How to Throw Plates on the Pottery Wheel
A plate is the flattest thing you will ever ask clay to do, and clay has opinions about flat. Here is the whole job: how much clay to start with, how thick to leave the floor, how steep to throw the wall, how to dry it so it stays round, and how to trim a foot wide enough to hold the whole thing up.
Ten videos from potters who throw plates for a living, a spec table for six sizes, and every technique written as a short list you can keep on a phone next to the splash pan.
Eight steps, two videos, and the two habits that save more plates than any technique on this page.
Jump to a section
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.
The nutshell
A plate is mostly floor, and the floor is what cracks.
Roughly eighty percent of a plate is a horizontal disc with nothing underneath it but a bat. That one fact causes every problem plates have.
The floor cracks because opening the clay pulls the particles apart in rings and nobody pushed them back together. The wall lies down because a nearly flat wall has no structure to stand on. The rim goes oval because it has air on both sides and dries before the middle does.
So the whole job is four things, in this order: compress the floor hard, throw the wall steeper than you want it, dry the rim slowly, and trim a foot wide enough to hold the disc up. Everything below is those four things with the numbers filled in.
At the wheel
Throwing a dinner plate in eight steps.
A 10 inch dinner plate takes about 3 to 3.5 pounds of clay, gets thrown at roughly 11.5 inches, wants a floor three eighths of an inch thick after compressing, and ends up on a foot ring about 6 inches across. Our clays shrink 10 to 14 percent, so throw everything about an eighth wider than you want it to finish.
Use a bat. Always.
Wider than the finished rim by an inch on every side. A wet plate has no wall to grip, so it cannot be lifted off a bare wheel head without deforming.
Center it low and wide.
Cone up and down once to line the clay up, then bring it all the way down to a low mound with a genuinely flat top, about an inch and a half tall. Not a dome.
Open straight down, and stop early.
Slow wheel, straight down in the center. Leave more floor than feels right. You can always take clay out later. You can never put it back.
Pull the floor out flat, toward yourself.
Straight across at one constant height, not down and out in a curve. Then check it with a needle tool: you want three eighths of an inch.
Compress the floor. Three passes, minimum.
Slow wheel, flat rib, center to edge, with enough weight that you can see the clay move. Then compress it again after every later stage. This is the step that decides whether the plate survives.
One short thick wall, then open the angle out.
Pull a low wall first, thicker than a mug wall. Then push it outward in two or three passes with a hand or a rib supporting underneath. Throw it steeper than you want it fired, because it relaxes as it dries.
Compress the rim after every pass, and rib the inside.
Leave the rim thicker than a mug rim. Then one continuous rib pass from center to rim, which levels the surface and compresses everything at once.
Sponge the well dry and leave it on the bat.
Standing water in the middle soaks the floor and a soaked floor warps. Pull the wire underneath twice, once from each direction, and then do not lift it.
Watch it once
Two videos, then get your hands wet.
Video is the only honest way to show a motion. A written list is the only thing that holds still while you work. Watch these the night before, and keep the eight steps above open on your phone at the wheel.
The week after
The two habits that save plates.
More plates die on a drying shelf than on a wheel, and a foot ring that is too small will fold a perfectly good plate in the glaze firing. Both are habits rather than skills.
Dry it flat and slow
- Leave it on the bat it was thrown on for the first day at least.
- Cover the rim more heavily than the middle. The rim has air on both sides, gets there first, and pulls the plate out of round.
- Never on a rack, a slatted shelf, or anything that leaves the rim up in the air.
- Flip it face down onto a flat board once it is leather hard, so the foot side gets its turn.
Trim a wide foot
- Wait for firm leather hard, firmer than you would trim a bowl, then tap center it upside down.
- Make the foot ring about sixty percent of the finished width. On a 10 inch plate that is a 6 inch ring, not a little circle in the middle.
- Keep the ring low. A quarter inch tall is plenty, and height only adds somewhere to chip.
- Level it and check for rocking on a flat surface while the clay is still soft enough to fix.
If it goes wrong
Three failures, and what caused each one.
A crack across the middle
Roughly an S shape, straight through the floor. The floor was not compressed enough, or water sat in the well while it dried. Three passes minimum next time, then sponge the middle dry before it leaves the wheel.
The rim went oval
It dried unevenly, or it got leaned on while it was still soft. Dry it on the bat, cover the rim more than the middle, and flip it at leather hard.
It slumped in the glaze firing
The wall angle was too flat, or the foot ring was too small and left the outer half of the plate hanging over nothing. Both get fixed at the wheel. Neither gets fixed after.
Start here
A plate is mostly floor, and the floor is the part that cracks.
In a mug, the floor is maybe a tenth of the pot and the walls hold everything up. In a dinner plate that flips. Something like eighty percent of the piece is a horizontal disc with nothing underneath it but a bat, and every difficulty plates have comes out of that one fact.
The floor carries all the crack risk
Opening a lump of clay and pulling the floor outward drags the particles into rings around the center and stretches them apart while it does. Loose clay dries faster than tight clay, so a plate with an uncompressed floor is a loose middle glued inside a tight ring. Something has to give, and it is the floor.
Gravity is pulling on the whole wall
A cylinder wall stands on itself. A plate wall leans out over nothing at all. Every degree you open it toward horizontal is a degree closer to the moment it lies down, and the clay gets a second chance to lie down later, in a kiln at cone 5½.
Wide flat things warp
The rim of a plate has air on both sides. The middle has a bat under it. So the rim dries first, shrinks first, and pulls the plate out of round while the middle is still catching up. That is warping, and it is a drying problem rather than a throwing one.
None of this makes a plate hard to throw. Most people can throw a passable plate on their first or second try. It makes a plate hard to keep, because a plate hides its problems for a week and then tells you about them in the kiln. Almost everything on this page is about the keeping.
How to use this page
Watch somebody do it. Then read it with your hands in the clay.
Video is the only honest way to show a motion. Nobody can write down what the right amount of pressure looks like on somebody else's knuckles, or how slowly a good rib pass actually travels, or the exact moment a wall stops being a wall. So the videos on this page are here on purpose, and they are from potters who throw plates for a living.
But video runs at the maker's pace rather than yours, and it does not hold still. When you are sitting at a wheel with a plate under your hands and you need to know whether the floor is thick enough, you cannot scrub back eleven seconds with a wet knuckle to find the one sentence you needed. By the time you have found it you have taken your hands off the pot, and taking your hands off the pot is how plates go wrong.
A written list holds still. You read it once, at your own speed, in whatever order you like, and after that you only need to glance at it. Glancing is the whole point. That is why every technique here is written as a short numbered list rather than as paragraphs, and why the videos sit beside the lists instead of in place of them.
Do both. Watch a video the night before so your hands know roughly what they are copying. Bring the list to the wheel.
Setup
Four decisions to make before the wheel is spinning.
All four are easier to get right now than to fix later, and three of them are the difference between a plate that survives and a plate that becomes reclaim.
-
A bat, and a big one
This is not one of the cases where a bat is optional. A wet plate has no wall to grip, so there is no way to lift it off a bare wheel head without deforming it. The bat should be wider than your finished rim by at least an inch on every side, and anything finishing much over 14 inches wants a bat wider than the wheel head itself. The full case for and against bats is here.
-
Weigh the clay
Do not eyeball it. Plates are the form people most reliably under-weigh, because a plate looks like it should need less clay than a mug and it needs more. The table below has starting weights for six sizes.
-
Wedge it properly
A dry lump or an air pocket anywhere in a plate's floor becomes a crack, because that floor is thin and wide and there is nowhere for the stress to run off to. Ram's head wedging is plenty for three pounds. Bigger platters are worth spiral wedging.
-
Pick a clay that wants to be a plate
Grog opens the body and lets moisture move through it, which is exactly what a wide flat piece needs. B-Mix with Grog is the friendliest bag in the building for plates. Number 16 Porcelain is the least forgiving, because it shrinks nearly 14 percent and remembers every uneven thing you ever did to it. All eight house clays are here.
Plates by the numbers
Start from these, then adjust to taste.
Our clays give up between 10 and 14 percent from wet to fired, so a plate comes out roughly an eighth smaller than you threw it. The thrown widths below assume about 12 percent, which is where most of our stoneware lands. Your exact clay is on the calculators page.
| plate | finished | throw it at | clay | floor | foot ring |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Saucer or side plate | 6″ | 6.75″ | 1 to 1.25 lb | 5/16″ | 3.5″ |
| Salad plate | 8″ | 9″ | 2 to 2.5 lb | 3/8″ | 4.75″ |
| Dinner plate | 10″ | 11.5″ | 3 to 3.5 lb | 3/8″ | 6″ |
| Pasta plate, deeper well | 10″ | 11.25″ | 3.5 to 4 lb | 3/8″ | 5.5″ |
| Serving platter | 14″ | 16″ | 7 to 8 lb | 1/2″ | 8.5″ |
| Big platter | 16″ | 18.25″ | 10 to 12 lb | 1/2″ | 9.5″ |
Floor thickness is what you want after your last compression pass, measured with a needle tool rather than guessed. Foot ring is the outside diameter of the ring, and it is about sixty percent of the finished width in every row on purpose. A standard wheel head is 12 to 14 inches across, so the bottom two rows need an oversized bat and arms long enough to reach across it without leaning on the rim.
Cross section through half a plate, center of the wheel on the left. Wall thicknesses are exaggerated so you can see them; the foot ring is drawn at its real sixty percent.
- The floorThree eighths of an inch on a dinner plate, after your last compression pass. Measure it with a needle tool. Guessing is how people find out at the trimming stage that there is nothing left to cut a foot into.
- The cornerA soft curve where the floor turns up into the wall, never a right angle. A sharp inside corner is a stress line, and stress lines are where plates split in the bisque.
- The wallThrow it steeper than the plate you are picturing. It relaxes outward as it dries and again as it fires, so what you leave on the wheel is not what you get back.
- The rimThicker than a mug rim, compressed after every single pass. A knife edge on a plate warps, chips, and cuts whoever is washing it.
- The foot ringAbout sixty percent of the finished width, and low. On a 10 inch plate that is a 6 inch ring standing a quarter inch tall.
- The base of the footFlat and level, checked on a flat surface while the clay is still soft enough to do something about it.
The main event
Twelve steps from ball to finished rim.
This is the method we teach first, and the one every other method on this page is a variation of. Work through it once slowly on a salad plate before you try a dinner plate; the moves are identical and there is less clay to fight.
-
Center low, not tall
Cone up and down once or twice to line the clay particles up, then bring it all the way down into a low, wide mound with a flat top. Do not leave a dome; a domed top gives you an uneven floor before you have opened anything. You are aiming for a puck roughly as wide as the plate's floor is going to be and about an inch and a half tall. Centering, in full.
-
Flatten the top with a rib
A straight wooden or metal rib held flat across the spinning top, pressed down with real weight. This is the first compression the floor gets, and it happens before you have opened anything at all. It costs ten seconds and it is the cheapest insurance on this page.
-
Open straight down, and stop early
Both thumbs, or the heel of one hand, straight down in the center at low speed. Stop while there is still more floor than you think you need. You can always take clay out. You can never put it back. Four ways to open, all correct.
-
Pull the floor out flat, toward yourself
Straight across at one constant height, not down and out in a curve, until the floor is the diameter you want it. Let the clay travel out from under your fingers rather than pushing a wave along in front of them. A wave means you are moving faster than the clay is.
-
Check the floor with a needle tool
Push it straight down until it stops, pinch the tool where it meets the clay, pull it out and read it against a ruler. Three eighths of an inch on a dinner plate. If you find a quarter inch you have already lost the foot ring, and there is a rescue for that while it is still on the wheel.
-
Compress the floor. Three passes, minimum
Slow wheel, a flat rib or the flat pads of three fingers, from the center out to the edge, with enough weight that you can see the clay move under the tool. Then do it again. Then once more. This is the single step that decides whether the plate survives, and it is the step everybody rushes. There is a whole section on it below.
-
Leave the corner soft
Where the floor turns up into the wall, build a gentle curve rather than a right angle, and make sure that corner is never thinner than the floor beside it. A sharp interior corner concentrates every bit of drying stress into one line, which is exactly where you do not want it.
-
Pull one short, thick wall
Do not try to open a flat plate straight out of the floor. Pull a low wall first, an inch and a half tall, deliberately thicker than a mug wall. That extra thickness is the material your rim is going to be made of. Pulling walls, in full.
-
Open the angle in stages, supporting underneath
One hand or a rib under the wall, the other on top, pushing the wall outward a few degrees at a time. Two or three passes, not one. Never open it further than you want it fired, because it relaxes outward while it dries and again in the kiln. Throw it steeper than the plate you are picturing.
-
Compress the rim after every single pass
Two fingers and a thumb, or a sponge folded over the edge, one lap of the wheel. A plate rim that has never been compressed will crack, and it usually waits until the kiln to mention it.
-
Rib the whole inside in one pass
Center to rim, one continuous travel, low speed. This levels the surface, kills the throwing rings and compresses everything at once. Plates show every wobble because light runs across them instead of around them, which is not true of any other form you make. Which rib for which job.
-
Sponge the well dry, then leave it alone
Standing water in the middle of a plate soaks straight into the floor, and a soaked floor is a warped floor. Get it all out. Then pull the wire underneath twice, once from each direction, and do not lift it off the bat.
Different roads to the same plate
Five methods, and the one we would start you on.
Potters argue about this more than they argue about almost anything else, and the honest answer is that all five work. What differs is what each one asks of you and what each one costs when it goes wrong.
1. Off a bat, opened flat
The twelve steps above. Best for your first plates, and anything you want a real trimmed foot on.
Why: the whole plate is one piece of clay that you compressed yourself, so there is no join anywhere and no mystery about how thick anything is.
2. Thrown as a shallow bowl, then flattened
Throw a wide low bowl and then push the floor out flat with a rib. Best for people who already throw bowls comfortably and want to use a move they trust.
Watch for: a floor that ends up thin in the middle, because a bowl gets opened deeper than a plate needs. Check with the needle tool before you flatten anything.
3. Off the hump
Several small plates pulled off one tall mound, no recentering between them. Best for a matched set of six side plates in one evening.
Watch for: S cracks. Compressing a floor properly is genuinely harder when the mound underneath is still spinning. Throwing off the hump, in full.
4. Slab floor, thrown rim
Roll a slab, lay it on the bat, then bring the wheel up and throw only the rim. Best for a dead flat floor with almost no S crack risk, and for anything genuinely large.
Watch for: the join where the slab meets the thrown rim, which has to be properly worked together or it separates in the bisque.
5. Not the wheel at all
A slab pressed into one of the 150+ slab molds on our shelves. Best for a genuinely beautiful platter tonight, on an evening when the wheel is fighting you.
There is no shame in this and the results are very good. How to use slab molds.
What actually decides it
One question: do you want a trimmed foot ring on it?
If yes, you need enough floor to cut into, which means method 1, 2 or 3. If no, method 4 or 5 will get you there faster and flatter, and a plate with no foot is a perfectly good plate.
The edge
Four rims, and what each one costs you.
The rim is the only part of a plate anybody touches on purpose, and it is the part that decides whether the piece reads as finished or as practice. Pick one before you start, because three of the four have to be planned into the wall thickness.
The plain rounded rim
Compressed and rounded off with a sponge, and nothing else. Fastest, strongest, chips the least, and the hardest of the four to make look deliberate rather than unfinished.
Costs you: nothing but the risk of looking plain. Round it generously and it reads as intentional.
The defined lip
A small step or roll where the wall turns into the rim, made with a fingertip or the corner of a rib on the last pass. This is the rim on most dinner plates you already own. It catches sauce and it gives the eye somewhere to stop.
Costs you: a couple of minutes and a slightly thicker wall to cut it from.
The wide flat shoulder
The broad flat band around a classic dinner plate, sometimes called the marli. Beautiful, formal, and the single most likely thing on this page to slump, because it is horizontal with nothing underneath it.
Costs you: real risk. Keep the shoulder a touch thicker than the wall, and do not make it wider than about a fifth of the radius.
The cut or altered rim
Waves, facets, a torn edge, a pinched scallop. Do it last, once the plate is otherwise finished, and never on a plate you have not compressed properly.
Costs you: the strongest part of the pot. You are removing the ring that was holding the whole disc in shape, so everything else has to be right first.
One rule under all four: the rim of a plate wants to be thicker than the rim of a mug. A knife edge looks refined on the wheel and then warps, chips in the dish rack, and cuts whoever is washing it. Thick is not clumsy here. Thick is the structure.
The one that decides everything
If you fix one habit, fix this one.
What is actually happening
When you open a lump of clay and pull the floor outward, you are dragging the flat platelets in the clay into rings around the center, and stretching them apart from each other while you do it.
Loosely packed clay dries faster than tightly packed clay. So a plate with an uncompressed floor is a loose middle sitting inside a tight ring, shrinking at a different rate from the thing it is stuck to. Something has to give, and what gives is the floor. It splits, usually in a lazy S shape, usually straight across the center, and usually on a shelf several days later when nobody is watching.
Compression pushes those platelets back together. That is the whole mechanism. It is not polish and it is not smoothing, and it is the reason a plate needs far more of it than a mug does.
How to actually do it
- Slow the wheel down. Fast is for shaping. Slow is for pressure.
- Flat against flat. A straight rib, the back of a metal rib, or the flat pads of three fingers. Never a fingertip, which just cuts a groove.
- Center to edge, every pass. Going the other way pushes clay into the middle and lifts your floor back up.
- Real weight. Enough that you can see the clay move under the tool. If nothing is moving, you are polishing.
- Three passes right after opening, one more after the last wall pull, one more after the final rib. A plate can be compressed five separate times and be better for all of them.
- Then get the water off. A puddle sitting in the well quietly undoes part of what you just did.
One more compression pass has never been the thing that ruined a plate. Skipping one has ruined thousands. When you are unsure whether you have done enough, you have not. Compressing the floor and the rim, in full.
The part that takes a week
More plates die on the shelf than on the wheel.
A plate is the most warp-prone thing in this building, and almost all of the damage is done in the first forty-eight hours. Utah is dry, which makes this worse here than it would be almost anywhere else.
-
Wire it, but do not lift it
Pull the wire underneath twice, once from each direction, so it releases cleanly later instead of gripping the bat as it shrinks. Then leave it exactly where it is.
-
The bat goes on the shelf, plate and all
It dries on the surface it was born on for the first day at minimum. This is the single biggest reason to own more bats than you think you need.
-
Cover the rim more than the middle
Plastic over the whole thing, or a strip laid around just the rim. The rim has air on both sides and the middle has a bat underneath it, so slowing the rim down is the entire trick to a round plate.
-
Never on a rack or a slatted shelf
Anything that leaves the rim hanging in the air will lift it. Flat, solid, and level, every time.
-
Flip it at leather hard
Face down onto a flat board so the foot side gets its turn in the air. If the rim has gone slightly out of round, this is the last stage at which it can still settle back.
-
A board on top, for big platters only
Light and flat, over a sheet of newsprint so it does not stick. You are guiding it, not pressing it. A heavy weight on a soft platter causes a different problem entirely.
If a plate goes leather hard overnight, it dried too fast, and you will find out in the bisque. Slow it down with more plastic rather than trying to speed the middle up. Drying pottery properly, in full. The same physics is why ceramic tiles warp, and that page is worth a read if plates keep beating you.
Leather hard
A plate's foot has one job: hold up a disc.
The most common trimming mistake on a plate is putting a mug's foot on it. A small ring in the middle of a wide plate leaves the whole outer half cantilevered over nothing, and in a glaze firing at cone 5½ the clay softens just enough to notice. The plate droops between the foot and the rim and comes out with a wobble no amount of sanding will take off.
-
Wait for firm leather hard
Firmer than you would trim a bowl. A soft plate distorts the moment you press a tool into it, because there is no wall anywhere to resist you.
-
Tap center it upside down
On a pad or a bat with a bit of grip. Getting a wide flat pot running true is a rhythm rather than a shove, and there is a practice tool that runs in your browser if you want to find the beat somewhere cheap.
-
Secure it properly
Three coils of clay pressed against the rim, or a foam bat. A plate that comes loose halfway through a trim is a broken plate, and it will take the tool somewhere unhelpful on its way.
-
Mark the foot ring before you cut anything
Score a line with the wheel spinning at about sixty percent of the finished diameter. On a 10 inch plate that is a 6 inch ring. Deciding this after you have started cutting is how feet end up too small.
-
Outside, then inside, then the base
Cut the outer wall of the ring first, then the inner wall, then level the bottom of the ring last. Working in that order means the ring is supported while you are cutting each face of it.
-
Keep the ring low
A quarter of an inch tall is plenty. Height in a plate foot buys you nothing, adds weight where you do not want it, and adds one more place to chip.
-
Check the floor as you go
Tap the inside of the ring and listen, and feel the flex with a thumb. When it starts to give under your hand, stop. If it is already too thin, there are still four moments where you can catch it.
-
Two rings on anything over 14 inches
A second concentric ring, or a broad flat foot instead of a narrow one. More contact with the shelf, less droop across the middle, and a platter that does not rock on a table.
-
Level it and test it now
Set it on the wheel head or a flat board and see whether it rocks. Fix it here, with the clay still soft, rather than later with a grinder and a bad mood.
-
Finish the foot with a chamois
Or a damp sponge, lightly. That ring is the part that lives on somebody's table, and a sharp edge on it will mark a wooden surface for years. Feet and foot rings, in full.
The last two chances to lose it
Plates are the pieces most likely to get welded to a shelf.
A plate has more flat contact with a kiln shelf than anything else you make, and it holds glaze in a puddle at the lowest point of the piece. Those two facts are worth reading twice before glaze day.
Wipe the foot, properly
Every plate, every time, all the way up the outside of the ring and a sixteenth beyond. A wide flat foot has far more shelf contact than a mug, so a smear of glaze there is not a small mistake. What can be saved when it does happen.
Be careful with runny glazes in the well
Glaze pools in the middle of a plate, because the middle is the lowest point of the whole form. A glaze that behaves perfectly on a mug wall can flood a plate. Look it up before you commit. Find any glaze on the wall.
Dipping is your friend here
An even coat on a wide flat surface is hard with a brush and easy in a bucket, and plates are the form where brush marks show most. How to use dipping glazes, and how to brush one evenly if you would rather.
Our numbers
Bisque goes to cone 05. Glaze goes to cone 5½, which is a cone 5 firing with a twelve minute hold. That is plenty of heat work for clay to soften and remember anything uneven about your foot. What a firing actually does.
What it costs
Glaze firings are five cents per cubic inch with a $4.80 minimum, measured at the widest points. A 10 inch dinner plate at 10 by 10 by 1.25 inches is 125 cubic inches, so $6.25. Bisque firings are free, every time. Pay for a firing.
Load it flat
A plate wants a flat shelf, not one with a warp in it, and not a spot where it has to be tipped on the way in. If you are unsure, hand it to an instructor rather than wedging it in yourself.
Troubleshooting
Nine ways a plate goes wrong, and what caused each one.
Almost every one of these was decided days before you noticed it. Find yours, then change the habit rather than the technique.
A crack across the middle, roughly an S shape
The classic. Three possible causes and often all three at once: the floor was never compressed enough, water sat in the well while it dried, or the clay was not properly centered before you opened it. Next time, three compression passes minimum, sponge the well completely dry before it leaves the wheel, and get the mound genuinely true first.
The rim came out oval
Uneven drying, nearly always. Either the rim dried much faster than the middle, or one side of the plate had more air moving over it than the other. It can also happen if the piece got lifted or leaned on while it was still soft. Dry it on the bat, cover the rim more heavily than the middle, and flip it face down at leather hard.
Small cracks around the rim edge
The rim was never compressed, or it dried far faster than the body did. Compress after every pass while throwing, and when it goes on the shelf, cover the rim first and the middle second.
It slumped flat in the glaze firing
Three candidates: the wall angle was too close to horizontal, the transition where the floor meets the wall was thinner than the floor itself, or the foot ring was too small and left the outer half of the plate hanging over nothing. All three are decided at the wheel and at the trimming stage. None of them are fixable afterward.
It rocks on the table
The foot is not level, or the plate warped slightly and took the foot with it. Trim the ring flat while it is leather hard and check it on a genuinely flat surface before it dries. After firing you are down to a diamond pad and patience.
It cracked where the floor meets the wall
A sharp inside corner. That angle concentrates all of the drying stress into one line, and clay obliges by splitting along it. Round that corner with a rib while you are throwing, and make sure it is never thinner than the floor beside it.
It stuck to the bat and tore coming off
Either it was never wired, or it was wired once and then left long enough to grip again as it shrank. Pull the wire underneath twice right after throwing, once from each direction, and leave it sitting where it is.
There is no floor left to trim a foot into
Opened too deep. This is why step five exists. If you catch it while the plate is still on the wheel there are real rescues available, and that page covers four separate moments where you can still save it. Once it is leather hard, leave the foot off and enjoy a flat bottomed plate.
It survived, but it is heavy
The floor was left thick and never trimmed down. That is a trimming problem rather than a throwing one, and it is the good version of this list. Heavy plates are still perfectly good plates, and they are considerably harder to break.
Questions
The things people ask at the wheel.
How long before I can throw a decent plate?
Later than a mug, sooner than a teapot. Most people can throw a cylinder before they can throw a plate that survives, because a plate hides its problems for a week and then tells you all at once. Give it three or four sessions, and throw two or three at a time so you are learning from a batch rather than from one disappointment.
Can I throw a plate without a bat?
Practically, no. There is no wall to grip, so lifting a wet plate off a bare wheel head deforms it every time. If you have no bat available, throw small plates off the hump instead and cut them free with the wire while they are still narrow enough to lift with a rib underneath.
How thick should the floor really be?
Three eighths of an inch on a dinner plate, measured with a needle tool after your last compression pass. That leaves you roughly a quarter inch of finished plate and an eighth to cut the foot ring out of. Half an inch on anything over 14 inches.
Why does everyone say plates are harder than bowls?
A bowl's wall curves, and a curve is structurally strong. A plate's wall is close to flat, which is the weakest shape clay can hold. Same skills, far less margin, and problems that do not show up until the kiln.
Which of our clays is best for plates?
Anything with grog in it. B-Mix with Grog dries evenly and forgives a wide flat form better than anything else on the shelf. Number 16 Porcelain is the hardest, at nearly 14 percent shrinkage, and it holds a grudge about uneven drying. All eight clays and what they shrink.
Can I dry a plate faster?
You can dry the rim slower, which is the same job done correctly. What you cannot do is speed the whole thing up without paying for it, and the bill arrives in the bisque firing. If you are up against a deadline, throw the plate first and something else second.
Do I have to trim a foot?
No. A flat bottomed plate works fine on a table and it saves you a session. It will be heavier, it will sit flat against a wet counter, and on anything over about 10 inches a foot genuinely does reduce slumping in the glaze fire. Under 10 inches it is mostly an aesthetic choice.
My plate came out smaller than I planned
Everything shrinks between 10 and 14 percent here, depending on the clay. Throw about an eighth wider than the plate you want, and put your exact clay into the shrinkage calculator rather than working off a rule of thumb.
Where does this sit in the University?
Topic four, Advanced Throwing. It assumes you can already center, open and pull a wall. If any of those are still a fight, start with the complete throwing guide and come back. The whole catalog is here.
Keep going
Where to go next.
One last thing
Throw six. Keep the third one.
Compress it more than feels necessary.
Nobody's first plate survives, and a surprising number of second ones do not either. That is not a talent problem. It is a compression problem and a drying problem, and both of those are habits rather than gifts.
So throw a stack of them. Compress every floor more than feels necessary, cover every rim, flip every one of them at leather hard, and cut a foot ring wider than looks right. By the time you have six on a shelf you will have stopped thinking about any of this, which is exactly the point.
That, and dry it slowly with the rim covered more heavily than the middle. Those two habits save more plates than every technique on this page put together.
If you want the long version, with the five methods, the four rim styles, the spec table and the full troubleshooting list, the toggle at the top of the page has all of it waiting.
Every temperature on this page is ours: bisque to cone 05, glaze to cone 5½. If you are reading this from another studio, check your own numbers before you copy anything.