is three options, and all three are smaller than you want them to be.

Borrow from the corner

The heel where the floor meets the wall is thicker than either of them on most pots. You can press that clay inward and downward into the floor, and it genuinely works. It buys you a sixteenth of an inch. On a good day, two.

Push the wall back down

You can collapse a wall that is already standing, walk it back down onto the base, and throw the pot again from a shorter and fatter start. It feels like failure. It is not. It is the most underused rescue in throwing.

Add clay that was never there

A coil, a slab, a whole second bottom. This is the option that actually scales, and it is the one everybody skips because it does not feel like throwing. Once the pot stiffens it is also the only one left.

And then the fourth one

Wire it off, drop it in the reclaim, sit back down. Ninety seconds. We are putting it here rather than in the steps because it is not a technique, it is a decision, and it is the right one more often than any of the three above. There is no prize for rescuing a mug.

03 · Why this page is shaped like this

Read it, then watch it, then go do it badly a few times

There are a lot of words on this page and only six videos, and the order is on purpose. It is not that we think reading is nobler. It is that the two do completely different jobs, and most people only ever use one of them.

What reading does

It hands you the words, and the words are what let you see the thing

Most people who lose a pot this way never find out that is what happened. They find a crack in the drying room and file it under bad luck. Reading gives the problem a name, and once a thing has a name you start catching it two days earlier than you used to. That is most of the win, right there.

Reading also runs at your speed. You can stop on the sentence that finally landed and sit on it for a minute. A video keeps going whether you got it or not, and the four seconds you actually needed went past while you were still chewing on the last thing.

What watching does

It hands you pressure, speed and angle, and words are hopeless at all three

Nobody has ever successfully written down how hard to press. We just spent two thousand words trying, and we still cannot tell you. Watching a hand do it takes ten seconds and lands harder than any paragraph we could write.

It is also the only honest way to see how small and boring most of this is. Every rescue on this page looks dramatic when it is written out in steps. On video it is a person quietly pressing a finger into some clay for a while.

Here is the part we believe rather than know, and we will label it that way, because we run a pottery studio and not a research lab.

When you read something first, you build a rough model of it in your head. It is usually a bit wrong. Then you watch somebody do it, and instead of admiring a nice person making a nice pot, you are checking your model against a real pair of hands. You catch the mismatch. Oh. She is barely pressing at all. That correction is the piece that sticks, and you cannot have it unless you brought a model along with you.

Watch first and you get a pleasant six minutes and almost nothing to take to the wheel.

And then the honest part. Neither one teaches your hands anything. Ten minutes at a wheel deliberately opening a pot too far, just so you can feel what too thin feels like under a fingertip, will do more for you than this entire page. What the page can do is make sure that when it happens, you know what you are looking at instead of quietly deciding you are bad at pottery.

You are not bad at pottery. You are being asked to judge a distance you cannot see.

04 to 07 · The four moments

Moment one: you have opened, and you have not pulled yet

Catch it here and this is barely a problem. It is a detour, not a disaster, and it is the one place on this page where you genuinely get to move clay back into the bottom of a pot and have it work.

1 The only easy one Before the first pull

What you are looking at

  • The needle came out with barely any wet length under your thumbnail.
  • The floor gives under a fingertip with the wheel stopped.
  • You opened wider than you meant to and felt the floor get away from you.
  • There is a grey shadow in the middle of the floor that will not sponge away, because it is the bat showing through.

Why it happened

Opening is a downward move and a sideways move at the same time, and the sideways one is the thief. Every millimeter you widen the floor comes out of the floor’s thickness, because you are spreading the same clay over a bigger circle. Nothing was added. It just got flatter.

The other cause is water. A puddle in a fresh opening hides an eighth of an inch without any trouble. You press, you feel something push back, and what pushed back was water.

What to do, in order

  1. 1Sponge it dry. Before anything else. Every judgment you are about to make depends on touching real clay.
  2. 2Measure before you touch anything. Needle down, thumbnail on, lift, look. Now you know the size of the problem instead of negotiating with it.
  3. 3Stop widening. Whatever the plan was, the plan is over. Any further opening only makes the number worse, and a slightly smaller pot with a floor is worth more than a perfectly sized pot without one.
  4. 4Feed the corner in. Medium wheel speed. Put one fingertip, or the rounded corner of a wooden rib, into the inside corner where the floor meets the wall. Press down and inward, toward the middle, and hold it there for several slow rotations. You are walking heel clay into the floor. Repeat in passes. This is the move.
  5. 5Then compress, and know why. Rib or fingertips, from the center outward, firm, three or four passes. Compressing does not add thickness. It aligns the clay so the floor does not crack. Those are two separate jobs and almost everybody blurs them together.
  6. 6Measure again. If you gained enough, carry on and make a slightly shorter pot than you had in mind. If you did not, step seven is not a punishment.
  7. 7Cone it up and start over. Wire it off if it will not lift, wedge it, go again. Ninety seconds, and it is the right call far more often than anybody wants it to be.

If it is already worse than that

If the needle came out dry, you are through the floor or you are a hair from it. There is no rescue at that thickness worth your evening. Reclaim it. You are out two minutes and you have learned exactly where your opening finger stops, which is worth considerably more than the mug was.

Moment two: the walls are up and it is all still wet

This is where most people find out, and it is where the answers stop being fun. The clay you needed is now standing up in the wall, and the wall does not want to give it back.

2 The narrow window Mid throw, everything still soft

What you are looking at

  • You pulled once or twice, checked out of habit, and the number came back bad.
  • The floor drums or flexes when you press the middle of it.
  • The middle of the floor is sitting visibly lower than the edges of it.
  • The pot has started to feel loose on the bat, which on a thin floor is the seal giving up.

Why it happened

The floor was already thin before your first pull and nobody checked. Pulling did not cause this. Pulling revealed it, which is why it feels like the pull is to blame.

The one thing pulling really does cause is starting too far in. If your outside hand begins its pull tucked inside the footprint of the base, it drags corner clay up the wall, and the corner was the only reservoir you had.

What to do, in order

  1. 1Decide honestly whether the next ten minutes are worth it. Say the number out loud. A mug you are already attached to at pull two is a mug you will still be attached to when it cracks in the drying room.
  2. 2Option one, push the wall back down. Slow the wheel. Wet your hands. Cup the wall from the outside and press down and inward, walking the height back into the base until you have a short fat form again. Then recenter, reopen, and this time leave a quarter inch. You lose the height and you keep the clay. Beginners are almost never told this is allowed.
  3. 3Option two, add a coil to the inside corner. Roll a coil of the same clay, about as thick as a finger. Score the inside corner. Press the coil in all the way around, then throw it: slow wheel, press down and inward with a fingertip or a rib corner until it merges into the floor, then compress from the center out. Good on anything wide, like a bowl or a plate. Poor on a narrow cylinder, because you cannot get a hand in there to weld it properly.
  4. 4Whichever you pick, weld it, do not smear it. A coil pressed on rather than compressed in leaves a seam, and a seam in the floor of a pot is a crack with a delayed start date.
  5. 5Slow the drying down afterward. Added clay is wetter than the pot around it. Bag it loosely for a day before it sees open air, or the new clay shrinks first and pulls itself away from the old.
  6. 6Do not add water to fix a soft floor. It is the reflex and it is backwards. Water is why the floor went gluey. More of it turns a thin floor into a wet one, and a wet thin floor tears.

If it is already worse than that

If the floor has torn, or you can see daylight, or the middle has gone soft and slippery from too much water and too much finger, stop. A soft torn floor cannot be thrown and it will not take a patch while it is that wet either. Wire it off, reclaim it, and you can be throwing the same clay again inside the hour.

Moment three: it stiffened up before you noticed

Once a pot is leather hard, throwing is finished as an option. Nothing you press is going to move. What is still on the table, and it works far better than people expect, is giving the pot a second bottom.

3 Stop throwing, start adding Leather hard, on the shelf

What you are looking at

  • The pot came off the wheel fine and you found the problem later, on the shelf.
  • The base flexes under a thumb even though the walls have gone firm.
  • There is a dip, or a shine, in the middle of the underside where it has sagged.
  • You started to trim, took one pass, and stopped on instinct.

Why it happened

Usually the same thing as always. Nobody measured, and a wet floor at a fifth of an inch feels identical to a wet floor at a third of an inch.

Sometimes it is a floor that really was fine and then got trimmed away by an enthusiastic foot ring. That is the version of this where the throwing was never the problem at all.

Adding a second bottom, in order

  1. 1Get both pieces to the same stiffness. Not soft, not dry, and matched. A join between clay at two different moisture levels is a join that fails while it dries, every time.
  2. 2Measure the base with calipers. Flip the pot, measure edge to edge across the bottom, lock the calipers and leave them locked.
  3. 3Make a slab about a quarter inch thick. Roll it, or throw a flat pancake on the wheel, whichever you are faster at. Throwing it has one real advantage: it comes out round already.
  4. 4Cut it to the measured size. If the slab is on the wheel, hold the calipers steady over it while it turns and run a needle tool down the outside edge of the caliper leg, all the way through to the bat. If it is rolled flat, cut around a template.
  5. 5Stiffen the slab to match. A few seconds with a heat gun usually gets there, and it also makes the slab liftable without stretching it out of round on the way.
  6. 6Score and slip both faces properly. Deep scratches on both, real slip or magic water, not a polite scuff. This join is carrying the entire pot from here on.
  7. 7Press from the center outward. This is the step that matters most and it is the one people get backwards. Working outward from the middle drives the air out to the edges. Starting at the edges seals a pocket of air in the middle, and a sealed pocket inside a floor is a piece that comes apart in the bisque.
  8. 8Compress and tidy. Rubber rib over the new bottom, trim the overhang flush with the wall, and now cut a foot ring into the new layer if you want one. You finally have the thickness for it.
  9. 9Dry it slowly. Loose plastic, a couple of days, no fans and no windowsills. You have just made one part of this pot much wetter than the rest of it.

If it is already worse than that

A pot with an actual hole in the floor takes the same repair and it will hold together fine. Just be honest with yourself about what it is for afterward. We would not put a patched floor under a mug that lives in a dishwasher. We would happily put one under a planter, a pen cup, or anything that never has to hold water.

Moment four: the trim tool told you

Trimming is where thin floors go public. One pass, a change in the sound, and there is suddenly a window in the bottom of your bowl.

4 The most common way to find out Upside down on the wheel

What you are looking at

  • The tool went quiet and started cutting easily, which means it is cutting less clay than it was a second ago.
  • Light through the base when you lift it toward a window.
  • A soft spot you can move with a thumb, right in the middle of the recess.
  • An actual hole, which at least removes all the guesswork.

Why it happened

Trimming removes floor. That is its job. A foot ring cut into a quarter inch floor can easily leave an eighth in the recess, so if you started at three sixteenths you were never going to arrive.

The other half of these are centering problems in costume. A pot that is off center on the wheel head hands the tool a deep bite on the same side of every single rotation, and that side gets thin while the rest looks fine.

What to do, in order

  1. 1Stop. Right now. The reflex is to even it up. Evening it up is exactly how a soft spot becomes a hole.
  2. 2If there is no hole yet, leave it alone. A flat bottom with no foot ring is a completely legitimate bottom. Clean the edge with a chamois, sign it, move on. Nobody in the history of pottery has picked up a mug and complained that it lacked a recess.
  3. 3If it flexes, give it a foot instead of taking one. Score a ring on the underside, lay a coil of the same clay where a foot would go, weld it down, and true it up on the wheel. Now the piece stands on the ring and the thin middle never touches a counter again.
  4. 4If there is a hole, patch it from both sides. Plug it with soft clay of the same body, then score and slip a small disc onto the inside and another onto the outside, and compress both down flat. Two patches beat one, every time, because they trap the plug between them instead of relying on it.
  5. 5Recenter before the tool touches anything again. Tap it true, or use a chuck. Fixing the floor and then trimming it off center a second time is a very expensive way to learn this.
  6. 6Trim less next time, not better. The most reliable cure for a thin floor at the trimming stage is a pot you barely trimmed.

If it is already worse than that

If the hole is bigger than a coin, or if the clay around it is soft and crumbly rather than firm, the pot is telling you it is finished. Into the reclaim bucket. That is not a failure of character. It is a bag of clay that has not decided what it wants to be yet.

08 · Find yours

Which moment are you in right now

Pick whichever line sounds most like the pot in front of you. Nothing is sent anywhere and nothing is saved. It just drops you in the right section.

Or ignore the buttons completely and read sections four through seven in order. They are short, and all four of them together take about as long as one of the videos below.

Start here

There is only one question, and it is about the clay

Nobody can see a thin floor. Sponge the water out, push a needle straight down until it stops on the bat, pinch it against the clay with your thumbnail, lift it out and look at the wet length. Under a quarter inch is thin. A quarter inch is what you want to leave, measured before you trim anything off the bottom.

Now the uncomfortable part. There is no move in throwing that reaches into a wall and pulls clay back down into a floor. Not one, and the potters you watch on the internet do not have one either. So what you can actually do about it comes down to a single question about the pot in front of you.

Is the clay still soft enough to move?

That answer decides everything below, and it is the only fork on this page.

Yes, still soft

Move clay you already have

The corner where the floor meets the wall is thicker than either of them, and it is the one place on the pot you get to borrow from. A wall that is already standing can be walked back down onto the base and thrown again from a shorter, fatter start.

No, it has stiffened

Add clay that was never there

Throwing is finished as an option once a pot is leather hard. What still works, better than most people expect, is a coil welded where a foot would go, or a whole second bottom scored, slipped and pressed on.

And the fourth answer, which is right more often than the other three put together. Wire it off, drop it in the reclaim, sit back down. Ninety seconds. There is no prize for rescuing a mug.

What to do right now

Four moments, and the one move under each

Find the pot in front of you, do the thing underneath it, and ignore the other three.

Moment 1 · Opened, not pulled yet

Feed the corner in

You are here if the needle came out with barely any wet length on it and you have not pulled a wall yet. This is the one moment where you genuinely get to put clay back into a bottom and have it work.

Sponge it dry, measure, and stop widening, whatever the plan was. Then put a fingertip or the rounded corner of a wooden rib into the inside corner where the floor meets the wall, press down and inward toward the middle, and hold it there for several slow rotations at medium speed. Repeat in passes. It buys you a sixteenth of an inch, two on a good day. Compress from the center out afterward, and know that compressing stops cracks rather than adding thickness. Then measure again.

Moment 2 · Walls up, still wet

Push the wall back down

You are here if the walls are standing, everything is still soft, and the floor drums or flexes when you press the middle of it.

Slow the wheel, wet your hands, cup the wall from the outside and press down and inward, walking the height back into the base until you have a short fat form again. Recenter, reopen, and leave a quarter inch this time. You lose the height and you keep the clay, and almost nobody tells beginners this is allowed. On a wide form you can instead score the inside corner, press in a finger thick coil and throw it into the floor. Weld it, do not smear it, and do not answer a soft floor with more water.

Moment 3 · Leather hard on the shelf

Give it a whole second bottom

You are here if the walls have firmed up but the base still flexes under a thumb, or there is a dip in the middle of the underside.

Get both pieces to the same stiffness, because a join between clay at two moisture levels fails while it dries. Measure the base with calipers, cut a quarter inch slab to that size, stiffen it to match with a few seconds of heat gun, then score and slip both faces deeply and press from the center outward so the air goes out to the edges instead of getting sealed in. Trim the overhang flush, cut a foot ring into the new layer if you want one, and dry it slowly under loose plastic.

Moment 4 · Upside down, trimming

Stop, and add instead of taking

You are here if the tool went quiet and started cutting too easily, or you can see light through the base.

Stop right now. The reflex is to even it up, and evening it up is exactly how a soft spot becomes a hole. If there is no hole, leave it alone: a flat bottom with no foot ring is a completely legitimate bottom. If it flexes, score a ring on the underside, lay a coil where a foot would go, weld it down and true it up, so the pot stands on the ring and the thin middle never touches a counter. If there is a hole, plug it with soft clay of the same body and score and slip a small disc onto the inside and another onto the outside. Recenter before the tool touches anything again.

And when to stop trying

The needle came out dry, the floor has torn, the middle has gone soft and slippery from too much water and too much finger, or the hole is bigger than a coin. Wire it off and reclaim it. You are out ninety seconds, you keep the clay, and you have learned exactly where your opening finger stops, which is worth more than the mug was.

09 · Now watch the hands

Now watch the hands

Six videos, none of them ours

Two videos, neither of them ours

Six potters, six accents, six slightly different opinions about how hard to press. We picked each one because it shows a moment this page can only describe. Every one is credited and every one is worth subscribing to.

Two short clips, both showing a move that words are hopeless at. Nobody has ever successfully written down how hard to press. Both are credited and both are worth subscribing to.

Nothing loads from YouTube until you press play, so no player and no tracking arrives on this page unless you ask for it. Each video plays right here rather than sending you away, and there is a link under every one if you would rather watch it over there. We do not know these makers and they do not know us.

Nothing loads from YouTube until you press play, and there is a link under each one if you would rather watch it over there.

Hanisch Pottery “Tool Tutorial: Measuring Thickness With A Needle Tool” Three minutes on the single habit that makes this entire page unnecessary. If you only watch one of these, watch the one that stops the problem rather than the five that clean it up.
  • Diagnosis
  • 3 minutes
Watch on YouTube instead
The Clay Teacher · Cindy Clarke Pottery “Fix a Thin Bottom, Sharpen Your Needle - Tiny Tips from the Clay Teacher - Episode 1” The closest thing on the internet to the exact subject of this page. It is over ten years old, which tells you roughly how long potters have been dealing with this. Watch what she does at the corner, and watch how little drama there is in it. The exact subject of this page. Watch what she does at the corner, and watch how little drama there is in it.
  • Moment one
  • 5 minutes
Watch on YouTube instead
Pottery on the Wheel with Steve McDonald “Fixing Wobbly Walls - How to Push Clay Back Down the Walls Throwing Pottery” Two minutes, no talking, and the most useful rescue on the list. This is the move from moment two: taking a wall that is already standing and walking it back down so you can start again with the clay you already have. Almost nobody tells beginners this is allowed. Two minutes, no talking. A standing wall walked back down so you can start again with the clay you already have.
  • Moment two
  • 2 minutes
Watch on YouTube instead
Jonthepotter “How to FIX a hole in the bottom of your pottery!!” The second bottom, start to finish. He is repairing an actual hole, but it is the same procedure you would use on a floor that is merely too thin, and watching somebody do it calmly removes most of the fear of trying it.
  • Moment three
  • 7 minutes
Watch on YouTube instead
Simon Leach “Trim a bottom too thin ? how to fix ! - Aug 13th 2019 with Simon Leach” The long, unhurried, talk-you-through-it one, filmed as a live session by a third generation potter. Eighteen minutes is a lot for a repair, and the length is exactly the point. This is what not rushing looks like.
  • Moment four
  • 18 minutes
Watch on YouTube instead
Florian Gadsby “How to Open Up Centred Clay and Form the Base of a Pot — A Beginner’s Guide” The prevention video, and the most carefully shot thing on this list. Watch how slowly he opens, and watch how early and how often he checks the depth. The reason he never has to fix a thin floor is happening in the first few minutes.
  • Prevention
  • 15 minutes
Watch on YouTube instead

Want more of this sort of thing? We keep a longer list of free video lessons from other potters, covering wedging, centering, trimming, handles and glazing as well as the wheel.

10 · Never again

Ten habits that stop this happening in the first place

Every one of these is cheaper than a repair, and most of them take under ten seconds.

  1. 1Tape your needle tool. A wrap of tape a quarter inch up from the point turns a judgment call into a yes or a no.
  2. 2Check before the first pull. Every pot, every time, for a month. After that you will feel it, and you will only reach for the needle when something seems off.
  3. 3Open down before you open out. Get your depth, stop, check, and only then widen. Widening is the part that steals the floor.
  4. 4Sponge before you judge. Water in a fresh opening will lie to your fingers every single time you let it.
  5. 5Leave more for anything you plan to trim. If a foot ring is in the plan, a quarter inch is the minimum and not the target.
  1. 6Do not start a pull inside the base. Your outside hand belongs at the outside edge of the clay, not tucked underneath it, or you drag the corner straight up the wall.
  2. 7Compress for cracks, not for thickness. Compressing a thin floor gives you a strong thin floor. It is still thin.
  3. 8Weigh your clay. Same weight, same pot, same floor. Guessing at the lump guarantees guessing at everything downstream of it.
  4. 9Throw on a bat. Wiring under a pot and lifting it off by hand is a very good way to smear a floor you were already worried about.
  5. 10Trim less. The best fix for a thin floor is a pot you never trimmed at all.

11 · The one to keep open

The one to keep open

Short enough to read at the wheel

Leave this open on your phone on the shelf beside you, propped against something that is not already covered in slip.

  1. 1Sponge the water out before you judge anything.A puddle feels exactly like an eighth of an inch of clay.
  2. 2Needle down, thumbnail on, lift, look.Slightly off center, then close the hole behind you.
  3. 3A quarter inch of floor, before you trim anything.Less than that only if you are never cutting a foot ring.
  4. 4Open down before you open out.Widening is the move that steals the floor. Get your depth, stop, check, then widen.
  5. 5Compressing does not add thickness.It stops cracks. Two different jobs, and everybody blurs them.
  6. 6When in doubt, reclaim it and sit back down.Ninety seconds. There is no prize for rescuing a mug.
  1. 1Sponge the water out before you judge anything.A puddle feels exactly like an eighth of an inch of clay.
  2. 2Needle down, thumbnail on, lift, look.Slightly off center, then close the hole behind you.
  3. 3A quarter inch of floor, before you trim anything.Less than that only if you are never cutting a foot ring.
  4. 4Too thin and not pulled yet? Feed the corner in.Fingertip or rib corner, press down and inward, several slow passes.
  5. 5Compressing does not add thickness.It stops cracks. Two different jobs, and everybody blurs them.
  6. 6Walls already up? Push them back down and start again.You lose the height, you keep the clay. It is allowed.
  7. 7A coil in the inside corner works on wide forms.Score it, press it, throw it in, compress. Poor on narrow cylinders.
  8. 8Leather hard means add a second bottom, not throw one.Match the stiffness, score deeply, press from the center outward.
  9. 9Trim tool went quiet? Stop immediately.A flat bottom with no foot is a perfectly good bottom.
  10. 10When in doubt, reclaim it and sit back down.Ninety seconds. There is no prize for rescuing a mug.

One more thing that is not on the list, because it is not a technique. If this keeps happening on the same shape, the problem is almost never your hands. It is that the shape needs more clay than you keep giving it, and nobody has told you the number yet.

12 · Where to go next

Where to go next

Reading about it is the cheap part

Everything above is free and it is going to stay free. But nothing on this page will move your hands for you, and the honest truth is that a reliable floor arrives after a few dozen hours at a wheel, not after a few dozen articles.

If those hours are hard to come by, that is the thing we actually sell. A membership at The Clay Hole is wheel access, kiln firings, classes, and instructors who will walk past, glance into your pot, and tell you the floor is thin before you have finished asking the question.

Find your membership Read the wheel guide
Pulling walls, in detail Where the pressure point really sits, and why starting a pull too far in is what empties your corner. Trimming and turning How much a foot ring actually costs you, how to center a pot upside down, and when to leave the bottom alone. Stop pots twisting The other guide in this family. Five places the twist shows up, and the fix for every one of them.

That was the nutshell version. The comprehensive one is behind the toggle at the top of the page: all four moments in full, a cross section of where the clay actually sits, ten habits that stop this happening, and six videos instead of two.

Every link on this page opens in a new tab so you do not lose your place. The Clay Hole, 12896 S Pony Express Rd, Suite 100, Draper, Utah.