The Clay Hole guide to the twist

How to stop your pots twisting on the pottery wheel

The spiral seam climbing the outside of a cylinder. The cone that screws off in your hands. The neck that wrings itself like a wet towel. They look like five separate disasters, and every one of them is the same piece of physics wearing a different hat.

Learn to name it and you will start seeing it about two seconds before it happens, which is the only useful place to see it.

5 places the twist shows up, and the fix for each
6 videos from potters who are not us
2 videos from potters who are not us
1 cause underneath all of it
An illustrated potter holding her face in horror while the cylinder on her wheel twists and folds over, in a busy pottery studio
Everything on this page, in order
01The one cause underneath all five 02Why we make you read it and watch it 03The twist while you pull walls 04The twist while you collar 05The twist while you center and cone 06The twist that shows up at the rim 07The twist that tears off the bat 08Tell us what you are seeing 09Six videos that show it happening 10The short list for your phone

The whole thing. Five sections in full, six videos and a symptom picker.

01 · The part that never changes
The part that never changes

A twist is a race your hands are winning

A wheel hands you the same piece of clay once per rotation. Your finger sits in one spot, the clay comes around, the clay gets moved, and it comes around again. That is the whole machine.

Climb slowly and your finger finishes each lap around the pot before it rises, so the pressure gets shared out and the wall goes up level. Climb quickly and it never finishes a lap, so the path it traces is not a ring. It is a screw thread. That screw thread is the twist, and you are no longer squeezing the wall upward. You are dragging it around the pot on a diagonal.

Now start climbing. If your hand climbs slowly, it stays inside one horizontal band of clay long enough to move all of it before it rises to the next one. The pressure gets shared out around the whole pot, and the wall goes up level.

If your hand climbs quickly, it never finishes a lap. It leaves each band partway through and arrives at the next one, so the path your finger actually traces around the pot is not a ring. It is a helix. A screw thread.

That helix is the twist. You are not squeezing the wall upward anymore. You are dragging it around the pot on a diagonal, and the clay goes where you drag it.

Variable one

Wheel speed

How many chances a minute the clay gets to meet your hand. More rotations means more laps completed before you have climbed anywhere.

Variable two

Hand speed

How fast you travel upward. This is the one people crank up when things start going wrong, and it is the one that causes the problem.

Variable three

Grip

How stuck your hand is to the clay. Dry skin on drying clay does not ride, it grabs, and a grabbing hand tows the wall sideways all by itself.

So the whole page comes down to one sentence

Fast wheel, slow hands, wet clay. You will hear it shouted across our studio most nights of the week, and every single fix below is just that sentence applied to a different moment.

The five moments

Where it shows up, and the one move for each

Same physics every time. What changes is which variable went out of range, and in one of these five the answer is the exact opposite of everything else on this page.

1

Pulling walls

The tell. A ridge or a groove climbing the outside of the wall on a diagonal, like a barber pole, and a rim that leans a little further with every pull.

The move. Speed the wheel up, not down. Squeeze at the base, wait until you feel the wall bulge above your fingers, and only then start rising. Three full seconds minimum from base to rim.

2

Collaring, and this is the exception

The tell. Vertical creases in the neck that turn diagonal as you keep squeezing, then buckle, then fold the neck over on itself.

The move. Slow the wheel right down. This is the only move on the page that wants less speed, because your hands are touching almost the whole circumference at once and a fast wheel turns that into a wringing machine. Wrap into a loose ring rather than gripping, take tiny bites, and keep it wetter than you would for a pull.

3

Centering and coning

The tell. The top of the cone turns into a screw thread and shears off in your palms, or a mushroom cap forms and flops sideways.

The move. Wheel faster than feels comfortable. Put the pressure at the bottom of the cone and be barely touching by the time your hands reach the peak. Never build taller than about twice the width, and brace both elbows into your ribs or thighs so your arms are one rigid object.

4

The rim

The tell. Oval, leaning, thicker in one spot, or fine while wet and wavy once it dries. Most rim problems are the receipt for something that happened lower down.

The move. Compress after every single pull. Two fingers either side, a thumb flat on top, three full rotations, no traveling. Never chase a high spot; hold absolutely still and let the clay grind itself level against your hand.

5

The base, which is a different problem wearing the same word

The tell. The pot suddenly jumps off center for no reason you can name, or tears loose and slides while the wheel keeps turning. Usually there is water pooled in a ring around the foot.

The move. Nothing to do with hand speed. Wipe the head bone dry, slam the clay down hard, and pat the skirt all the way around with the wheel turning before you start. Sponge the moat out every few minutes on tall work.

If it already happened

A shallow spiral will usually rib out. Speed the wheel up, hold a firm rib flat against the outside with an anchored arm, and run it slowly from base to rim once while your hand stays still. A genuine thin stripe rather than a surface ridge is not saveable.

A neck that has folded over on itself has trapped air and a seam in there, and it will crack in the kiln even if it looks fine on the shelf. Cut it down and use the belly.

A sheared cone is not a lost lump. Wire the top off cleanly, slam the two pieces together off the wheel, and wedge it properly before you go again.

02 · Why this page is built the way it is

Read it first. Then watch it. Then go do it badly a few times.

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

What reading does

It gives you the words, and words are what make a thing visible

Before somebody explains torque to you, a twisted pot is just a pot that went wrong. After somebody explains it, you can see a diagonal seam from across the room.

Reading also moves at your speed. You can stop on the sentence that finally landed, go back two lines, and sit there. A video keeps going whether you understood it or not, and the part you needed was probably four seconds long.

What watching does

It shows you speed, pressure and timing, which words are terrible at

Nobody has ever successfully written down how fast “slow” is. Or how hard a squeeze is. You can read “count to three going up” a hundred times and still move twice as fast as you meant to.

Watching hands fixes that in about ten seconds. It is also the only way to see how much of throwing is small and boring, because every video makes it look easier than it is and that is useful information too.

Here is the part we actually believe, and we will say it as a belief rather than as science, 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 watching a nice person make a nice pot, you are checking your model against reality. You catch the mismatch. You go, oh, her hand barely moves. That correction is the thing that sticks, and you cannot have it unless you brought a model with you.

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

And then the honest part. Neither one teaches your hands anything. Ten minutes of sitting at a wheel deliberately doing it wrong will teach you more about the twist than this entire page will. 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. Your hand is winning a race it is supposed to lose.

03 to 07 · The five places it shows up

Same physics, five different disguises

Every one of these has the same root, so the fixes rhyme. What changes is which variable went out of range, and in one of them the answer is the exact opposite of everything else on this page.

1While you pull walls

The spiral seam, also known as torque

This is the twist people mean when they say the twist. It is the most common one, it gets worse the taller you go, and it is the one that quietly ruins pots that felt fine while you were making them.

What you are looking at

  • A ridge or a groove running up the outside of the wall on a diagonal, like a barber pole.
  • The rim leans, or goes slightly oval, and gets worse with each pull.
  • A thin stripe that spirals rather than a thin band that rings the pot.
  • A tear that opens on the diagonal instead of straight across.
  • The whole form starts drifting sideways as it gets taller.

Why it is happening

Your hands are climbing faster than the wheel is delivering clay, so your pressure point is cutting across the wall instead of going around it. That is the headline, and it is true about eight times out of ten.

The three things that cause it, in the order we see them at the wheels:

The wheel got slowed down because the pot felt out of control. Squeezing and traveling started at the same instant, so the pressure went in on a slant. Or the hands ran dry and started grabbing instead of sliding, which drags the wall around even if your timing was perfect.

The fix, in order

  1. Speed the wheel up, not down. Pulling wants a faster wheel than shaping does. When a pull feels out of control, every instinct says slow the wheel and hurry your hands. Do the opposite of both.
  2. Squeeze first. Wait. Then travel. Set the pressure at the base, feel the wall bulge above your fingers, and only then start rising. Doing both at once is how a groove gets carved on a slant.
  3. Count it out. Three full seconds minimum from base to rim, and slower than that on the first pull. If you got to the top in one second, you did not pull a wall, you drew a spiral on one.
  4. Keep a film of slip under your hands. If your fingers squeak or stutter, they are grabbing. Wet them before it gets bad rather than after.
  5. Anchor your arms. Elbows into your thighs or braced on the splash pan. Arms floating in the air make a helix on their own, because nothing is holding your hand at one height while the clay comes around.
  6. Release over three full turns. Ease off gradually and travel out sideways as you go. Lifting your hands straight off drags a divot around the pot and it lands on a diagonal too.
  7. Fewer pulls. Three or four good ones. Clay has a finite number of pulls in it and a tired wall twists far more easily than a fresh one.
If it already happened. A shallow spiral will usually rib out. Speed the wheel up, hold a firm rib flat against the outside with an anchored arm, run it slowly from base to rim once, and let the wheel shear the ridge off while your hand holds still. If the spiral is a genuine thin stripe rather than a surface ridge, there is no saving it, and pushing on will cost you the pot on the next pull anyway.
2While you collar

The neck that wrings itself like a towel

This is the one where the advice flips. Everywhere else on this page we tell you to speed the wheel up. Collaring is the exception, and getting that backwards is why so many first bottles fold over at the shoulder.

What you are looking at

  • Vertical creases in the neck that turn diagonal as you keep squeezing.
  • The neck corkscrews, then buckles, then folds over on itself.
  • The rim goes wavy and starts to split.
  • The neck closes beautifully and then tears right through at the narrowest point.

Why it is happening

Collaring moves a lot of clay a short distance, and your hands are in contact with almost the whole circumference at once. That is enormous friction compared with a pull, where you touch one small spot.

So a fast wheel plus a firm grip is not a shaping move anymore. It is a wringing machine, and the clay obliges.

The second cause is greed. Trying to close a lot in one pass thickens and shortens the wall faster than the clay can reorganize, and thick short walls buckle rather than compress.

The fix, in order

  1. Slow the wheel down. Slower than you think. This is the only move on the page that wants less speed, because here the clay is not being invited to come to your hand, it is being squeezed by all of it at once.
  2. Wrap, do not grip. Make a loose ring with your fingers and thumbs so you contact the whole neck evenly. Pressure from three fingers on one side just pushes the pot over.
  3. Take tiny bites. A few millimeters per pass and many passes. Come up from below the neck each time rather than pinching at one height.
  4. Pull after every couple of passes. Collaring thickens the wall, and a thick wall is a wall that buckles. One light pull upward re-thins it and buys you two more collaring passes.
  5. Compress the rim as you go. The rim is doing the most traveling and the most compressing. Two fingers and a thumb, three rotations, every couple of passes, or it goes wavy and then it splits.
  6. Keep it wet the whole way. More than you would for a pull. Dry collaring is how creases become tears.
If it already happened. A crease that has not folded can often be stretched back out with one gentle pull upward before you collar any further. Once it has folded over on itself there is trapped air and a seam in there, and the neck will crack in the kiln even if it looks fine on the shelf. Cut it down and use the belly.
3While you center and cone

The cone that screws off in your hands

The earliest twist, and the most under-diagnosed. Most people who meet this one decide their arms are not strong enough. Strength has almost nothing to do with it.

What you are looking at

  • The top of the cone turns into a screw thread and shears off in your palms.
  • The lump smears round and round under your hands without ever settling.
  • The cone leans, and leaning it back just moves the lean somewhere else.
  • A mushroom cap forms at the top and then flops sideways.

Why it is happening

Same race, earliest stage. Your hands are traveling upward faster than the clay is actually rising, so the top of the cone gets wound around while the bottom stays put. Wind anything hard enough in two directions and it shears.

A wheel that is too slow makes it inevitable, because a slow wheel gives the top fewer chances per second to come back around and catch up with your hands.

And squeezing hardest at the very top does the rest. That is the thinnest, fastest, least supported clay on the lump, and it is exactly where most people bear down.

The fix, in order

  1. Wheel fast. Faster than is comfortable at first. Centering and coning are the two moves that want the most speed of anything you will do all session.
  2. Squeeze low, rise slowly, ease off near the top. The pressure belongs at the bottom of the cone. By the time your hands reach the peak they should barely be touching.
  3. Do not build a tower. Roughly twice as tall as it is wide is plenty. Past that you are asking a narrow column to carry a heavy top while it spins, and it will not.
  4. Wet hands, not grabby hands. Coning dry is the single fastest way to shear a cone off. Re-wet between every cone.
  5. Brace against your body. Both elbows locked into your ribs or thighs so your arms are one rigid object. Anything hinged introduces a wobble that the clay copies once per rotation.
  6. Come down with the heel of your hand, not with a grab. Press down and slightly inward at the same time so the clay has somewhere to go.

If you have not read it yet, our full walkthrough on coning, in detail goes deeper on the mushroom and the screw top than we can here.

If it already happened. A sheared cone is not a lost lump. Stop the wheel, cut the top off cleanly with a wire, slam the two pieces back together off the wheel, and wedge it properly before you go again. Do not try to smear a sheared top back on while it spins, because you will seal a spiral of air into the middle of the lump and meet it again on your third pull.
4At the rim

The twist you only notice at the top

Here is the annoying thing about the rim. Most rim problems are not rim problems. They are the receipt for something that happened lower down, printed at the end.

What you are looking at

  • The rim is oval, or it sits at a slight angle to the wheel head.
  • One section of the rim is noticeably thicker or taller than the rest.
  • A tear opening diagonally down from the rim edge.
  • The rim looks fine wet and goes wavy as it dries.

Why it is happening

The rim is the fastest-traveling part of the pot and the least supported, so it exaggerates everything. A spiral of thick and thin from a twisted pull arrives at the top as a rim that leans.

Grabbing the rim to correct it makes it worse, because your hand copies the high spot onto the next rotation instead of grinding it down.

And an uncompressed rim has been dragged apart and never pressed back together, so it tears while you pull and it goes wavy while it dries.

The fix, in order

  1. Compress the rim after every single pull. Two fingers on either side, a thumb flat on top, three full rotations, no traveling. This is not optional and it takes four seconds.
  2. Finish rims with a chamois or soft plastic. It rides the high spots down instead of catching on them.
  3. Slow the wheel as the pot gets wider. A wide rim is traveling far faster than the base and it will fling itself outward if you let it.
  4. Leave the rim a touch thicker than the wall. Thin rims are the first thing to tear and the first thing to warp.
  5. Never chase a high spot. Hold absolutely still and let the clay grind itself level against your hand. Moving with it copies it forward.
  6. Cut it off rather than argue with it. A needle tool held steady against the spinning rim takes the whole uneven ring off in one rotation. Then compress the fresh edge.
If it already happened. Level it with a needle tool, lift the ring off, compress the new rim, and then go and look at the bottom third of your wall, because that is where the twist that caused it is still sitting.
5At the base

The twist that tears the pot off the bat

Different mechanism, same word, and it is the most sudden of the five. One second you have a pot. The next second you have a pot going around at a slightly different speed than the wheel it is standing on.

What you are looking at

  • The whole pot suddenly jumps off center for no reason you can name.
  • The base tears loose and the pot slides while the wheel keeps turning.
  • Water has pooled in a ring around the foot.
  • The pot twists as you lift it after wiring, and the base ends up smeared.

Why it is happening

The seal between clay and bat failed. Either it was never made properly, or water dissolved it while you worked.

A wet or dusty wheel head lets the lump skate from the start. A soft slam leaves a gap underneath that no amount of good throwing will close.

Then there is the lift. A pot released cleanly by the wire and then rotated even slightly as you pick it up will shear its own base, and you will find out at trimming.

The fix, in order

  1. Bone dry, then slam hard. Wipe the head or bat completely dry and throw the clay down onto the middle of it with real commitment. A polite placement is not a seal.
  2. Pat the base all the way around before you start. Ten seconds of firm patting with the wheel turning locks the skirt of clay down onto the bat.
  3. Sponge out the moat. Water pooling around the foot slowly dissolves the seal from the outside in. Get it out every few minutes, especially on tall work.
  4. Check the bat is actually seated. Both pins engaged, no rock, no warp. A bat that lifts a millimeter on one side is a wobble you cannot throw out.
  5. Wire off flat, taut and in one pass. Wheel stopped, wire pulled tight, kept flat against the bat, straight through. Sawing at it leaves a ridged base that will crack.
  6. Lift with two flat hands and no rotation. Straight up, both hands low on the form, and set it down without a swivel. Most smeared feet happen in this last two seconds.
If it already happened. A pot that has torn loose mid throw is almost never worth rescuing, because the base is already sheared internally even if it looks attached. The exception is very early on, before you have opened. Then you can stop, lift the lump off, dry the head and start again with nothing lost but two minutes.
08 · Find yours

Tell us what you are actually seeing

Pick whichever line sounds most like your last ruined pot. Nothing gets sent anywhere and nothing gets saved. This just puts you in front of the right section.

Start here

Pick a line above

Or ignore the buttons entirely and read sections three through seven in order. They are short, and the five of them together take about as long as one video.

09 · Now watch the hands
Now watch the hands

Six videos, none of them ours

Two videos, neither of them ours

Six different potters, six different accents, six different opinions about where your elbows go. We picked them because each one shows a moment this page can only describe. Every one is credited, and every one is worth subscribing to.

Eight minutes for the pair. The first one makes the mistakes on purpose, which is far more useful than watching somebody do it right, because you already know what right looks like. The second is the rescue, and almost nobody tells beginners it exists.

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 opens here rather than sending you away. We do not know these makers and they do not know us.

MW Ceramics
“Stop Ruining Your Pots! 8 Pulling Mistakes Every Beginner Makes”
The long one, and the most complete thing on this list. Watch how little her hands move upward relative to how much the wheel is turning. That ratio is the entire subject of this page.
Pulling walls30 minutes
Kyla Glendenning
“Five Mistakes to AVOID to Pull Better Walls on the Pottery Wheel”
If you only have six minutes, spend them here. She demonstrates the mistakes on purpose, which is far more useful than watching somebody do it correctly, because you already know what correct looks like.
Pulling walls6 minutes
Ripple Pottery
“Tips on reducing torque on taller pieces.”
The only video here aimed squarely at torque by name. Tall work is where the twist stops being cosmetic and starts costing you pots, and this is the clearest explanation of why height makes it worse.
Tall forms8 minutes
Florian Gadsby
“How to Collar in Clay — A Beginner’s Guide”
Watch the wheel speed, then watch how many separate passes he takes to close a neck that a beginner would try to close in two. The patience is the technique.
Collaring17 minutes
Tinker & Think
“THIS Is Why You Struggle to Center Clay on the Potter’s Wheel”
Bracing, and why an unbraced arm hands the clay a hinge to open and close. This is the video to watch if your cones keep screwing off and you have already tried everything else.
Centering and coning7 minutes
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. Collapsing a twisted wall back down and starting the pull again is a real option, and almost nobody tells beginners that.
Rescues2 minutes

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

10 · The one to keep open
The one to keep open

The whole page, 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. Ten lines, in the order they come up.

  1. Wedge it properly. A lopsided lump twists no matter how good your hands are.
  2. Wheel fast to center and cone. Faster than feels comfortable. Squeeze low, rise slow, ease off at the top.
  3. Never cone taller than about twice its width. Tall thin columns shear.
  4. Anchor both elbows. Into your thighs, your ribs, or the splash pan. Floating arms make a spiral on their own.
  5. Squeeze first. Wait for the bulge. Then travel. Doing both at once carves the groove on a slant.
  6. Three seconds minimum from base to rim. Slower on the first pull. If you got there in one second, you drew a spiral.
  7. Keep a film of slip under your hands. Squeaking means grabbing, and grabbing tows the wall sideways.
  8. Compress the rim after every pull. Three rotations, no traveling. Four seconds, every time.
  9. Release over three full turns. Ease off and travel out. Never lift straight off.
  10. Slow the wheel right down to collar. This is the one move that wants less speed, plus small bites and a lot of water.

One more thing that is not on the list because it is not a technique. If the twist keeps arriving on pull three, the answer is usually not pull three. It is that the pot was carrying a small twist from pull one and you have now multiplied it twice.

Where to go next

Reading about it is the cheap part. The wheel time is the expensive 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 the twist goes away after a few dozen hours at a wheel, not after a few dozen articles.

That is the short version. The long one has all five ' sections in full, six videos, a picker that turns a symptom into a first move, and the reasoning underneath every ' rule here. The switch is at the top of the page.

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 at your pot, and tell you your hands are climbing too fast before you have finished asking.

Find your membership Read the wheel guide
Learn to tap center The fastest way to stop fighting a lump that will not settle, with a practice tool you can use right now on this screen. Coning, in detail Why coning is really just wedging on the wheel, and how to stop the mushroom and the screwed off top. Pulling walls, in detail The offset between your hands, where the pressure point really sits, and a video of the mistakes made on purpose.

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.