Hand building
Kurinuki, carving a pot from a block
Almost everything else in pottery is addition. You add a coil, you join a slab, you pull a wall up out of a lump on the wheel. Kurinuki is the opposite. You start with one solid brick of clay, you shape the outside of it, and then you dig the pot out of the middle. Nothing gets attached, so there is no join to fail and no seam to crack. There is a block, a loop tool, and a decision about where the walls should be.
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The short version
All of it, in seven lines
- Start with a firm block, not a fresh one. Wedge it well, pat it into the rough outside shape you want, and let it stiffen to soft leather hard. Wet clay smears under a loop tool and dry clay chips.
- Shape the whole outside before you open the top. A solid block takes paddling, faceting and hard pressure. A hollow one does not. This is the step most people do backward.
- Mark the rim, then dig straight down the middle. Go down toward the floor depth first, before you widen. Judging depth from a hole is much easier than judging it from a bowl.
- Walls a quarter inch to three eighths, floor a little thicker. Check by pinching the wall between a thumb inside and a finger outside, every couple of minutes, all the way around.
- Round the inside corner where the wall meets the floor. A sharp interior angle is where drying cracks start. One sweep with a rounded rib fixes it permanently.
- Undercut the bottom edge so it is not a hollowed brick. A bevel or a carved foot, done at leather hard, and the whole pot lifts off the table.
- Bag it loosely for a day before you dry it. The inside you just exposed is soaking wet and the outside has been in the air for an hour. Let those two even out or the rim cracks.
The one rule underneath all seven
The inside follows the outside. Nearly everything that goes wrong with a kurinuki pot goes wrong because somebody hollowed first and then tried to shape a wall that had nothing behind it to push against. Finish the outside while it is still a solid block and the rest of the evening is mostly patience.
How to use this page
Watch somebody do it, then read the list
A video tells you things a sentence cannot. How much clay actually comes away in one pull of a loop tool. What the surface looks like when the block is at the right stiffness. How slowly somebody who is good at this moves, which is always slower than you expect.
Writing does the other half of the job. It holds the order of operations, the numbers, and the reason a step exists, and it sits still on a screen while your hands are covered in clay. Nobody has ever successfully scrubbed back through a twenty minute video with a wet thumb to find the part about wall thickness.
The two together also seem to stick better than either one alone. Watching gives you a picture of what it should look like. A short written list gives you something to rehearse against and check yourself on, which turns the video from something you watched into something you can repeat. So every section below has a list you can prop up on a phone next to your table, and a video from somebody who does this better than most of us.
A note on the videos on this page
None of them are ours and none of them are sponsored. They are the clearest things we could find on each part of this technique, and a few of them are from potters who have made kurinuki most of what they do. Nothing loads from YouTube until you tap a thumbnail, so the page stays fast if you never watch any of them.
If you print this page, every video comes out as a labelled box with the title and the channel to search for, since paper does not play them.
Where it comes from
Subtraction, not construction
Kurinuki is a Japanese word that means, more or less, to hollow something out. It describes exactly what the technique is: you remove clay until a pot is left. It has a long association with tea ware and with the Hagi tradition, and it is still the way a number of working Japanese potters make sake cups, tea bowls and small covered containers.
What matters for the person at the table is the aesthetic that comes with it. A kurinuki pot is supposed to look carved. The facets stay, the tool marks stay, the slightly-off symmetry stays, and a glaze that pools in the low spots and thins over the ridges is doing you a favor rather than exposing a flaw. If you have spent months trying to make everything on the wheel perfectly round and even, this is a genuinely different set of instincts to learn.
It is also worth saying plainly: this is not a beginner’s consolation prize for people who cannot center. It is a real technique with its own difficulty, and the difficulty is all in judgment. Nothing is holding your wall thickness honest except your own fingers, and nothing is stopping you carving a beautiful pot that cracks in half on the shelf four days later.
What it is good for
Small heavy-feeling drinking vessels, tea bowls, sake cups, incense holders, planters with thick rims, trinket boxes, and anything where you want a piece to look like it was quarried rather than assembled. It is also the fastest way we know to get somebody who has never touched clay to make something they actually like on their first evening.
It is a poor choice for anything that needs to be thin, light, perfectly round, or made in a matching set of eight.
Step one
The block decides most of it
Two things about the block are worth more than every carving tip further down this page: what clay it is, and how stiff it is when you start. Get those two right and the carving is pleasant. Get them wrong and you will spend the evening fighting a material that is either smearing or crumbling, and no amount of technique fixes that.
Which clay
Grogged clay is the easy road
B-Mix w/Grog has tooth in it, which means it holds a carved edge, it dries more evenly, and it forgives a wall that came out thicker on one side. It is also one of our two picks for raku, for the same underlying reason.
Smooth bodies carve beautifully
52 Buff and B-Mix take a crisp facet and a clean tool mark, and 52 Buff is the least expensive bag in the building. They also move more as they dry, so your wall thickness has to be more honest than it does in a grogged body.
Porcelain is the hard mode
#16 Porcelain is the least forgiving body we stock on an ordinary day. On a thick carved block with a soaking wet interior and an hour-old dry exterior, it is close to asking for a crack. Beautiful when it works.
Two worth knowing about
Berlin Gray is a dark gray stoneware, and a carved surface in a dark body is dramatic in a way a buff body simply is not. Speckled Buff throws its specks through a thin glaze and looks especially good in the low spots of a carved texture. Both are on the clay page, and clay comes from us in 25 lb bags with a discount at Yellow, Purple and Black Level.
How much clay, and what shape
| What you are making | Clay | Rough block | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|
| A cup or yunomi | 1.5 to 2 lb | About a 3.5 inch cube | The best first project. Small enough that a mistake costs an hour instead of an evening. |
| A tea bowl or small serving bowl | 2.5 to 3 lb | About 4.5 by 4.5 by 3.5 inches | Wider than it is tall, so the floor does more of the work and wants to be thicker. |
| A vase or bottle | 3 to 5 lb | A tall block, roughly 4 by 4 by 7 inches | The hardest to hollow, because the tool has to reach past a narrow neck to get to the floor. |
| A lidded box | 3 to 4 lb | One block, cut in two before hollowing | Cut the lid off the block first, hollow both halves, and the grain of the cut lines the two back up. |
Sizes here are the block, not the finished pot. Everything you facet, bevel and undercut comes out of those outside dimensions, so build in more than feels necessary.
Getting the block right, in five moves
- Wedge it properly. An air pocket matters more here than anywhere else in pottery, because you will not find it until a loop tool opens it into a hole in an otherwise finished wall. Ram’s head or spiral, either works, and the method is on the wedging guide.
- Pat it into shape on the table. Slap each face down hard and square the block up with your palms. You want a compressed brick with flat-ish sides, not a smooth sculpted blob. Compression now is wall strength later.
- Make it bigger than the pot. The pot lives inside the block, so the block has to be larger in every direction than the thing you are picturing.
- Let it firm up. Clay straight from the bag is too soft. Under loose plastic for a few hours, or overnight, brings most bodies to soft leather hard, which is the window where a loop tool cuts a clean ribbon instead of dragging a smear.
- Test it with a thumbnail. Press a nail into a corner. Sinking in with no resistance means too wet. A white powdery line and a crumb means too dry. You want it to take the mark cleanly and hold the edge.
The stiffness window is the whole ballgame
Soft leather hard is a narrower target than it sounds, and it is the difference between an enjoyable evening and a frustrating one. Too wet and the loop tool pushes the wall out instead of cutting it, the outside shape you spent twenty minutes on quietly bulges, and the rim slumps. Too dry and the tool skips, chips out chunks, and leaves a torn surface that has to be smoothed, which is the one thing kurinuki is not supposed to need.
If a block has gone too far, wrap it in a damp towel inside a bag for a few hours rather than spraying it. Wetting the outside of a thick dry piece puts water where you do not want it and takes it further from even, which is the opposite of what this technique needs. There is more on rescuing a stiff bag on the softening clay page.
Step two
The outside comes first, and it is not close
A solid block is a structural gift. You can paddle it, cut planes off it with a wire, drop it on the table to square it up, and lean on it hard, and it will not deform, because there is nothing inside for it to collapse into. The moment there is a cavity, every one of those moves becomes a way to bulge a wall you cannot see. So the whole exterior gets settled while the block is still solid, and the top face stays closed until it is done.
Shaping the outside, in six moves
- Decide the silhouette before you cut anything. Tall and narrow, squat and wide, four flat faces, a rounded river stone. Kurinuki rewards a committed shape and punishes a vague one, because there is no wheel quietly making the decision for you.
- Cut planes with a wire. A clay cutting wire pulled through the block leaves a faceted face with a texture no other tool makes. Three or four cuts turn a lump into something that looks intentional.
- Paddle rather than pinch. A flat stick or a wooden rib compresses the surface and tightens the form at the same time. Pinching pulls the clay outward and thins it unevenly, and you cannot tell where until much later.
- Undercut the base now. Taper the bottom inch or two inward, or cut a chamfer all the way around. This single move does more for how a kurinuki pot looks than anything else on the page, and it is far easier on a solid block than on a hollow one.
- Leave the marks you like. This is one of the few techniques where the tool marks are the finish. Smoothing everything is allowed and it is also throwing away most of the reason to do this.
- Stop before the rim. The top face stays flat and closed until the outside is finished. It is your handle, your work surface and your reference for depth, and once it is open you do not get it back.
A word about symmetry
Kurinuki pots are usually not round, and the ones that try hardest to be round tend to look worst. Four clean faces read as deliberate. A slightly lopsided circle reads as a failed attempt at a circle. If you want round, the wheel is right there and it is better at it.
Step three
Digging the pot out
This is the part everybody pictures when they hear the word, and it is genuinely the easy half if the first two steps went well. A large loop tool does almost all of it. What you are managing is not the cutting, it is knowing where the wall is when you cannot see it.
Hollowing, in seven moves
- Mark the rim on the top face. Score a line showing where the opening will be, set in from the edge by the wall thickness you want plus a little margin. Cut inside that line, never on it. You can always take more clay away.
- Go down before you go out. Drive the loop tool straight down through the middle, most of the way to the floor depth you want, before you widen anything. A deep central hole gives you a depth reference for the whole rest of the job. Widening first leaves you guessing at how far down the floor is.
- Take ribbons, not chunks. A loop tool wants to peel a curl of clay a couple of millimeters thick. If it is tearing and jumping, the block is too dry. If it is smearing and packing up inside the loop, too wet. The tool will tell you about the clay before your hands do.
- Work around, not along. Rotate the pot and take a pass, rotate and take a pass. Carving one side all the way to depth before you start the next side is exactly how a pot ends up with three different wall thicknesses.
- Pinch to check, constantly. Thumb inside, finger outside, squeeze gently. You are feeling for a quarter inch or a little more, and you are checking every couple of minutes, all the way around, including the parts your eye never gets to.
- Undercut the rim from the inside. Cut slightly in under the inside edge so the wall does not flare outward as it rises. Skip this and the rim ends up the thickest part of the pot, which looks heavy and dries at a completely different rate to everything below it.
- Round the corner where the wall meets the floor. A sharp interior angle concentrates the stress of shrinking clay, and concentrated stress becomes a crack in drying or in the kiln. One pass with a rounded rib or a wet thumb. It takes two seconds and it prevents the most common kurinuki failure there is.
The clay you dig out is still clay
A cup takes roughly half the block out of the middle, which is not a small amount, and every gram of it is perfectly good. It goes in the reclaim bucket, not the bin. The reclaim page covers what happens to it after that.
Numbers
How thick, exactly, and where
How thick, and where
A cross section through a finished kurinuki cup, with the block it started as drawn around it. Five numbers, and they are the only measurements on this page you actually need to hold in your head.
- The rim, about a quarter inch. The thinnest part of the pot and the fastest to dry, which is exactly why it is the first place to crack. Even it out all the way around before you decide you are finished.
- The wall, a quarter inch to three eighths. Thicker than a thrown wall, and that is correct rather than a compromise. A kurinuki pot is supposed to feel carved. Much under a quarter inch and you are fighting the technique instead of using it.
- The floor, three eighths to half an inch. Deliberately thicker than the wall. It carries the weight, it dries slowest, and it is the one part you cannot check by pinching, so it gets the benefit of the doubt.
- The inside corner, rounded. Where the floor meets the wall, a curve rather than an angle. A two second job that prevents the single most common crack in carved work.
- The bottom edge, undercut. A bevel, a chamfer or a carved foot, so the pot lifts visually off the table and so the sharp bottom edge does not chip on the shelf.
The dashed outline is the block you started with. Everything inside it is a decision you are making, one pass at a time.
The part that decides it
Drying a carved block
Every other technique in the building dries a piece that was more or less uniformly wet when you finished it. Kurinuki does not. The inside surface of your pot is minutes old and soaking. The outside has been sitting in the air for the last hour while you shaped it. Those two faces are at different moisture levels, they are going to shrink at different rates, and the difference between a pot that survives and one that splits is almost entirely what you do about that in the first twenty four hours.
The inside of the pot is minutes old and soaking wet. The outside has been in the air the whole time you were shaping it. Put the piece in a loose plastic bag for a day so the two even out, keep the rim covered longer than the rest, and then dry it slowly and out of any draft. A carved pot is thicker than a thrown one, so give it more days than feels necessary, and do not let it near a kiln until it is genuinely bone dry.
Drying, in five moves
- Bag it loosely for twenty four hours. Not sealed and not tight. The point is to slow the outside down until the freshly cut inside has caught up with it. This one habit prevents more cracks than everything else on this list put together.
- Cover the rim for longer than the rest. Strips of plastic laid over the top edge only. The rim is thin and exposed on both faces at once, so it dries first and it pulls against a body that has not started shrinking yet.
- Get it out of any draft. A doorway, a fan, a heat vent, the warm air coming off a kiln. Air moving across one side of a pot is uneven drying with extra steps, and a carved piece is already fighting an uneven start.
- Give it days, not hours. A thrown mug with a quarter inch wall can be leather hard by the next class. A carved pot with a half inch floor takes considerably longer, and there is no prize for getting it to the kiln shelf first.
- Bone dry means room temperature. Hold the piece against your cheek. If it feels cool, there is still water in it. Cool clay in a thick floor is how a piece comes apart in a bisque firing.
Why this is the section to actually follow
Everything else on this page is a matter of taste or of how the pot looks. This is the only part that can quietly undo an entire evening four days after you went home, and it is also the only part that costs you nothing except patience.
Bisque firings are free here, and so is having your piece come out of one in several pieces. The full drying guide, including what leather hard and bone dry actually mean, is on the drying your pottery guide, and the five stages of clay is worth ten minutes if you have never read it.
The one that costs you an evening
Bone dry means room temperature against your cheek. If it still feels cool, there is water in it, and water in a half inch floor is how a piece comes apart in the bisque. When you are not sure, wait. The full guide is on the drying your pottery guide.
The long watch
One carve, start to finish, in real time
Short videos are edited, and editing hides the single most useful piece of information a beginner needs: how long each stage actually takes. A four minute tutorial makes hollowing look like it takes four minutes. It does not.
So it is worth watching one unedited carve all the way through at least once, ideally before your first attempt. You will see how many passes the loop tool really makes, how often somebody stops to pinch-check a wall, and how much of the time is spent turning the pot around and looking at it rather than cutting anything.
Watch for these three things
How often the pot gets rotated. Almost every pass is followed by a turn. Nobody good at this carves one side to depth and then moves on.
How much of the shape is already there. By the time any clay comes out of the middle, the pot already looks like the pot.
How little smoothing happens at the end. The marks stay. That is the point of the whole technique, and it is the hardest habit to unlearn if you came to this from the wheel.
Beyond a cup
What else comes out of a block
Once the order of operations makes sense, the form is just a different silhouette and a different hollowing problem. These six are the ones worth watching before you try them, roughly in order of how hard they are.
Several of these come from the same channel, and that is not laziness on our part. Blank Earth Ceramics has made more genuinely useful kurinuki footage than anybody else we could find.
Step four
Feet, rims and surface
Leather hard is the second chance kurinuki gives you. The pot is firm enough to hold its shape under a knife and soft enough to cut cleanly, and almost everything that separates a good carved pot from a lumpy one happens in this window rather than on the first evening.
The foot
Either deepen the bevel you already cut, or carve a proper foot ring with a trimming tool. A foot lifts the pot, gives the glaze somewhere to stop, and stops the base looking like the bottom of a brick. The same principles as wheel work apply, and they are on the feet and foot rings page.
The rim
Even the thickness all the way around, then decide whether you want it crisp or soft. A quick pass with a damp finger or a sponge rounds it enough to drink from without erasing the carved character of everything below it.
The surface
Leather hard is also when carving and sgraffito work best, if you want more than the tool marks. The rule of never cutting deeper than about a third of the wall matters more here, because you already know exactly how thick that wall is. Full method on the carving and sgraffito page.
Glazing something carved
A carved surface is full of ridges and valleys, which is exactly the condition where a glaze stops being a flat color and starts doing something. Glaze pools and darkens in the low spots and thins and lightens over the edges, so a single dip can produce three tones on one pot without you doing anything clever.
- Thin coats show the tool marks. Thick coats fill them. If you spent an hour on a texture, two coats will show it and four will bury it.
- Anything that breaks over an edge is your friend. Look for glazes described as breaking, mottled or variegated rather than flat and opaque. The Glaze Finder will point you at the exact slot on the wall.
- Underglaze wiped back is the other classic move. Brush it on, wipe the high points off, and it stays in the recesses like a shadow. The method is on the underglaze page.
- Wipe the foot and the bottom edge bone clean. A thick pot welded to a kiln shelf is a bad afternoon for everybody, and the fused pottery page exists because it happens.
If you want to add a handle
You can, and it is the only join on an otherwise seamless pot, which makes it the only thing that can pop off in the kiln. Score and slip properly, attach at the same stiffness on both parts, and dry the handle slower than the body by covering it. The score and slip page and the handles page both apply here unchanged.
A carved lug or a thumb rest cut straight out of the block is the more honest answer, and it cannot fail because there is nothing to fail. Decide before you start, because it has to come out of the outside dimensions.
For your phone
The whole thing on one screen
Prop this up next to your table. The copy button gives you the list as plain text, matching whichever version you are reading.
Before you carve
- Wedge it. An air pocket becomes a hole in a finished wall.
- Pat the block square and make it bigger than the pot.
- Let it firm to soft leather hard. A few hours under loose plastic.
- Thumbnail test. Takes a clean mark and holds the edge.
- Grogged clay is the easy road. Porcelain is the hard one.
While you carve
- Outside first, all of it, before you open the top.
- Undercut the base while the block is still solid.
- Dig straight down the middle, then widen.
- Rotate and take passes. Never one side at a time.
- Walls a quarter to three eighths. Floor a little thicker.
- Pinch-check every couple of minutes, all the way around.
- Round the inside corner where the wall meets the floor.
- Carved clay goes in the reclaim bucket, not the bin.
After you carve
- Loose bag for a day so inside and outside even out.
- Keep the rim covered longer than the rest.
- No drafts, no vents, no fans.
- Bone dry means room temperature against your cheek.
- Refine the foot and rim at leather hard, not before.
- Thin glaze shows the tool marks. Thick glaze fills them.
Troubleshooting
Eight ways this goes wrong
Three ways this goes wrong
Every one of these has happened in this building, most of them more than once. The first three are the ones that cost you the piece.
These are the three that cost you the piece. The longer version has five more that cost you an hour.
- A crack around the rim It dried too fast. The rim is the thinnest part and it is exposed on both faces, so it shrinks while the body below it has not started. Lay plastic over the top edge and leave it there longer than you think you need to.
- A crack where the floor meets the wall A sharp interior corner. Clay does not like right angles, and drying shrinkage concentrates on them until something gives. Round that corner with a rib or a wet thumb before it dries, every single time.
- It came apart in the bisque It was not bone dry. A half inch floor holds water long after the outside feels dry to a hand. Room temperature against your cheek, or it waits another few days on the shelf.
- The wall broke through while carving Either the bites were too big or the clay was too soft. Thinner ribbons and a firmer block next time. A small hole can be plugged with the same clay, scored and slipped, and it will usually survive.
- The pot bulged or slumped Carved too wet, or shaped after hollowing rather than before. The outside gets settled while the block is solid, and there is no way around that once there is a cavity behind the wall.
- The clay chipped instead of cutting Too dry. Wrap it in a damp towel inside a bag for a few hours and come back to it. Do not spray it, because wetting the outside of a thick dry piece puts water exactly where it causes flaking later.
- Three different wall thicknesses Carved one side at a time. Rotate the pot and take passes all the way around, and pinch-check the side you cannot see as often as the side facing you.
- It looks like a hollowed brick The base never got undercut and the silhouette never got decided. Both are outside-of-the-block jobs, and both are still fixable at leather hard with a sharp knife and some nerve.
Here specifically
What applies to kurinuki at The Clay Hole
None of it is unusual, and none of it needs a certification. It is worth having in one place before you plan anything larger than a cup.
- Nothing to get certified for Kurinuki is hands and hand tools, so there is nothing to sign off before you start. Glazing it afterward is a different matter, and the brush-on glaze certification is the one you need for that.
- Clay comes from us In 25 lb bags, with a discount at Yellow, Purple and Black Level. Outside clay can destroy a kiln, so please do not bring any. Every body we stock is on the clay page.
- Everything you carve out is reclaimable A cup takes roughly half the block out of the middle, so this is not a trivial amount of clay. It goes in the reclaim bucket.
- Bisque is free, glaze firing is not Five cents per cubic inch with a $4.80 minimum, measured at the widest points. A four inch carved cup is about 64 cubic inches, which lands on the minimum. A 5 by 5 by 8 inch vase is 200 cubic inches, so $10.00. You are charged for the space a piece occupies, not the clay left in it.
- Green Level Members bring their own tools A large loop tool is the one thing genuinely worth owning for this. Every other Level uses the studio tools, and there are plenty of loop and ribbon tools in the building. The helpful items page has the ones we actually recommend.
- Plan the shelf time A carved block dries slower than anything you can throw, and half a divided shelf fills up quickly when every piece needs a week under plastic.
- Fired to cone 5½ Glaze firings run to cone 5½, which adds a twelve minute hold at temperature, and bisque is cone 05. Thick carved work is exactly the kind of piece that benefits from a slow, well dried run up to that.
Questions
The ones we get asked
How do I know the wall thickness without cutting it open?
Pinch it. Thumb on the inside, a finger on the outside, and squeeze gently. Your hands are better at judging a quarter inch than you expect, and they get better fast. For the floor, which you cannot pinch, push a needle tool straight down through it in one spot near the middle, pull it out, and measure the clean part of the needle against the wet part. Then close the hole with a smear of the same clay.
The other honest answer is that your first pot will be thicker than you meant it to be, and it will still be a good pot.
Is this faster than throwing?
For one pot, on your first day, yes, by a wide margin. Somebody who has never touched clay can carve a cup they are pleased with in an evening, which is not usually true on a wheel.
For twelve matching cups, absolutely not. Throwing wins on repetition and it is not close. Kurinuki is a technique for one good object at a time.
Can I do this with porcelain?
You can, and it is beautiful, and we would not pick it for a first attempt. Porcelain has the least tolerance for uneven moisture of anything we stock, and a carved block starts out uneven by definition. If you want to try it, go smaller than usual, be stricter about the loose bag for the first day, and accept that the failure rate is higher.
Half & Half is the reasonable middle: much of the porcelain character, considerably more forgiveness.
Do I have to leave the tool marks?
No. It is your pot. But it is worth knowing that the marks are the reason the technique looks the way it does, and that a smoothed kurinuki pot often ends up in an awkward middle ground: not as clean as a thrown pot, and no longer carrying the character that made it interesting.
A useful compromise is to smooth the rim and the inside, where your mouth and a sponge go, and leave the outside alone.
My pot cracked. Can it be saved?
At leather hard, sometimes. Open the crack out into a V with a needle tool, pack it with a paste of the same clay, compress it hard with a rib, and dry the whole piece slower than before. Mayco Clay Mender, which we keep at the front desk, improves the odds.
Once it is bone dry, or once it has been bisqued, the honest answer is no. A crack that survived a firing will reopen in the next one. It is better to learn what caused it and make the next one, which is usually a better pot anyway.
What tools do I actually need?
One large loop or ribbon tool does most of the work. Add a clay cutting wire for faceting, a wooden paddle or rib for compressing the outside, a needle tool for checking the floor, and a fettling knife for cleaning up at leather hard. That is the whole kit.
Yellow, Purple and Black Level Members use the studio tools. Green Level Members bring their own, and a decent large loop tool is the one purchase that changes this technique.
Can I make a planter this way?
It is one of the best uses for it. A carved planter with a thick rim looks like something that came out of the ground, which is a good look for a plant pot. Cut the drainage hole from the outside in, at leather hard, and go slightly larger than feels necessary because glaze will shrink it.
A planter that lives outside in Utah wants a grogged body rather than a smooth one. Freeze and thaw is hard on ceramics, and tooth helps.
The pot was already in there
That is the working version
Nothing on this page is difficult on its own. Firm the block. Finish the outside. Dig down before you dig out. Keep a thumb and a finger on either side of the wall. Round the corner. Bag it for a day. The reason kurinuki has a reputation for cracking is that four of those are easy to skip and none of them complains until two days later, by which point the pot has already made its decision. Do them once in the right order and this becomes the most forgiving technique in the building.
That is everything you need to carve a pot out of a block tonight. There is a longer version behind the toggle at the top with the clay comparison, the block sizes, the finishing and glazing sections, and nine more videos, for whenever you want to know why any of it works.
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.