Free for all potters

The Clay Hole University

Free pottery lessons and guides for anyone serious about clay: 220 of them, in the order you learn them, from wedging a bag of clay to selling what you made. Every one has its own quiz, and none of it asks you to sign up.

Everything at The Clay Hole University comes in two versions: Comprehensive or Nutshell. The only question is how deep down the rabbit hole you want to go.

Pottery students at The Clay Hole in Draper, Utah, holding their first thrown pots in clay-stained aprons

Dan Pearce founded The Clay Hole, and he wanted all of it open to everybody rather than walled off for members. People have been making pots shoulder to shoulder for tens of thousands of years, showing each other what works. That is a long tradition we’d love to keep going. Browse what you like. Dive in where it interests you. Join us if you’re here in Utah. We can’t wait to see what you make…

  • 220 lessons & guides written and live right now
  • 17 pottery areas, ordered start to finish
  • 1,620 quiz questions to test yourself on

The course catalog

Pick a pottery area, or search the whole thing.

The pottery areas run in the order a piece does, and inside each area the lessons and guides run in the order you learn them. That is why tap centering sits with trimming rather than with throwing.

220 lessons and guides in the catalog

You have studied 0 of the 220 finished guides. Tick them off as you go and this page will remember.

Your ticks and quiz grades are saved on this device only. Private or incognito browsing, or clearing your browser history, wipes them and you would need to start again.

01

Pottery Foundations

Start here. What actually happens between a bag of clay and a finished piece, how to read the state your clay is in, and which of the things potters repeat to each other are true.

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02

Safety and Your Body

The dust, the joints and the back. What actually carries risk in a pottery studio, which precautions are worth the effort, and how to keep working comfortably for years.

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03

Studio Life and Etiquette

How to share a room full of people and equipment. Asking for help, saying what you need, looking after shared tools, and what to wear while you do it.

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Before you dive deeper, a few thoughts from Dan

Because Dan built The Clay Hole for real humans. These are letters, not lessons. Nothing to tick off and nothing to practice. Our founder wrote all four himself, for you, the very real human reading this right now.

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More about Dan Dan’s pottery collections

04

Preparing Your Clay

Wedging is the step people skip and then quietly regret four weeks later, standing over a cracked piece. The two techniques worth knowing, and what to do with the scraps once you have them.

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05

The Pottery Wheel

The core skills, in the order you learn them. Nobody gets these on the first night, and the guides say so plainly rather than pretending otherwise.

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06

Advanced Throwing

Once a cylinder holds up on its own, this is where the wheel gets interesting.

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07

Hand Building

No wheel required, and plenty of people never use one. Pinch, coil and slab work, plus our slab rollers and the 150+ slab molds on the shelves.

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08

Project Guides

Whole objects rather than single techniques, thrown or hand-built, in roughly the order they get hard. Each one runs from the first lump of clay to the finished piece, with the parts that catch people out written down.

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Take a break to have some fun

There is a lot on this page and nobody takes it in at one sitting. These four are for when your brain needs a minute. They are exactly as silly as they sound, and members love every one of ’em.

09

Trimming, Handles and Drying

Leather-hard work. This is where a decent pot becomes a good one, and where an impatient week turns into a crack you cannot fix.

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10

Surface and Decoration

Everything you do to a surface before the glaze goes on. Carving, inlay, texture and resists, plus underglaze and engobes, which are the two products people mix up constantly.

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11

Glazing

650+ brush-on glazes, seven dipping buckets, and more ways to ruin a good pot at the last step than at any other point in the process. Start with the rules.

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12

Firing and Fixing

What happens in the kiln, what to do when a piece comes out attached to something it should not be attached to, and how to put one back together when it breaks. Bisque goes to cone 05 and glaze fires to cone 5½.

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13

Other Ways to Find, Fire, and Form

Everything that happens away from a members' wheel, from digging your own clay out of a hillside to firing in a pit. Some of it we run as a workshop here, the rest needs a trip somewhere else, and all of it is worth knowing about. We do not slip cast and never will.

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14

Selling Your Work

What happens after the kiln, in the order it tends to happen. Take a decent photograph, work out what a pot costs you, then decide where and how to sell it.

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15

Electives

Nothing here belongs to a single stage of the process, because all of it belongs to every stage. When a plan helps and when it gets in the way, finding your own work and the feelings that get in its way, how potters mess up their own pots, where the craft grew up, and what running a building full of potters teaches you.

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16

Graduation Day

The four certifications. Each one gates equipment or a process, each has a quiz and an agreement at the end, and each one ends with a card. Take them when you need them rather than all at once.

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If you are anywhere near Draper, Utah

Everything on this page is free to anyone, anywhere. The studio itself is in Draper, and if that is close enough to you, the four links below are the whole story on joining it. We would love to have you making pots with us.

Something missing?

Tell us what else you’d like to see here.

This library keeps growing, and the best ideas for it have always come from members getting stuck on something at the wheel. If there is a technique, a form or a problem you keep running into and it is not here yet, say so and it goes on the list.

Request a lesson or guide

Bisque fires to cone 05 and glaze fires to cone 5½ here, so any temperature written into these lessons and guides is ours. If you are reading from another studio, check your own numbers before you copy anything.