Raku workshops · Alpine, Utah
Raku. Fire, smoke, and a pot you pulled out yourself.
A few times a year, a small group of Clay Hole members spends a day or a night around propane kilns in Alpine. The pots come out at almost 2000 degrees and go straight into cans of burning newsprint. Everybody goes home smelling like a campfire, holding pots that didn’t exist that morning.
When
Day or night
Some workshops run in daylight and wrap up in the afternoon. Some start in the evening and run well past midnight. Each one is announced with its own date and start time.
Where
A barn in Alpine
A family property, not the studio. It’s somebody’s home, so the address never goes on the internet. Registered participants get it by text before the workshop.
How long
Until it’s done
Plan on six to eight hours, sometimes more. Raku takes exactly as long as raku takes. Everybody stays through the last firing and through cleanup. Everybody.
Who
Current or past members
If you’ve ever been a Clay Hole member, you can sign up. Participants only, no spectators, first come, first served.
The one thing people get wrong
Your pots must be bisqued and glazed with raku glazes before you get there
There is no kiln, no glaze, and no time to do any of that at the barn. The clay rules, the size limits, and the glaze rules are all further down this page, and they’re worth reading before you build a single thing.
Getting a spot
Every workshop gets its own sign-up
The date, the start time and the price are set workshop by workshop, and each one is announced with its own sign-up page. Every workshop has a hard cap on spots, and they go first come, first served.
- Be a current or past Clay Hole member.
- Grab a spot on that workshop’s sign-up page. One spot per checkout, so a spouse or friend checks out separately with their own name on it.
- Sign the raku waiver. Every participant, every workshop.
- Build, bisque and glaze your pots before the day.
No refunds and no reschedules, for any reason. You can sell your spot to another current or past member for what you paid or less.
Raku workshops are for current and past members only. If you’re not one yet, start a membership and the next one is open to you.
What raku actually is
You pull your pot out of the fire while it’s still glowing. On purpose.
Every other firing you’ve ever done at the studio goes the same way. You put your piece on a table, we eventually load a kiln, and an electrical panel babysits it for you.
Raku is the opposite of that.
Propane kilns get your pots to almost 2000 degrees, fast. Then, while they’re still red-hot and visibly moving, the lid comes off and they come out on long tongs. Straight from the fire into a metal can full of newsprint and pine shavings, which catches on contact. Lid slams down. Inside that can the fire burns through every bit of oxygen it can find, and whatever it can’t get from the air, it pulls right out of your glaze.
That’s where the glaze goes copper, or oil-slick, or turquoise with crackle running all through it. That’s where a once-smooth pot comes out looking like it was dug out of a shipwreck. It’s chemistry, it’s smoke, it’s a little bit of violence, and you’re holding the finished thing about twenty minutes after you watched it go into the can, plus some elbow grease to scrub it.
If you love pottery, raku is worth doing at least once. The raku firing lesson in Clay Hole University goes deeper on the chemistry.
Day or night
Nighttime raku is unforgettable. Daytime raku is when you can actually see what you made.
We run both, and each workshop is announced as one or the other. They feel nothing alike, and neither one is the lesser version.
At night it turns into theater. Floodlights over the kilns, everything outside them gone dark, and a circle of faces lit orange the second a lid comes off. It also ends somewhere around 2 or 3 AM, and the drive home runs on pure will.
In daylight the glaze does its whole show in real color. You watch the copper flash and shift while you’re scrubbing it, not under a floodlight. You can see your friends’ faces when their lids come off. There’s a real lunch. And when the last pot comes out, you’re home in time to eat dinner like a normal person.
Nighttime workshops
Pure drama
- Glowing pots, floodlights, and a whole lot of dark.
- Usually wraps between 2 and 3 AM.
- Hard to see your colors until the next day.
- Unforgettable. Also exhausting.
Daytime workshops
Pure pottery
- The kiln still glows in daylight. It really does.
- Usually done by mid-afternoon.
- Every color, every crackle, in real sunlight.
- Sunscreen, a real lunch, and home for dinner.
How a workshop goes
Here’s a whole workshop, from the gate to the last pot
Drag the slider to walk through it, one moment at a time. Switch between a daytime workshop and a nighttime one and watch the sky do what it does. The start time changes from workshop to workshop. The order of things never does.
Arrival · Gates open
Park, unload, find your people
Get your pots out of the car, plant a camp chair somewhere near the kilns, and go introduce yourself to the people you’re about to spend the next six hours standing shoulder to shoulder with. This is the easy part. Enjoy the easy part.
The start time is real. The rest is not a schedule. Pots go in across separate rounds, usually one per person per firing, so everybody gets more than one shot at the kiln. Nobody leaves until the last pot is out and the site is clean, because whoever ends up in the final round deserves the same crowd the first round got.
Prepping your pots
Start building early. Earlier than feels necessary.
Every piece you bring has to be made, dried, bisque-fired, and glazed with raku glazes before you pull into that driveway. Count backward from the workshop date and the calendar gets short fast. Somehow it always does.
The raku gods demand that some pots be sacrificed. That’s the deal and it always will be. But most of the pieces lost out there failed for reasons that got built into them weeks earlier, at the studio, before anybody lit anything. So here are the rules that give your pot the best odds, and the rules that keep a whole group fitting into one workshop.
Use the grog clays
B-Mix with Grog or Berlin Gray. The grog is what lets a pot go from almost 2000 degrees to a can of burning newspaper without cracking in half. You can use any other clay in the studio, and some people do, but the thermal shock and cracking rate goes up and you’ll have nobody to blame. Bring a grog pot you’d be gutted to lose and a smooth-clay pot you wouldn’t.
Mind the size limits
Up to four tall, skinny pieces, or up to two wider pieces. Combined width of everything you bring stays under 28 inches. Measure each pot at its widest point and add them up. That math is what keeps a whole group fitting into one workshop.
Build it to survive
Even walls top to bottom. Every seam reinforced with a blended coil. Inside corners rounded off. A foot trimmed to match the walls. Bone dry before bisque. None of that is a guarantee. It just moves you from hoping to reasonably confident, and out there that’s a real difference.
Raku glazes only, one family per pot
Glaze at the studio with the raku glazes we provide. Most are included; the spendy ones carry an up-charge that tops out at $15, and you’ll know which is which. Know what’s on each piece, and never mix brands or families on one pot unless you know they fire to the same temperature. Amaco’s raku glazes are discontinued, so don’t plan around those.
Dip if you’re certified
The studio stocks Laguna raku dipping glazes. Dipping is fast and ridiculously satisfying, and it gets an even coat brushing almost never does. Two catches: they dry slow, so give them real time or a heat gun, and you need the dipping glaze certification to touch them. Same one as the studio’s other dipping glazes. Do it well before the workshop, not the night before.
Glaze it all before you come
Use your regular class times, or take one extra studio day on top of your membership. There is no glaze, no glazing table, and no time to glaze at the barn. If it’s not glazed when you park, it’s not getting fired. Nobody out there enjoys saying that sentence to someone’s face.
Nobody knows what your pot is going to look like. Not you. Not us. Not the people who made the glaze. Where it sat in the kiln, how fast it came out, which way the wind was blowing, how long the lid stayed on. All of it changes what you get, and none of it repeats. The people who show up wanting one specific result usually go home a little let down. The people who show up for the adventure almost never do.
Not going to have pots ready
Buy a bisqued pot and skip straight to the fire
Maybe your timing didn’t work out. Maybe you’ve never touched a wheel and you just want a raku vase on your mantel with a story attached. Either way, you can buy a wheel-thrown bisqued piece thrown by the owner, roughly $10 to $250 depending on the pot.
Ask the owner at class to price them out. First pick goes in the order people ask. You still glaze it yourself, at the studio, before the workshop. And as with every pot in raku, it is very well thrown and there are absolutely no guarantees.
Pack the car
What you bring, and what we bring
The daytime and nighttime lists overlap almost completely. The difference is the sky, so both are covered here. Dress for every hour you’ll be out there, not the hour you leave the house.
You bring
The stuff we can’t bring for you
- Your bisqued, glazed pieces. Raku glazes, ready to go straight into a kiln. There is no glazing at the barn. This page will keep saying that.
- Your own food and drinks. Nothing is provided, and there may be nothing open nearby at the hours raku keeps. At daytime workshops, pitching in on a group order with everyone else works too. Either way, plan on eating, because you’ll be out there six hours or more.
- A cooler for whatever needs to stay cold. It’s a barn, not a kitchen.
- A water bottle. Standing next to a kiln dries you out faster than you’d think.
- A camp chair. Technically optional. Practically, bring one. There’s real waiting between rounds.
- Warm layers. Hoodie, jacket, beanie, blanket, whatever you’ve got. A field at the foot of a mountain runs cold early in the morning and late at night, whatever the afternoon did.
- For daytime workshops: sunscreen, a hat, sunglasses. Full sun, no shade near the kilns, and glowing pots are bright even in daylight.
- Long pants and closed-toe shoes. Required, not a style note. Long sleeves are strongly recommended. Long hair gets tied back and secured.
- A box or some old towels to carry your finished pots home. They’ll still be warm and they’ll still smell like smoke.
- For nighttime workshops: a headlamp or flashlight. Optional. Floodlights cover the kilns and the working areas, but a lot of the property stays dark.
- Bug spray. Optional. It’s a field.
- A respirator or mask. Optional, most people skip it, but the smoke finds you now and then.
- Extra combustibles to experiment with. Optional. Whatever you bring has to be bone dry. Damp stuff just steams and you get nothing.
We bring
Everything with a flame on it
- The raku kilns, the propane, the long tongs, the cans, and the whole operation.
- The combustibles. Newsprint, pine shavings, and animal bedding. Plenty of it.
- Every piece of safety gear. Welding gloves, welding aprons, welding sleeves, safety goggles. You don’t buy a single thing.
- Cleanup supplies. Scour pads and Soft Scrub, so you can get the carbon off your pots right there on site.
- India ink, back at the studio. If you want your crackle to read deep black instead of gray, that step happens at The Clay Hole during a regular class, not at the barn.
- Floodlights at night, misters on hot days. Floodlights over the kilns and working areas for nighttime workshops, and cooling misters for the hot daytime ones.
- The safety meeting, the choreography, and the patience of the family whose barn it is. One of those three is not unlimited.
No spectators. None. Everyone standing near that kiln has sat through the safety meeting and signed the waiver, and that’s exactly what keeps this whole thing boring in the best possible way.
Safety
Everybody goes home with all their skin
The inside of that kiln is almost 2000 degrees. Several people are pulling pots out of it at the same time. That is the one part of raku nobody jokes about.
Every single unload is choreographed and walked through before the lid ever closes. Where you stand. Where your hands go. Who moves first. There has not been an injury at one of these, and the only reason for that is that everyone out there is running the same play. That is why the safety meeting is not optional, and why anybody who misses it cannot participate. Everybody sits through at least one in person, first-timers without exception. People who are certified online and have already been through a meeting can help set up during this one instead of hearing it again, and they still show up on time. Show up more than ten minutes late and you cannot fire. That one has no exceptions.
- Sign the waiver before you come. Every participant, every workshop, even if this is your fourth one. It is checked at the gate.
- Dress the part. Long pants and closed-toe shoes are required. Long sleeves are strongly recommended. Long hair tied back and secured.
- No horseplay, no practical jokes, no joking about safety. Not once. Not as a bit.
- Stay for the whole thing and help clean up. Both are part of the price of admission.
Get certified online
Do the raku certification ahead of time and you can help set up during the safety meeting
There’s an online raku safety certification on the site. It’s the safety meeting, on your couch, with a quiz at the end. One rule first: everybody sits through at least one safety meeting in person, no matter what. Once you’ve done that, being certified means you can help set up during the next one instead of sitting through it again.
Here’s why it matters. The meeting runs while the kilns sit cold. If a few certified people who’ve been through one already are unloading cans, laying out gear and staging the combustibles during the talk, the first pots go in the minute the meeting ends instead of twenty minutes after. Everybody fires sooner and everybody gets home sooner. You still show up on time, you still sign the waiver, and you still do exactly what you’re told near the kilns. You just get the option to be useful instead of being an audience.
And anyone who wants to help run one of these someday needs the certification first. Nobody runs a can without it.
A first workshop without the certification is totally fine. Be there at the start time and all of it gets covered in person, same as always.
Food
You’re going to get hungry standing next to a fire
Bring your own food and drinks, or, at daytime workshops, pitch in with everybody on a group order somewhere in the middle of the day. No food is supplied, and there may be nothing open near a barn in Alpine at the hours raku keeps, so plan like nothing is. Throw a cooler in the trunk. Gently. It has your sandwich in it.
The fine print
The stuff that generates the texts
Read these before you sign up. Every one of them is a real rule, and every one of them has come up at least once.
How do I sign up, and what does it cost?
Each workshop is announced with its own sign-up page, and that page carries the date, the start time and the price. One spot per checkout, so if your spouse is coming, they check out separately with their own name on it. Spots go first come, first served, and only current or past members can sign up.
Can I get a refund or reschedule?
No refunds, for any reason, and no switching to a future workshop. These fill up, and a refund means somebody else missed out on the spot you’re not using. You’re welcome to sell your spot to another current or past member for what you paid or less. Just tell the owner at class who’s taking it, so the right name is on the list.
What if it rains or snows?
Light rain, we fire. Dress for it and show up anyway. If heavy rain or snow is rolling in, the workshop gets rescheduled and everybody gets a text directly, so keep an eye on your phone that week. Utah weather makes no promises, especially at the foot of a mountain.
What happens if I’m late?
More than ten minutes past the start time and you can’t participate, and there’s no refund. It’s a hard line because the safety meeting is the foundation of the whole workshop, and it cannot be repeated for one person while everyone else stands around a lit kiln. Give yourself a buffer on the drive. Gates open ahead of the start for exactly this reason.
What if not enough people sign up?
There have to be at least seven registered participants to run a workshop. If fewer than seven register, you get your choice between a full refund or a spot at the next raku workshop. That has never actually happened, but it’s the rule.
Can I leave early?
No. Everybody stays through the last firing and through cleanup. Whoever lands in that final round deserves the same crowd and the same set of hands the first round got. Plan the rest of your day, or night, around the late end of the estimate, not the early one.
Can I bring someone to watch?
No. Participants only. Everyone on site has sat through the safety meeting and signed the waiver, and adding people outside that circle is exactly how a well-run day stops being one. You might see a guest or two out there; those people have been cleared ahead of time.
How many pots, and how many firings?
Up to four tall skinny pieces or two wider ones, under 28 inches of combined width. Usually one pot per person per firing, so your pieces go in across separate rounds rather than all at once. That way everybody gets the kiln more than once and nobody hogs a round.
Is my pot going to survive?
Maybe. Pots crack. Glazes shift or come out looking nothing like the jar. That’s raku, and it’s the whole point. Use the grog clays, build to the rules further up this page, and bring one piece you’d be genuinely sad to lose and one you wouldn’t. You’ll have a better day either way.
Raku workshops · Alpine, Utah
They fill fast. That’s not a sales line. Only so many people fit around a kiln.
When the next workshop is announced, grab a spot, sign the waiver, and start building pots that same week. Until then, the online raku certification is open any time.
Raku workshops are open to current and past Clay Hole members only. Questions go to any instructor at class, or text the studio at 385-241-5528.