Wheel and hand building
Miniature Pottery
A one inch pot is not a small mug. It is a mug where every tolerance got divided by four, and none of your tools got smaller with it. Everything you already know still applies here. It just stops forgiving you.
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The whole thing, short
Three things refuse to get smaller with the pot
The sentence the rest of this page is built on
Your fingers, the water on them, and the coat of glaze at the end are all the same size on a one inch pot as they are on a ten inch one. Every technique below is a way of getting one of those three out of the way.
So the whole craft is three substitutions. A chopstick and a needle tool instead of fingers. As little water as you can stand instead of a wet hand. One thin coat instead of three.
There is a fourth thing, and it is the one that catches people out on their first session. A pot this small has roughly four times the surface area per unit of clay that a four inch pot has, so it dries about that much faster. It can go from throwing-wet to too stiff to touch while you are making the next one. Every pot goes onto a board and under plastic the moment it comes off the hump, and you trim the whole batch together afterwards.
Everything below is those four facts, applied.
01 · The idea
Three things refuse to get smaller
Scale is not uniform, and that is the whole difficulty
Shrink a pot and the clay shrinks with it. Your fingertip does not. The film of water on that fingertip does not. The coat of glaze at the end does not. Three fixed sizes start crowding a shape that is running away from them.
People assume miniatures are a patience problem. They are mostly a proportion problem, and once you see it that way the fixes stop being mysterious and start being obvious.
Your fingers. A fingertip is roughly half an inch across. On a six inch bowl that is a precise instrument. On a one inch pot it is a fist. This is why every miniature potter you watch is holding a stick.
The water. A mug can absorb a startling amount of water before it gives up, because there is a lot of clay to absorb it into. A miniature has almost none. The same wet hand that lubricates a mug will saturate a miniature in about four seconds, and a saturated one inch wall does not sag gracefully, it simply stops existing.
The glaze. This is the one that catches people out last, because it happens weeks later. A dipped or brushed glaze fires to roughly a millimeter. On a ten inch vase that is a hundredth of the height. On a one inch pot it is a twenty fifth. Every carved line closes, every narrow neck narrows, and anything with a bit of movement in it runs down onto a foot that is the size of a pea.
There is a fourth thing that does scale, and it is the one working against you: time. Surface area relative to volume goes up as things get smaller, so a miniature dries roughly four times faster than a four inch pot made from the same clay. Everything on this page happens quickly.
- A mug, four inches tall. Drawn to scale, and the reference for everything else in the drawing.
- A miniature, one inch tall. Same scale, same drawing. This is genuinely how much smaller it is, which is worth looking at for a second before you go and try one.
- The glaze layer on the mug. Roughly a millimeter fired, drawn a little heavier here so you can see it at all. On a four inch pot it is a line you would never think about.
- The same glaze layer on the miniature. Same real thickness, because it is the same glaze out of the same jar. This is why detail closes up and why narrow necks seal themselves shut.
02 · Why this page reads like this
Video teaches hands. A page holds still.
What only video can show you
How lightly somebody actually touches a one inch wall. How fast the wheel is really going. What a chopstick does to a rim that a finger cannot. How quickly a good potter gives up on a bad one. No sentence has ever taught any of that.
There are eight excellent videos on this page and we would rather you watched them than skimmed us. So it is fair to ask what the words are for.
Watching and reading are not two routes to the same place. Watching is very good at motion and very bad at numbers. You will absorb somebody's hand position in thirty seconds and lose the figure they said out loud at minute eleven, because the figure went past once, in sequence, at their pace. Reading is the opposite. It is slow at motion and excellent at anything you need to come back to.
Miniature work is unusually full of the second kind of thing. Wheel speed. Water. Two pulls rather than five. Undercut before you cut off. Bag it now. Thin the glaze. None of those are hard to perform. All of them are easy to be missing at the exact moment you needed them, and the moment is usually about four seconds long.
The other half of it is simply that you cannot scrub a video with clay on both hands. A page can sit open on a phone beside the wheel, at the part you need, for as long as you need it, and it will not carry on without you. That is not a small advantage. It is most of the reason this page ends in a checklist rather than a conclusion.
So do both, in this order. Read the section you are about to attempt. Watch one video of somebody doing it. Then leave the list near the bottom open while you work. That combination sticks in a way neither one manages on its own.
03 · Wheel speed
Run the wheel faster, not slower
This is the single setting most people get backwards, and getting it right fixes more miniature problems than any tool does. Small pots want speed. The instinct that says a delicate thing wants a gentle wheel is the instinct that keeps producing wobbly little lumps.
What your fingertips actually feel is travel, not the dial
A rim moves pi times its diameter every single turn. A six inch pot carries its rim 18.8 inches past your finger per turn. A one inch pot carries it 3.1 inches. At the same pedal position, the small one is giving your hand less than a fifth of the contact it is used to, so the clay never smooths out and every touch registers as a dent instead of a shape.
of rim travelling past your finger every turn. This is the feel every throwing habit you own was built around.
at the same wheel speed. One sixth of the contact, which is why the clay feels dead and refuses to true itself up.
to put the same travel back under your hand. Not exactly, but that is the number to aim at rather than nudging the pedal.
| Pot diameter | Rim travel per turn | Speed to match a six inch feel |
|---|---|---|
| 6 inches | 18.8 in | Your normal throwing speed |
| 3 inches | 9.4 in | About twice it |
| 2 inches | 6.3 in | About three times it |
| 1 inch | 3.1 in | About six times it |
| Half an inch | 1.6 in | Twelve times, and here you run out of wheel |
Our wheels top out somewhere around 240 to 300 revolutions a minute, which is plenty for anything down to about an inch. Below that the arithmetic stops being available to you and the job shifts from speed to tools: you shape with a wooden edge held steady against the clay rather than trying to out-spin the problem. That is the point where miniature work genuinely becomes its own craft rather than throwing done carefully.
Below about an inch you run out of wheel, and the job shifts from speed to tools: hold a wooden edge steady against the clay rather than trying to out-spin it.
04 · Clay
Particle size is the whole decision
A speck of grog you would never notice in a mug wall is a boulder in a wall a millimeter thick. It will drag under your tool, tear the rim and sit there in the fired surface looking like a mistake. So for miniatures the ranking is simple: smoothest first.
| Clay body | Texture | Shrinkage | For work this small |
|---|---|---|---|
| #16 Porcelain | Smooth | 13.9% | The best surface in the building and the sharpest detail you will get. Also the least forgiving, and it shrinks the most. Worth it once you have thrown a few. |
| B-Mix | Smooth | 12% | Where we would start you. Smooth, very plastic, and it tolerates being pushed around far better than porcelain does. |
| Berlin Gray | Grog under 0.2mm | About 12% | The grog in it is fine enough to behave, and it is specifically made for small detailed work. A good dark option. |
| Half & Half | Slightly coarse | 12% | Half porcelain, half stoneware. Most of the porcelain look with more give. A fair compromise. |
| B-Mix w/Specks | Smooth | 12.47% | Throws beautifully, but the specks do not scale. On a one inch pot they read as spots rather than as speckle. Sometimes that is exactly what you want. |
| Speckled Buff | Slightly coarse | 12% | Same speckle question, plus a little more grit under the tool. Fine at two inches, busy at one. |
| B-Mix w/Grog | Slightly coarse | 11% | The grog that makes it forgiving on a big form is the thing fighting you on a thin one. We would pass. |
| 52 Buff | Slightly coarse | 10% | The lowest shrinkage of the eight, which matters if you are building to a scale. Coarsest of the group, so it is a trade. |
Stiffer clay than you would normally throw with
Soft clay is a gift on a ten pound bowl and a liability on a walnut. A slightly stiff body resists the water you are inevitably going to introduce and holds a thin wall up long enough for you to finish it. If a bag has gone soft on the shelf, wedge it out on a plaster bat for a few minutes first. If it has gone the other way, the softening hard clay page covers getting it back.
Shrinkage figures are the manufacturers' published averages for each body and are close enough to plan with, not close enough to bet a matched set on. Your own drying and our firing schedule both move the number a little. If you need it exact, make three test bars, mark them at ten centimeters, and measure them after they come out. The calculators page will do the arithmetic once you have a real number.
05 · Tools
Nothing here is a miniature tool
You do not need to buy a special kit. Every one of these is either already in your tool box, in the studio, or in a kitchen drawer. What you are doing is finding a thinner substitute for each part of your hand, one job at a time.
A chopstick
Replaces the finger you open with. The blunt end sets the floor, the flat of it compresses, and the tip pushes a wall out from the inside.
A needle tool
Does three jobs down here. Trues a wandering rim, cuts the undercut that becomes your foot, and releases the finished pot off the hump.
A rubber tipped shaper
Your rib, at a twentieth of the size. A silicone colour shaper or the soft end of a rubber kidney trimmed down will both work.
A small loop or ribbon tool
For trimming, and for hollowing a hand built form. The smallest loop in the studio is still bigger than you want, so tilt it and use one corner.
Fine tweezers
How you lift it, move it, and hold it while it goes into glaze. Fingers leave a dent. Tweezers leave two very small marks you can sponge out.
A damp sponge on a stick
A corner of sponge held in a bamboo skewer or clipped to a clothes peg. Reaches inside, mops standing water and does not squash the wall on the way out.
A paper strip, if you have no small calipers
Cut a strip, mark the rim width on it with a pencil, and use the mark. It is more accurate than a caliper you cannot get into a one inch opening.
A wooden rib you cut down
Take an old wooden rib and shape a narrow tongue onto one corner with sandpaper. Half an hour of work and it becomes the tool you reach for most.
A bat, a board and a plastic bag
Not glamorous, and the thing most likely to save your session. Everything goes under plastic the second it leaves the wheel.
The helpful pottery items page lists what we sell in the studio and what we recommend buying elsewhere. Nothing on this page is a purchase you have to make first.
06 · At the wheel
Throwing one, in ten steps
Throwing one, in six steps
The hump is a workbench, not a pot
Centering a walnut of clay on its own is a fight you do not need to have. Center three to five pounds into a tall cone and make every miniature out of the top inch of it. You get a fresh, already-centered start each time, at a comfortable height, without touching the wheel head. Our throwing off the hump page covers the technique properly if it is new to you.
- Cone up three to five pounds and leave it tall. A narrow cone rather than a dome. You want the crown small enough that centering just the top is quick.
- Center only the top inch. Cup it, cone it up an inch, press it back down, twice. Do this again before every single pot. A crown that looks centered and is not is the most common reason a miniature goes wrong before it exists.
- Speed up. Faster than feels correct. See the wheel speed section for why, but the short answer is that a one inch rim needs roughly six times the revolutions to give your hand what a mug gives it.
- Open with a chopstick, not a finger. A quarter of an inch down, no more. Keep the opening narrower than you think you want, because it will open further on its own as you lift the wall.
- Compress the floor with the flat of the tool. Two passes from the middle out. Skipping this on a piece this small still produces the same S crack it produces on a bowl, and there is no repairing it at this scale. The compression page is the same story, larger.
- Pull the wall in two pulls. Not five. Every extra pass costs water, and water is the thing that ends miniatures. Thumb or chopstick inside, needle tool or fingertip outside.
- Thin the rim more than feels sensible. A rim that would read as normal on a mug reads as a slab on a one inch pot, and it is the single biggest tell between a small ugly pot and a tiny beautiful one. Squeeze it between a wet fingertip and the tool.
- Shape with a tool held steady. Rubber tip, wooden edge, the back of the needle tool. Let the wheel carry the clay past it. Do not chase the pot with your hands.
- Undercut the base while it is still spinning. Run the needle tool in at an angle to define a foot. This is the step that matters most, because that undercut is your foot ring and cutting it now means you may never need to trim the pot at all.
- Release it and bag it. Push the needle tool through the undercut, or run a thin wire in. Lift with dry fingertips or tweezers onto a board, and get it under plastic before you re-center the crown for the next one.
07 · Without a wheel
Hand building is the easier road down here
It is worth saying plainly: at this size, hand building is not the fallback. A pinched miniature is often better than a thrown one, because pinching gives you the wall thickness control that the wheel takes away, and nobody has ever pinched a pot too fast.
Pinching, from a pea
The most direct route to a good miniature, and the one we would put a first-timer on.
Roll a ball roughly the size of a pea, press a thumbnail into it rather than a thumb, and open it with the rounded end of a needle tool while you turn it against your other fingers. It is exactly the pinch pot method at a scale where the tool does the pressing.
The whole advantage is that you can feel the wall between your fingers the entire time, which is something you never get on the wheel at this size.
- Work drier than you would on a full size pinch pot. Almost no water.
- Turn it constantly. Ten small presses beats two firm ones.
- Set the rim last, with a damp fingertip, and set it thin.
- Rest it on a scrap of foam while it stiffens so it keeps its round.
Coils, at thread scale
For anything with a shape a pinch pot cannot give you. Slower, and much more controllable.
Roll coils about as thick as cooked spaghetti, build three or four at a time, and blend the inside with the tip of a needle tool before you do the outside. At this scale you do not need to score and slip between coils as long as the clay is properly soft and you are building in one sitting, though the join still has to be genuinely blended and not just smoothed over.
- Build on a small disc of clay, not straight onto a board.
- Blend as you go. You cannot reach back in later.
- Three coils, then let it firm for two minutes, then three more.
- Keep the whole thing bagged between sittings.
Thin slabs, cut with a blade
For plates, tiles, boxes and anything flat. The most accurate of the three.
Roll a slab down to about two millimeters, let it set up until it is firm but still bendable, then cut with a scalpel or a craft knife rather than a needle tool, which drags. Small slabs dry unevenly and curl, so dry them flat between two boards with a light weight on top.
Our slab molds are made for full size work and are far too large to be useful here, but a sprig mold is exactly the right scale for adding a handle, a foot or a decoration to something tiny.
- Two millimeters is thin. Thinner than that and it will not survive handling.
- Cut firm, not soft. A soft slab tears at this size.
- Dry flat under weight or it will curl into a crisp.
- Carving reads beautifully at this scale. See the carving and sgraffito page.
08 · Trimming
You have to make the chuck first
Or, better, arrange not to trim at all
The undercut you cut on the wheel in step nine is a finished foot. If you get that right, a miniature needs no trimming whatsoever, and that is genuinely the goal rather than a shortcut. Trimming a one inch pot is the hardest thing on this page. Read this section so you can do it, and then try to avoid needing to.
The problem is obvious the first time you try. There is nothing to hold. You cannot press a one inch pot onto a wheel head hard enough to grip without crushing the rim you spent five minutes thinning. So you make something for it to sit in. That something is a chuck.
A soft clay wad
The fastest one. Center a lump of soft clay, press a shallow dish into the top with your thumb, and settle the pot into it upside down. Cheap, quick, and it re-shapes for the next pot in three seconds.
A thrown ring
Throw a short open cylinder, let it go leather hard, and keep it. The rim of the pot sits down inside the ring and the walls hold it. This is the one to make if you are trimming a batch, because every pot lands at the same depth.
A hole in foam
A block of upholstery foam with a hole cut in it, sat on the wheel head. The foam grips without pressure, which is exactly the property you want. Works surprisingly well and costs nothing.
- Catch it at the right moment, which is short. The leather hard window on a piece this size is measured in tens of minutes, not hours. Too soft and the chuck marks it. Too dry and it chips.
- Center the chuck, not the pot. Get the chuck running true and empty first. Then seat the pot in it and true the pot with light taps of a fingertip, the same way you would tap center anything else.
- One small coil of clay to hold it. Three tiny pads of soft clay around the base, or a thin snake pressed round the join. Not enough to grip hard, just enough to stop it walking.
- Speed up again. Same arithmetic as throwing. A slow wheel makes a trimming tool chatter, and chatter on a wall this thin goes straight through.
- Take almost nothing off. Use one corner of the smallest loop tool, held at an angle, and take shavings rather than curls. Our full trimming page covers tool angle properly.
- Stop early. There is no second chance and nobody has ever looked at a miniature and wished the foot were more refined.
The chuck, in one sentence
There is nothing to hold a one inch pot by, so you make something for it to sit in. Center a lump of soft clay, press a shallow dish into the top with your thumb, and settle the pot into it upside down.
- Catch it in the window, which is tens of minutes. Too soft and the chuck marks it, too dry and it chips.
- Center the chuck empty, then seat the pot. True the pot with light fingertip taps.
- Three small pads of soft clay to stop it walking. Not a grip, just a stop.
- Wheel fast, one corner of the smallest loop, shavings not curls. Then stop earlier than you want to.
09 · Drying
It dries before you have finished
Four times the drying speed, roughly
Drying happens at the surface and water lives in the volume. Halve every dimension and you halve the surface but you cut the volume to an eighth, so the ratio of one to the other doubles. A one inch pot has about four times the surface per unit of clay that a four inch pot has, and it dries about that much faster.
This is the part of miniature work that surprises people who are otherwise experienced. You throw one, you are pleased with it, you throw a second one, and by the time you look back at the first it has gone past leather hard and into the range where a chuck will chip it.
Nothing about that is a mistake you made. It is arithmetic. The answer is to change how a session is organized rather than to work faster.
Work in batches, and bag as you go. Every pot goes onto a board and under plastic the moment it leaves the hump. Not at the end of the session. At the end of each pot.
Then trim the whole batch at once, once the earliest ones have come back to a workable stiffness inside the bag. Bagging does not stop drying, it evens it out, which is exactly what you need when your window is short.
Slow the last stage down. A miniature will be bone dry in a day on an open shelf. That is usually fine, because there is so little wall to crack, but anything with an attached handle, a lid, or two thicknesses meeting deserves a loose bag for a couple of days so the join dries at the same rate as the rest.
One genuine upside: the whole cycle is fast. A miniature thrown on a Tuesday can be dry enough to bisque by the weekend, where a big form might need three weeks. If you like seeing finished work, this is the fastest feedback loop in the building.
10 · Glazing
The glaze does not shrink with it
More good miniatures are lost here than anywhere else on this page, and they are lost three weeks after the interesting part, which is what makes it so annoying. A coat of glaze is about a millimeter thick whatever it is sitting on.
It fills your detail
Carving, sgraffito, throwing lines, a crisp rim: all of it is shallower than the glaze going over it. Three coats will erase work you spent twenty minutes on and leave a soft blob where a sharp edge was.
It closes narrow openings
A bud vase neck that measures three millimeters has a millimeter of glaze going on each side of it. Do that arithmetic before you dip, not after.
It runs onto a tiny foot
Any glaze with movement in it travels the same distance down a one inch pot as it does down a ten inch one. There is simply much less pot for it to travel down before it reaches the shelf.
What we would actually do
Underglaze, then one thin coat of clear. This is the answer for miniatures more often than not. Underglaze keeps every line you cut, gives you colour that does not move, and one coat of clear is the thinnest glassy surface you can get. The underglaze page covers the rules.
- One or two coats of a brush-on, not three. The three coat instruction on the jar is written for a mug. Down here it is a different product.
- Dip for well under a second. A bisqued miniature is small, porous and thirsty, and a one second count that is right for a bowl will load it far too heavily. In and out. Our dipping glaze page has the technique, and dipping glazes need the certification first.
- Hold it in tweezers and touch it up after. Two tiny bare marks are easier to fix than a fingerprint of thick glaze.
- Wax the foot properly. Every time. There is not enough foot here to be casual about it.
- Put it on a kiln cookie. An X-Small kiln cookie is $2.25 and it is the cheapest insurance in the building. A running glaze welds a miniature to a shelf instantly and there is no grinding it off without losing the pot.
- Check what the glaze does before you commit. The glaze finder will tell you which ones move and which ones sit still, and on a piece this size that is the single most useful thing to know.
- One or two coats of a brush-on, not three. The jar instructions are written for a mug.
- Dip for well under a second, holding it in tweezers, and touch up the two small marks afterwards.
- Wax the foot, and sit it on a kiln cookie. A running glaze welds a miniature to the shelf and there is no getting it back.
- Check the glaze finder for whether your glaze moves before you use it on something this small.
11 · Working to a scale
If it has to fit a dollhouse, do the arithmetic
Most miniatures are just small pots and the size is whatever it turns out to be. But if you are making pieces to a scale, there are two divisions to do and people almost always forget the second one.
Divide twice
First for the scale. Standard dollhouse scale is 1:12, so a real ten inch plate becomes 0.83 inches. Then for the shrinkage, which runs the other way. To finish at 0.83 inches you have to make it larger while it is wet: finished size divided by one minus the shrinkage. In #16 Porcelain at 13.9% that is 0.83 divided by 0.861, so you throw it at 0.97 inches. In 52 Buff at 10% you throw it at 0.93 inches.
| Real object | Real size | At 1:12 | Throw it at, in porcelain |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dinner plate | 10 in across | 0.83 in | 0.97 in |
| Mug | 3.5 in tall | 0.29 in | 0.34 in |
| Mixing bowl | 12 in across | 1.00 in | 1.16 in |
| Floor vase | 24 in tall | 2.00 in | 2.32 in |
The calculators page has a shrinkage calculator that will do this for whichever body you are using, and it will use your own measured shrinkage if you have made test bars rather than the published average. For a matched set, that difference is worth the twenty minutes it takes to find out.
12 · Troubleshooting
Eight ways a miniature goes wrong
Three ways the first night goes wrong
Seven of these happen while you are standing there and are fixable in the moment. The eighth happens three weeks later in the kiln room and is not.
These are the three that will happen on your first attempt, in roughly this order, and all three are fixable while you are standing there.
- It went off center the second you touched itThe crown of the hump was not truly centered, it just looked like it was because it is small. Re-cone and re-press the top inch before every pot, not once at the start of the session. This is the failure behind most first attempts.
- It collapsed and it was not even thinWater. A miniature holds almost no clay, so it saturates in seconds and a saturated wall has no strength at any thickness. Dry your hands between pots, use a sponge on a stick rather than a wet hand, and finish in two pulls instead of five.
- It was too stiff to trim by the time you got to itFour times the drying speed, and you were busy making the next one. Bag every pot the moment it comes off the hump and trim the whole batch together later.
- It tore when you cut it offA wire drags at this scale because there is not enough mass to hold the pot still against it. Undercut with the needle tool first and then push the needle through the undercut rather than sawing a wire underneath.
- The chuck marked or chipped itWrong moment. Too soft and the chuck presses into it, too dry and the rim chips. The window is short, and the honest answer is often to skip trimming altogether by cutting a proper undercut on the wheel.
- The glaze filled everything inGlaze thickness does not scale. Underglaze plus one thin coat of clear keeps the detail. If you want a single glaze, one coat, and pick one the glaze finder says sits still.
- It welded itself to the shelfA tiny foot and a glaze that moves. Nothing about a miniature gives a run anywhere to go. Wax properly and sit it on a kiln cookie, which costs $2.25 and prevents this entirely. If something did fuse, the fixing fused pottery page covers the grinding tools.
- It looks like a small ugly pot rather than a tiny beautiful oneAlmost always the rim. A rim thickness that reads as normal on a mug reads as a kerb on a one inch pot, because the rim did not shrink with the rest of your proportions. Thin it, then thin it again. The proportions page is the same idea at full size.
13 · The kiln
Cheap to make, not cheap to fire
The one number to know before you make forty of them
Glaze firing is five cents per cubic inch with a $4.80 minimum. A one inch pot is about one cubic inch, so the clay volume is worth five cents and the minimum is what you actually pay. One miniature costs the same to glaze fire as a mug does. Bisque firings are free, every time.
We would rather say this plainly than have it turn up as a surprise. The minimum exists because a firing takes the same electricity and the same day whatever is riding in it, and it is the right policy, but it does land oddly on work like this.
The practical answer is to make miniatures the way you would make anything else you want a lot of: in sets, and finish them together. How a group of tiny pieces gets measured for a firing is a fair question and not one this page can answer for you, so ask whoever is at the front desk before you have forty of them glazed and waiting. It is a two minute conversation that is much better had early.
The firing itself is the easy part. A miniature has almost no thermal mass, so it heats and cools evenly and is one of the safest passengers in a load. Everything we fire goes to cone 5½, which is cone 5 with a twelve minute hold at peak, and small work handles that without complaint.
Two practical things. Put your name on the board, not on the pot, because there is nowhere on a one inch foot to write legibly and a marker line under glaze is very visible at this size. And keep miniatures together in a small labelled box or a lidded container on your shelf. Loose ones get knocked into the gap behind the shelving, and we do not have a good way of getting them back.
14 · The videos
Six potters, six different answers
Two videos, two different roads
Two more are already up the page, sitting next to the method they belong to. None of these are us. They are the people we send members to when they ask, and between them they cover the wheel, the hump, trimming, lids, hand building and the mini wheels you have probably seen online.
One at the wheel and one with no wheel at all, so you can pick whichever road you are actually on tonight. Neither of them is us.
Nothing plays until you click it, and nothing is reposted. Every one of these opens on YouTube and belongs to the potter who made it. If you find a better one, the suggestion box comes straight to us.
Keep this open at the wheel
The whole thing, on one screen
Tap copy and it lands in your notes app, so you are not scrolling a page with slip on your thumb.
Before you center anything
- Smooth clay. B-Mix or #16 Porcelain
- Slightly stiff, never soft
- Chopstick, needle tool, rubber tip, tweezers
- A board and a plastic bag, ready
- Small sponge clipped to a skewer
- Paper strip for measuring, if no small calipers
At the wheel
- Cone 3 to 5 lb tall. Throw off the hump
- Re-center the top inch every pot
- Wheel much faster. Six times, at one inch
- Open with the tool, 1/4 inch deep
- Compress the floor, two passes
- Two pulls, not five. Minimal water
- Thin the rim, then thin it again
- Undercut the base before you cut off
- Bag it the second it comes off
Trimming, glazing, firing
- Best case: do not trim. Undercut instead
- If you do: make a chuck first
- Center the chuck empty, then seat the pot
- Glaze thin. One or two coats, not three
- Underglaze plus one clear keeps detail
- Dip under a second, held in tweezers
- Wax the foot. Use a kiln cookie
- Bisque free. Glaze fire minimum $4.80
- Fired at cone 5½
Questions we get asked
The ones that come up at the wheel
If yours is not here, grab any instructor in a pink shirt. Miniatures are a good conversation because so few people try them, and most of us have opinions.
How small can I actually go?
On our wheels, an inch is comfortable, half an inch is a real achievement, and below that you are relying on tools and stillness rather than the wheel, because you run out of revolutions. People do make quarter inch pots. They mostly do it by hand, slowly, with a magnifier.
Do you have those little desktop wheels?
No, and we are not planning to. They are fun and there is a video about them on this page, but they are underpowered for real clay and everything here is written for the wheels we actually have. Throwing off the hump on a full size wheel gives you more control than a mini wheel does, not less.
Is a miniature good practice, or a distraction?
Genuinely good practice, and it is one of the few things on the wheel that improves your full size work quickly. It forces the two habits everyone struggles with: using very little water, and shaping with a tool held steady rather than chasing the clay with your hands. Potters often come back to a normal mug afterwards and find it feels easy.
Can I put a handle on something this small?
Yes, but not a pulled one. Pull a full size handle, let it firm, then cut a short section from the thin end and shape it. Or roll a thread of clay and bend it. Either way, attach it with real slip and blend the join properly, because at this size a handle is mostly join. The handles page covers pulling, and the shaping afterwards is the same idea at a quarter of the scale.
Should I use a bat?
Not for the throwing. The whole point of the hump is that the pot leaves the wheel in your fingers and there is nothing to release. Do keep a bat or a board beside you to park them on, and keep a bag over that board. Our bat or no bat page covers when a bat earns its place.
Are tiny pots food safe?
The same rules apply as to anything else here. Our clay bodies and our regular glazes fire to cone 5½ and are food safe when used as intended, and nothing about scale changes that. What does change is that a miniature is much more likely to be handled by a small child, so if it is going anywhere near one, treat it as an object rather than a dish.
How do I keep a set matching?
Same clay, same session, same bag. Beyond that, weigh the clay for each one on the studio scale before you start rather than eyeballing it off the hump, and cut a paper gauge for the height and the rim width. A paper strip with two pencil marks is more useful than calipers at this size and it costs nothing.
Why did mine come out chalky?
Almost always glaze applied too thin on the second attempt, after somebody got burned by applying it too thick on the first. There is a real window between the two and it is narrower on a miniature than anywhere else. If you are unsure, underglaze with one coat of clear over it, which is much more predictable than trying to judge a single glaze by eye.
One last thing
Small is a skill, not a shortcut
Everyone assumes a miniature is a beginner project because it uses a thimble of clay. It is closer to the opposite. There is nowhere to hide a wobble, no mass to absorb your mistakes, and a rim thin enough to look right is genuinely hard to throw. What makes it worth doing anyway is that it teaches the two things every potter is short of, water discipline and a steady tool, faster than anything else in the building. Come back to a mug afterwards and it will feel enormous and forgiving, which is exactly the point.
That is enough to go and throw one tonight. If you want the arithmetic behind the wheel speed, all eight clay bodies ranked, the tool substitutions, hand building, working to a dollhouse scale, six more videos and the eight ways it goes wrong, switch to the Comprehensive Version at the top of the page.
The videos on this page belong to the potters who made them and are linked, not reposted. Shrinkage figures are the manufacturers' published averages and will move a little with your own drying and our firing schedule. Firing prices and the $4.80 minimum are current at the time of writing and live on the FAQs page. This lesson is part of The Clay Hole University.
Shrinkage figures are published averages and will move a little with your own drying. Firing prices live on the FAQs page. Part of The Clay Hole University.
Which version would you like to print?
Videos come out as a labelled box with the title and channel to search for, since paper does not play them.