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Wheel throwing · Intermediate
A donut vase is a hollow clay ring standing on its edge with a small neck on top. It looks like it took a lifetime to learn. It didn’t. It took a few pounds of clay, one technique most people skip, and a willingness to wreck the first two.
This page is the whole thing. Both throwing methods, step by step. Eight videos from potters who are very good at this. Everything that goes wrong and why. And then, if you want it, the optional exercise that turns a nice donut into a beautiful one: making and attaching a neck.
This is the short version. One throwing method start to finish, the four things that end a first donut, and one video worth watching before you begin. The whole teardown, with both methods and eight videos, is one tap away.
A donut vase is a sealed hollow ring with two openings cut into it: the hole through the middle, which never touches the inside, and the neck or vent, which does.
There are two ways to build the ring. You can throw one fat pot and collar it shut, so the trapped air holds the shape while you work it, or you can throw two matching halves and join them rim to rim. Learn the closed way first. The collaring it teaches is most of the reason to make this pot at all, and it is the method on this page. The two-half route lives in the Comprehensive Version, for the day you want one bigger than you can collar.
Read the list once, watch the one video further down, then put the list back up on your phone and go.
Sealed air holds the form up while you throw, and it bursts a pot in a kiln. Before anything is fired there must be an opening into the cavity. The neck handles it. No neck, then a small hole under the foot. And expect to wreck the first one or two. Everyone who is good at this did.
01
Here is the thing almost nobody says out loud about pottery videos.
Watching one feels like learning.
It mostly isn’t. It is closer to watching somebody else exercise. You finish the video full of confidence, you sit down at the wheel, and about ninety seconds in you realize you have no idea what came after the part where the wall went in.
That is not the video’s fault. Video is spectacular at the two things writing is worst at. Timing and pressure. How long a hand stays put. How slow the wheel actually is. What a rib sounds like when it is doing the right thing instead of the wrong thing. Nobody has ever written any of that down in a way that helped.
But writing is spectacular at the two things video is worst at. Order and reasons. A video shows you a wall that did not collapse. It does not tell you why yours did. And when your hands are covered in slip and the pot is turning, you are not scrubbing back thirty seconds to check what comes next. You are guessing.
There is a real thing behind this, too. You keep what you can find again. A list you can glance at from the wheel gets read eleven times in one session. A video gets watched once, in the parking lot, and then you are on your own.
So this page does both jobs, in the order that actually works.
The videos on this page are not ours. We did not make them, we are not affiliated with anybody in them, and we get nothing if you watch them. They are simply the clearest ones we could find, from potters who are very good at this. Every title and channel below was pulled from YouTube itself rather than typed from memory.
02
Because a donut vase is a trojan horse. It looks like a decorative object and it is actually five throwing lessons stacked on top of each other, and you only find that out after you have already agreed to make one.
The moment you can trap air inside a pot and shape it from the outside, a whole shelf of work opens up. Bottles. Gourds. Moon jars. Anything with a belly wider than its opening. Most potters put this off for years because there is no obvious first project. This is the obvious first project.
Bringing a wide form inward without buckling it is the single most useful throwing skill people skip. You can make mugs and bowls forever without touching it. A donut will not let you. And once your hands know it, every neck, every shoulder and every lid gallery you ever make gets easier.
Two pieces of clay at the same dryness, scored, slipped, pressed and blended until the seam disappears. Handles run on those rules. Spouts run on those rules. Lids, feet, sprigs, sculpture, all of it. A donut punishes a lazy join loudly enough that you only do it once.
Nobody has a bouquet sitting on the counter. They have two stems somebody handed them, or three things clipped out of the yard. A tall vase swallows those. A donut vase is built for exactly that amount of flower, and it holds them upright instead of letting them flop.
A donut reads as a shape, not as a pot. It photographs from every angle, it works empty, and the hole in the middle does something no other vase does: it frames whatever is behind it. People pick it up. That is not nothing.
We are going to be honest with you. It is roughly as hard as a decent teapot, and about a hundred times more impressive to the person holding it. Nobody looks at a teapot and says “how on earth.” Everybody says it about a donut. Use that information however you like.
Your first one is probably not going to be great. Your second one might not be either. The failure rate on this shape is genuinely high for the first few attempts, and everyone who is good at it wrecked a pile of them first. The good news is that a wrecked donut costs a few pounds of clay and an hour, and the clay goes back in the recycle bucket. That is the whole risk. Go be bad at it for a while.
03
Before you throw one, get the shape clear in your head. Almost every failure on this form comes from a misunderstanding of one of these seven parts, and the misunderstanding usually happens before the clay is even centered.
The outer wall. The face everybody sees. This is the surface you shape with a rib, and on a good donut it is one continuous curve with no flat spot and no seam you can feel with a thumb.
The sealed space inside. This is the whole trick. The ring is hollow, and while you are throwing, the air trapped in there pushes back against your rib. That trapped air is what lets you shape a form you cannot get a hand inside. It is also the thing that will crack your pot in the kiln if you never give it a way out. More on that below.
The inner wall. The surface facing the hole. It is the hardest part to reach, the hardest part to smooth, and the hardest part to glaze, and it is also the part people run a finger around when they pick the pot up. Plan for it early, because you cannot fix it late.
The hole. Not decoration. It is the reason the shape works. It frames whatever is behind the vase and it is what makes people pick the thing up. Get it round, get it centered, and keep it generous. A timid little hole reads as a mistake.
The neck. Where the water and the stems go. This is optional in the sense that the pot stands up without it, and not optional in the sense that a donut with a bad neck is a donut nobody uses. The whole second half of this page is about this part.
The foot. A donut carries a lot of weight on a small footprint, and it is tall for how narrow it is. The foot has to be flat, wide enough to be stable, and dead level, or the whole thing leans and you will notice from across a room.
The seam. Only exists if you build it from two halves. It runs right around the widest line of the ring, on the outside and on the inside. Done well it is invisible. Done badly it is the crack you find after the bisque.
A donut vase is a sealed hollow ring with two openings cut into it: the hole through the middle, which never touches the inside, and the neck, which does. Everything else is detail.
04
There are two real ways to get a hollow ring out of a lump of clay, and potters argue about which one is correct. Neither is. They are different trades, and which one suits you depends almost entirely on how confident you are at collaring.
| One: closed on the wheel | Two: two halves joined | |
|---|---|---|
| How it works | Throw one wide, fat, thick-walled form and collar the top shut until the air is sealed inside. Then press or cut the hole through the middle. | Throw two matching shallow forms, cut a hole in the center of each, let them stiffen, then join them rim to rim so the ring closes itself. |
| Sessions | One at the wheel, then a second visit to trim and cut. | One to throw both halves, a second to join once they are leather hard, a third to clean up. |
| The hard part | Collaring a wide form shut without the wall buckling. This is the whole difficulty of the method and there is no way around it. | Making two halves that genuinely match, and getting both of them to the same dryness on the same day. |
| Best if you | Want the skill more than the object, and are comfortable throwing an even wall you cannot see. | Want a larger or flatter donut than you can collar, or you want tight control over the profile. |
| Where it fails | At the wheel, loudly, in about four seconds. You will know immediately. | A week later, quietly, as a hairline crack along the seam. You will not know until it is too late to fix. |
| Clay to start | 4 to 6 lb in one piece for a vase around 7 to 9 inches across. | 2 to 3 lb per half, weighed on a scale so they match. |
| Our take | Learn this one first even if you end up preferring the other. The collaring alone is worth the wrecked pots. | Come here when you want a specific shape, or a big one, or when method one has beaten you three times in a row. |
Some potters throw the ring as a ring from the start, working a doughnut of clay on a chuck rather than closing a bowl. It is a genuinely different approach and one of the videos further down goes at it that way. We have not written it up as a full method here because it is a specialist route and the two above will get almost everybody where they are going.
05
One lump of clay, one sitting, one continuous shape. You throw a fat little pot, you shut the top of it, and the air you sealed inside becomes the thing that holds the form up while you push it into a ring.
Stage one · Set up for a wide pot, not a tall one
More than you think. A donut eats clay because the walls stay thick the whole way through. Six pounds gives you a vase roughly the size of a dinner plate. Four gives you something that sits nicely on a windowsill.
Why: a thin wall cannot be collared. Every gram you leave in the wall is insurance.Do not cone it up into a tower and leave it there. Bring it up once to align the clay, then push it back down into a broad dome, wider than it is tall. You want a shape that already looks a bit like a hamburger.
Why: you are about to make something wide. Starting tall means fighting the clay outward the whole time.Open out to roughly two thirds of the diameter you eventually want. Leave the floor a solid quarter inch or a bit more, and compress it hard with a rib or the heel of your hand before you go anywhere else.
Why: this floor becomes the bottom of the ring and it carries the whole pot. It is also where an s-crack starts if you skip the compressing, and a wide floor makes that more likely, not less.Slower than feels right. Something in the region of a third of the speed you would use for a mug. Set it now so you are not reaching for the pedal later with one hand inside a closing pot.
Why: everything from here on is a wide form, and wide forms throw themselves off at speed.Stage two · Build the belly before you can no longer reach it
Pull the wall up, but leave it noticeably thicker than you would on a cylinder. Somewhere around a quarter inch. Two good pulls is usually enough and three is the most you should need.
Why: a thin wall buckles the instant you start collaring. This is the single most common reason a first donut ends in the recycle bucket.Inside hand or a sponge on a stick, pressing outward at the widest point while the outside hand follows along to support it. Get the fat curve you actually want. Overdo it slightly, because collaring will pull some of it back in.
Why: this is the last moment you can reach the inside. Once the top closes, the only tool you have is trapped air, and trapped air can refine a curve but it cannot invent one.Push a needle through low on the wall, thumb against the outside, pull it out and look at the gap. Do it once, near the bottom, and patch the pinhole with a wet finger.
Why: guessing is how people find out their wall was an eighth of an inch, and they find out during collaring, which is the worst possible moment.Sponge the inside dry. Sponge the outside dry. Take the slip off the rim with a chamois or a finger. The pot should feel firm and slightly tacky, not slick.
Why: water sitting in the bottom of a form you are about to seal has nowhere to go, and a wet wall is a soft wall. Every collaring pass you make on a wet pot costs you structure you needed.Stage three · Close it
Make a loose circle with both hands around the pot, fingers linked or nearly touching, starting an inch or two under the rim. Squeeze gently and travel upward as the wheel turns. Do not grab the rim itself.
Why: pressure applied at one point makes an oval. Pressure applied all the way around makes a circle. Your hands are the collar.One pass takes maybe a quarter inch out of the diameter. After every single pass, compress the rim: pinch it gently between thumb and finger with the wheel turning, or run a small sponge across it.
Why: collaring squeezes the rim into a smaller circle, which means the clay there has nowhere to go. Uncompressed, it thickens unevenly, goes wavy, and then splits. Nearly every wavy rim on this shape is a skipped compression.A wall that is starting to ripple is telling you it is too soft. Walk away for fifteen minutes with a fan pointed at it, or leave it uncovered while you throw something else, then come back.
Why: this is a recoverable moment and almost nobody takes it. Pushing on through a ripple is how a pot that was fine becomes a pot that is not.When the hole is down to the size of a coin, bring it shut with a fingertip and smooth the little scar flat with a small rib or the side of your finger. You want it properly sealed, not almost sealed.
Why: from here the trapped air is a structural component. A pinhole leak means no pressure, and no pressure means the form goes slack the second you touch it with a rib.Run a flexible rib around the outside and refine the curve. Push a little and the form resists you. Push harder and it gives, and the air moves somewhere else in the pot.
Why: this is the moment the whole technique makes sense. Feel it once and closed forms stop being mysterious. Everything from bottles to moon jars runs on this.Stage four · Make the hole
Wet, you press the center of the closed dome down and inward with a knuckle or a sponge on a stick until it meets the floor, then open that channel out into a clean round hole. Leather hard, you let the pot stiffen overnight and cut the hole out with a hole cutter or a needle tool instead.
Why: pressing it wet is faster and gives a softer, more organic inner curve. Cutting it leather hard is far more forgiving and gives a more precise hole. If it is your first one, cut it leather hard.The hole has to pass cleanly out the back. Whichever route you took, come at it from both faces and meet in the middle rather than trying to punch through in one go.
Why: pushing through from one side alone tears the far wall outward and leaves a lip you cannot reach to fix.Where the two faces meet around the hole they have to become one continuous wall. Score, add a thin coil if there is a gap, and blend it in with a wooden tool and a damp sponge until you cannot feel the join with a fingertip.
Why: this join is under tension for the whole drying and firing. It is the second most common place a donut cracks, right after the seam.Soften the rim of the hole on both faces with a damp chamois or a rounded rib so it reads as one curve rolling through the pot rather than a cut edge.
Why: a sharp cut edge looks like a hole punched in something. A rounded one looks like the shape was always a ring. It is a two minute job and it is most of the difference.Stage five · Finish it
If you are adding a neck, cut the opening for it now while the pot is leather hard and you can still reach the edges. If you are not, you still have to make a hole somewhere into the sealed cavity. A neat one under the foot works and nobody ever sees it.
Why: sealed air that cannot escape expands in the kiln. Give it a way out. This is not optional and it is not a suggestion.Bed the pot on a foam pad or in a chuck so the ring is held upright and cannot rock, then trim a foot wide enough to be stable. Check it on a flat surface before you call it done.
Why: a donut is top-heavy and narrow. A foot that is a millimeter out of true reads as a lean, and a lean on a symmetrical shape is very hard to unsee.Loose plastic, opened a little more each day, for the best part of a week. See the drying section below, because a donut dries less evenly than almost anything else you will make.
Why: you have just spent two sessions on this. The drying is where people lose it, and drying is free to do right.06
Throw the donut as two matching halves, cut the hole while you can still reach everything, then close the ring by joining them rim to rim. There is no collaring at all. There is, instead, a seam, and the seam is where all of the difficulty went.
Visit one · Throw two halves that match
Two to three pounds each, identical to within a few grams. Wedge them the same way and put them side by side so you do not mix up which is which.
Why: eyeballing two lumps gets you within about fifteen percent, and fifteen percent is a visible step at the seam that no amount of blending hides.Think of it as half a donut sliced through the middle, lying face up. A wide low bowl with a fat rounded profile and a rim that is flat and level rather than tapered. Wall around a quarter inch.
Why: the rim is a gluing surface, not a drinking edge. Flat and wide gives the join something to hold onto.Outside diameter and, if the rim is wide, the inside diameter too. Do it before you take the piece off the wheel.
Why: you cannot match a number you did not record, and clay stiffens and shrinks while you are throwing the second half.Same weight, same profile, same wall, and check the calipers against it repeatedly rather than once at the end. Mirror the curve so the two halves make one continuous shape when you put them face to face.
Why: this is the whole method. Everything after this is recovery from how well you did here.Same shelf, same plastic, same airflow, right next to each other. Do not put one under a fan and leave the other on a wet shelf.
Why: two pieces at different dryness shrink at different rates after you join them, and the seam pulls itself apart over the next few days. This is the number one cause of a cracked donut seam and it happens before the join is even made.Visit two · Cut the hole, then close the ring
The clay should hold its shape if you pick it up by the rim, but still take a fingernail mark easily and still feel cool. Firm enough to handle, soft enough to move.
Why: too soft and the halves distort under their own weight while you press them together. Too hard and the join never really bonds, it just sits there looking like it did.Mark the center, use the same cutter or the same template on both, and cut cleanly through. Then bevel or flare the cut edges slightly outward on each half so they will meet each other squarely once the halves are face to face.
Why: this is the reason to build it this way. You can reach both sides of the inner wall right now with two hands and a tool. In ten minutes you will not be able to reach it at all.Both outer rims and both inner edges around the hole. Score properly, deep enough to feel, then a real coat of slip on both faces rather than a smear on one.
Why: a join is two surfaces reaching into each other, not two surfaces stuck to each other. Scoring one side and slipping one side gets you about half a join.Bring the halves together, press evenly all the way around rather than one point at a time, then immediately work the inner join around the hole: run a coil in and blend it down with a wooden tool while you can still get a finger in there.
Why: the inner join is the one that fails and the one you cannot reach later. Do it first, while the pot is still forgiving.Lay a thin coil right into the outer seam and blend it in both directions with a rib until you cannot find the line with a fingertip and your eye cannot find it in raking light.
Why: the coil is what makes the join survive drying. Pressed rims alone leave a weak line straight through the wall, and that line is exactly where the crack goes.Bed it on a foam pad or a chuck, center it by eye or by tapping, and run a rib around the outside with the wheel turning to make it one continuous curve.
Why: this is what makes a joined donut look thrown rather than assembled. Two minutes on the wheel erases the seam better than twenty minutes of hand-blending.Visit three · Neck, foot, vent
Find the top of the ring, mark it, and cut an opening sized to the neck you are about to make. Keep it centered on the ring, not just centered by eye from the front.
Why: a neck that is a few degrees off the top makes the entire vase look like it is falling over, and the shape is symmetrical enough that everybody notices.Same as method one. Wide enough to be stable, flat enough that it does not rock, checked on a flat surface rather than trusted.
Why: a joined donut is heavier than it looks and the seam runs right through the widest part. A wobble becomes a stress point.The neck opening usually handles this. If you have decided against a neck, put a small hole under the foot instead. Check it before the pot goes on the shelf, not after it comes out of the kiln.
Why: because a sealed cavity in a kiln is a physics problem with a very predictable ending.Loose plastic for several days at minimum. If anything, keep the seam area covered slightly longer than the rest.
Why: the seam has more water in it than the wall around it, because you just added slip and a coil to it. Drying that faster than its surroundings is asking for the exact crack you spent two visits avoiding.07
The half the writing cannot do. One potter, start to finish. Watch how much clay stays in the wall and how unhurried the collaring is.
Now the half the writing cannot do. Five potters, several different routes to the same shape, and one that is not a donut at all but teaches the skill the whole thing rests on.
Nothing loads until you press play, so no video player and no YouTube cookies arrive on this page unless you ask for them. Every title and channel below came straight from YouTube rather than from memory or from a search result.
The clearest start-to-finish walkthrough we found, filmed by a supply shop rather than an artist, which means it is paced to teach rather than to look good. Watch how much clay stays in the wall and how unhurried the collaring is. If you only watch one of these, watch this one first and watch it before you read the steps again.
Open on YouTubeA second pair of hands on the same problem, at a bigger scale, which changes the difficulty in ways worth seeing. Watch the wheel speed and watch where the hands sit during the closing passes. Two people solving one shape differently is more useful than one person solving it once.
Open on YouTubeThis one follows the piece past the wheel and on to the glazed object, which almost no throwing video does. Worth it for the part everybody skips: what happens to this shape between the wheel and the shelf. Watch what gets done to the hole and the inner wall after the throwing is finished.
Open on YouTubeThe specialist approach we mentioned in the comparison above: going after the ring as a ring, double walled, rather than closing a bowl and piercing it. It is not the route we would send a first-timer down, but seeing a third way exists is genuinely useful once the first two have stopped being mysterious.
Open on YouTubeNot a donut. This is the thing a donut is made of. Hsin-Chuen Lin has been teaching closed forms on YouTube for well over a decade and works with famously little water, which makes the hand positions unusually easy to read. If collaring is where you keep coming unstuck, spend your time here rather than on another donut video.
Open on YouTubeWe keep a whole page of hand-picked free video lessons covering the core skills: wedging, centering, cylinders, bowls, trimming, handles, hand building and glazing. Same rules as this page. Credited, explained, and none of them ours.
Open the video library08
All of it. In the order you are likely to meet it. Find your symptom, read the cause, and notice how many of these turn out to have happened several steps before the moment you noticed them.
The four failures that end a first donut at the wheel, and what each one is telling you. The other eight, from drying cracks to kiln blowouts, are in the Comprehensive Version.
The wall was too thin. A donut wall wants to be around a quarter inch, which feels wrong if you are used to throwing mugs. Two pulls, not four.
Also worth checkingToo much water. A soaked wall has no structure at all. Sponge the pot dry inside and out before you collar. And check you actually slowed the wheel down, because a wide form at mug speed is fighting you the whole way.
You did not compress the rim between collaring passes. Collaring squeezes the rim into a smaller and smaller circle, which means the clay there is being crowded with nowhere to go. Uncompressed, it thickens unevenly, ripples, and then tears.
The fixCompress after every single pass. Every one. Pinch the rim gently between thumb and finger with the wheel turning, or run a small damp sponge over it. It takes three seconds and it prevents the most common failure on this shape.
You did not belly it out enough before you closed it, or you tried to do it after. Once the top is sealed you can refine a curve with trapped air and a rib, but you cannot create one that was not already there.
The fixNext time, push the belly out further than you think you want it while your hand is still inside. Collaring will pull some of it back. Overshoot deliberately.
It is not actually sealed. There is a pinhole somewhere, usually where you closed the last opening or where you checked the wall with a needle tool, and the air pressure you were counting on is leaking out.
The fixFind it and close it with a wet fingertip and a small rib. If you cannot find it, press gently on the form and listen. And next time, patch the needle hole immediately rather than at the end.
Warm hands, a warm studio, or a fan blowing on a sealed form. Air that gets warmer expands, and a sealed pot is a balloon with a clay skin. It can also go the other way and pull inward as it cools.
The fixNot really a problem, and some potters use it deliberately. But once you have the shape you want, put the hole or the vent in and stop the pot from having opinions.
Trying to do it wet, in one go, from one side. The far wall tears outward and leaves a lip you cannot reach in to fix.
The fixStop fighting it. Let the pot go to leather hard overnight and cut the hole out with a hole cutter or a needle tool instead, working in from both faces and meeting in the middle. It is slower by a day and better by a mile, and it is what we would tell any first-timer to do.
The two halves were at different dryness when you joined them. They then shrank at different rates and pulled the seam apart. This is decided days before the crack appears, which is why it feels mysterious.
The other causesNot enough slip. No coil in the seam. Or the seam dried faster than the wall around it, which it will do naturally because you just added wet clay to it. Keep the seam covered slightly longer than the rest of the pot.
The inner join around the hole and the neck join are both under tension for the entire drying, and both are places where you added wet clay to firmer clay. A neck also dries much faster than the body because it is thinner and more exposed.
The fixBlend those joins until you cannot feel them with a fingertip, not until they look fine. Then wrap the neck in a scrap of plastic for the first couple of days while the body catches up.
The floor was not compressed after opening. A donut has a wide floor for its size, which makes this more likely rather than less, and the crack often does not appear until after the bisque.
The fixNothing to be done for that pot. Next time, compress the floor hard with a rib immediately after opening, and again before you start pulling walls. Ten seconds of work.
You sealed a cavity and never gave the air a way out. Heat the air in a closed void and it expands, and it will find its own exit through the thinnest part of the wall.
The fixThere is no fixing it afterward. Before anything goes in a kiln, confirm out loud that there is an opening into the cavity. The neck usually does the job. If you skipped the neck, put a small hole under the foot where nobody will ever see it.
The foot is not flat, or the ring is not evenly weighted all the way around. On a shape this symmetrical, a very small lean is extremely visible.
The fixCheck the foot on a genuinely flat surface at leather hard, not by eye on a wedging table. If it rocks, trim it again. If the ring itself is heavier on one side, that was decided at the wheel and you are stuck with it.
Usually a wall that is much thinner on one side than the other, so one side softens sooner. Sometimes a foot too small for the weight sitting above it.
The fixEven walls, checked with a needle tool while you are throwing rather than hoped for afterward. And a foot with a real footprint. A donut is a tall narrow object carrying its mass high up, which is a harder ask of a foot than a bowl ever makes.
09
You got it off the wheel. Congratulations, and please do not relax yet. More donuts are lost between the wheel and the shelf than are lost on the wheel, and every one of those losses was free to avoid.
A donut dries less evenly than almost anything else you will make. The belly is thick, the walls are thin, the neck is thinner still, and there is a seam or a join somewhere carrying more water than the clay around it.
Before anything goes in a kiln, say it out loud: there is a hole into the cavity. A donut is a sealed void with an opening cut into it, and if you forgot the opening the kiln will make its own.
This shape is genuinely awkward to glaze and it is better to decide how before you make it than to work it out with a full brush in your hand.
The glaze finder is the fastest way to work out what a glaze is actually going to do before you commit a pot to it. Glazing big and intricate pottery faster is written for exactly this problem. Dipping covers the bucket glazes. And if it comes out fused to something, there is a page for that too.
The full drying, firing and glazing guidance, including how to handle a shape that is mostly hole, is in the Comprehensive Version.
The optional exercise
Here is something you can see across a room, and almost nobody can say out loud why.
Put two donut vases side by side, identical in every respect except the neck. One has a short stub cut into the top of the ring. The other has a neck that rises out of the curve like it grew there, flares very slightly at the lip, and is a shade taller than you expected.
One of them is a pot. The other one is a piece.
And the difference is maybe twenty minutes of work.
The neck is doing a lot of quiet jobs. It is where the water goes, so it decides how the flowers sit. It is the part everybody grabs when they pick the vase up, so it decides whether the thing feels solid or precious. And visually it is the only vertical line on an object that is otherwise entirely circles, which means it is the one element carrying all the tension in the design.
You can skip it. A donut with a plain cut opening is a real finished pot and there is nothing wrong with one. But if you have got this far, the neck is the cheapest upgrade available to you, and it teaches you a skill that transfers to every bottle, gourd and closed form you will ever throw.
Too short reads as an accident. Too tall reads as a bottle somebody glued to a donut. Start by making it slightly taller than feels correct and then take some off, because that is a much easier direction to travel.
Trace the outer curve of the donut in the air with a finger and keep going past the top. The neck should sit on that line. A neck that ignores the curve of the body is the single most common thing that makes a good donut look wrong.
Size it to two or three stems, not to a bouquet. A narrow opening holds flowers upright, which is the entire reason anybody owns a vase this shape. A wide one lets them flop and turns your donut into a bowl standing on its edge.
10
Pull it straight out of the pot, throw it separately and attach it, or build it by hand. They give genuinely different results and the middle one is the one that makes the best necks.
Way one · Pull it out of the closed form
The purest option and the hardest. One piece, no join, nothing to crack. You are working with whatever clay you deliberately left at the very top of the form, which is never very much.
Instead of smoothing the closing scar flat, leave a small mound of clay sitting at the top center. Half an inch or so of extra thickness.
Why: this is the only clay you will have to work with, and there is no adding more later. Decide before you close, not after.Wheel slow, wet fingers, and treat it exactly like centering and opening a tiny pot that happens to be sitting on top of a big one. Open only as far as you actually want the opening to be.
Why: opening too wide is unrecoverable. You cannot collar a neck this small back in without tearing it.Small, patient pulls. One finger inside, thumb and finger outside, moving together. Expect to get less height than you wanted.
Why: there is very little clay and no wall below it to draw from, which is exactly why this method is limited to short necks.Run a wet finger around the rim to compress it, then ease the very top outward by a hair with a fingertip.
Why: a dead straight neck reads as unfinished. A tiny flare catches light along the lip and gives the eye somewhere to stop.Way two · Throw a ring, attach it, then throw it again
The method most professional bottle-makers use, and the one to learn if you want necks that look designed rather than survived. You throw the neck as its own object with all the clay it needs, attach it at leather hard, and then re-throw it on the wheel so it becomes part of the pot.
Half a pound is plenty. A stubby open cylinder, walls left generously thick, no shaping and no elegance. It is a blank, not a neck.
Why: you are going to throw this again once it is attached, and the second throwing is where the shape comes from. Leave yourself clay to shape.Measure the base of the ring. Mark the top of the donut, dead center on the ring, and cut an opening to that measurement.
Why: a mismatch here becomes a ridge or a gap that you will be patching forever, and it will still be visible after glazing.Same shelf, same plastic, same day. Firm enough to handle without distorting, soft enough to take a fingernail.
Why: same rule as the two-halves method, same reason, same crack if you ignore it. Different dryness means different shrinkage means a failed join.Score both surfaces properly, slip both, press the ring down onto the opening and give it a quarter turn as you press.
Why: the twist smears the two scored surfaces into each other. A straight push leaves them touching rather than joined.A thin coil right into the angle where the neck meets the shoulder, blended up into the neck and down into the body until the transition is a curve rather than a corner.
Why: this is the fillet that makes the neck look grown rather than glued, and it is also the structural reinforcement that keeps the join alive through drying.Half an hour at least. Longer is better. Go and clean your tools.
Why: throwing a join that is still fresh tears it straight back open, and you will not be able to tell until it is drying.A thrown cylinder, a foam pad or a shaped chuck, anything that holds the ring upright and still. Then get the neck running true by tapping the pot into center rather than shoving it.
Why: the neck has to spin true or you cannot throw it. If tap centering is not a thing you do yet, there is a whole page and a practice tool for it.Wet it, pull it up, narrow it, shape the curve so it continues the line of the body, and finish the lip with a compression and a small flare. Very slow wheel and very small movements.
Why: this is the payoff. All the clay you left in the blank turns into height and shape, and the join disappears under the throwing.Way three · Build it by hand
A neck does not have to be round or symmetrical. On a shape as strictly geometric as a donut, a hand-built neck can be the thing that stops the whole object from looking machine-made.
A slab wrapped into a tube gives you a crisper neck. Coils give you something more organic. Either way, let it stiffen a little before you shape it so it holds a line.
Why: a floppy neck slumps under its own weight the moment you stand it upright, and slumping is not the same as organic.Stand it on the pot dry, look at it from four sides and from above, and adjust until the line works. Only then start scoring.
Why: once the slip is on you stop making design decisions and start rescuing them.Exactly the same join as way two. Score both, slip both, press and twist, then run a coil into the angle and blend it in until the transition reads as one shape.
Why: hand-built or thrown, the physics of the join is identical, and so is the crack you get for skipping it.Loose plastic around the neck for the first couple of days while the rest of the pot dries down toward it.
Why: a thin exposed neck on a fat body dries at a completely different rate, and the join between them is where that argument gets settled.Everything in ways two and three is really the same skill: making a pot out of separate thrown parts and joining them so nobody can tell. If that is the bit that interests you, throwing pottery in sections goes at it properly and at a much bigger scale.
11
One video for each of the three routes above. None of these are shot on a donut, because almost nobody films that specific combination, and it does not matter: the neck is the neck. What you are watching for is how the join is made and how the line is judged.
This is way two, on video. A pot built in parts and a neck that gets thrown after it is attached rather than before. Watch how much clay is left in the blank, and watch the moment the join stops being a join and starts being a curve. This is the one to study if you want the good necks.
Open on YouTubeWay three, from a potter who spent decades on bulbous narrow-necked forms and has strong opinions about all of it. Worth watching even if you intend to throw your necks, because it is the clearest argument we know for why a neck does not have to be symmetrical to be right.
Open on YouTubeTwenty minutes of nothing but narrow-neck technique, which is far more time than anybody normally spends on it. Way one is the hardest of the three routes and this is the most tip-dense thing we found on the underlying skill. Watch the wheel speed and the size of the movements.
Open on YouTubeIf any of the underlying skills on this page are shaky, start further back. Centering, pulling, and every way it goes wrong, with real skill-level cutoffs. It is all in text on purpose, for the same reason this page is.
How to throw on the wheel12
Not for the throwing. A donut vase uses a wheel, a needle tool, a rib and some calipers, and none of that needs a sign-off. Glazing is the part where our certifications live, so check what you are certified for before you plan the surface.
You should be able to center four to six pounds without a fight and pull an even wall on a cylinder without thinking about it too hard. If centering is still a wrestling match, this shape will not teach you anything except frustration. Go and get comfortable first and come back. It will still be here.
The good news is that you do not need to be able to throw closed forms already. This page is one of the better ways to learn that.
Something with a bit of grog or tooth in it is easier here, because you are asking the wall to stand up under collaring and to survive a join. A very smooth porcelain will do it, but it will be less forgiving on both counts and it is not what we would hand a first-timer for this shape.
We stock eight bodies and they start at $28 for a 25 lb bag. If you are unsure, ask whoever is on the floor. Everybody in the building has an opinion about clay and most of them are happy to share it.
Bigger than you would think, but the two methods scale differently. Closing a form on the wheel gets harder fast as the diameter grows, because there is more circumference to collar and more wall to keep even. Joining two halves scales much better, which is exactly why people reach for it when they want a large one.
Start around seven to nine inches across. Get one you like. Then push it.
Yes, once it is glazed and fired to maturity, and it holds a surprising amount because the whole ring is one connected cavity. Which is also worth knowing before you pick it up carelessly and tip it.
If you skipped the neck and vented it under the foot instead, then obviously not. That version is a sculpture and should be treated as one.
Absolutely. Donut vases get hand-built with slabs and coils all the time and some of the best ones are made that way. This page is specifically about the wheel-thrown route because that is what was asked for, but nothing about the shape requires a wheel.
Because it is sealed, and sealed air responds to temperature. A warm pot cooling down pulls itself in slightly. A cool pot warming up puffs out. It is normal and it is temporary and it stops the moment you cut the opening.
If it bothers you, cut the neck opening or the vent sooner rather than later.
Sometimes there just is not, and we would rather tell you that than pad the page. There is very little good footage of somebody attaching a thrown neck specifically to a donut vase, which is why the neck videos above are shot on bottles and vases instead. The join is the same join.
If you find something better than what is on this page, tell us and we will swap it in. We are not precious about it.
Keep going
Read the list, watch somebody who is good at it, then put the list back up on your phone and get your hands dirty. That last part is not optional and it is the only part that has ever taught anybody anything.
And when the first one collapses, come back to the section on everything that goes wrong. It is almost certainly in there.
This was the short version. The whole teardown, with both throwing methods, all eight videos, every failure we know and the neck exercise, is one tap away. Switch to the Comprehensive Version at the top of the page.
Every video on this page belongs to the person who made it. We are not affiliated with any of them, we did not ask for anything, and we get nothing if you watch. Titles and channel names were read straight from YouTube rather than typed from memory.
No video player and no YouTube cookies load on this page until you press play on one of them. Firing prices and cone numbers were current when this page was written. Wheel technique is not an exact science and every potter on this page would do at least one of these steps differently, which is rather the point.
Videos come out as a labelled box with the title and channel to search for, since paper does not play them.
