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The Clay Hole University · Project Guides

Butter Dishes with a Domed LidPrintable pottery guide

The whole butter dish, in the order you do it: the two fits, the arithmetic that settles one of them before you touch clay, and the one shape decision that settles the other.

$10.005 guides, 1 free
  • Skill level: Intermediate
  • 30 printable pages
  • 7 video picks
  • 6-question quiz + answer key

Flip through the free sample
  • Instant download
  • Prints on any printer
  • The lesson stays free
The printable, at a glance

What is the Butter Dishes with a Domed Lid printable guide?

It is the butter dish on paper: how to measure the stick your household actually buys, what to multiply it by so the fired dish fits, why a domed lid touches the butter at the corners and the free fix for it, a ten step slab build, the wheel route, and twelve ways a finished dish stops working. Built to be printed, written in and left on the bench for the fortnight the project takes.

Prefer to read it online first? The “Butter Dishes with a Domed Lid” lesson is free, and always will be.

  • 30printable pages, US Letter
  • 6quiz questions, with a full answer key
  • 7hand-picked videos, each with a QR code
  • 22glossary terms in plain language
  • 2workbook pages you fill in yourself
For the pot that has to fit something you did not make

Nobody fails a butter dish at the wheel

The making is easy. A slab, a curve, two end walls. Almost everybody gets a tidy little object out of it on the first go.

Then it comes out of the glaze fire and the butter will not go in. That is the whole problem with this project, and it is not a pottery problem: you are building to a size a factory already decided, and the butter is not going to shrink to meet you.

So the work happens before the clay does. Measure the stick, multiply, and start the arch above the butter rather than at the tray. Three decisions, all of them made with a ruler, and they are what separates a butter dish from a very nice paperweight.

Look inside

Real pages, for a bench with a ruler on it

These are actual pages from the guide, shown here with the sample watermark.

  • Page 3 of the “Butter Dishes with a Domed Lid” printable guide: before you begin, shown with the sample watermark
    Before you beginWhat you will learn, what to bring, what usually goes wrong and what success looks like. Every guide opens with one, so you know what you are walking into before you cut anything.
  • Page 9 of the “Butter Dishes with a Domed Lid” printable guide: the one idea, drawn to scale, shown with the sample watermark
    The one idea, drawn to scaleTwo lids, same height, same tray, same butter. One touches the butter at the corner and one clears it by a third of an inch. The numbered key sits beside the drawing, so the measurement and the reason are on one page.
  • Page 18 of the “Butter Dishes with a Domed Lid” printable guide: twelve ways it stops working, shown with the sample watermark
    Twelve ways it stops workingFind the symptom, read the cause. Almost all of them were decided long before the moment you noticed, which is the annoying part and also the useful part.
  • Page 23 of the “Butter Dishes with a Domed Lid” printable guide: every dish, and the stick it was built for, shown with the sample watermark
    Every dish, and the stick it was built forA log to write in: the clay, the stick you sized it for, the wet size you cut, and what it actually came out at. Two of these and you will be using your own shrinkage figure instead of ours.
Flip through the free sampleTen pages, free, no email required.
Why this one belongs on paper

You will be standing at a bench with a ruler in one hand

This project is mostly measuring, and measuring is the part that gets edited out of videos because it is not interesting to film.

  • It does not go dark

    A page holds still while you check a number twice, and it does not time out while you are easing a slab over a former with both hands covered in slip.

  • The gap nobody plans for

    There are about two weeks in the middle of this build. Nobody rewatches a thirty minute video to remember what they were supposed to do at the glazing stage. They come back to a list.

  • Numbers you write down

    Three measurements off a stick of butter, multiplied, then written on tape and stuck to the bench. The guide has the page to do that on, and a log for the next one.

  • It pins up

    The bench checklist belongs where you build and the drying rules belong above the shelf, because that is where the question actually gets asked.

How this one is built

Rebuilt for paper, not printed from a web page

Every guide in the series is set from scratch for print. Here is what that meant for this one.

  • The arithmetic, checked against the bags

    Every shrinkage figure in the wet size table was read off the clay’s own product page rather than taken from another lesson, and every wet size in it was recomputed from scratch.

  • The diagram and its key on one page

    Two lids drawn to scale with a six point key beside them, not underneath, so the measurement you are reading and the line it points at are never on different pages.

  • The geometry re-derived

    Every number in that key was worked out again from the drawing’s own proportions. One of them did not agree and was corrected, on the free lesson as well as here.

  • Written for any studio

    Our cone numbers, our clay shelf and our slab rollers are named as ours and dated, so a reader working somewhere else knows which parts are a Clay Hole fact and which are a rule of the craft.

  • Inches you can read

    Every measurement is set in the guide’s own typeface rather than borrowing a character from a system font, which is the kind of thing nobody notices until a page prints badly.

  • Codes that keep working

    Every link is a short Clay Hole address. If a video moves, we repoint the address and your printed copy still goes to the right place.

Why the University is free

The lesson is free. It always will be.

All of the teaching in this guide comes from the free “Butter Dishes with a Domed Lid” lesson, and that lesson is not going anywhere.

I have watched a lot of people make a butter dish, and I have never once seen somebody fail at the making.

They fail two weeks later, when they open it up in front of me and the butter will not go in. Every other pot, you get to decide how big it is. Not this one.

So do the two minutes with a ruler first. That is the bit the whole fortnight rests on.

Dan Pearce, founder of The Clay Hole
The series

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Sits next to

Three lessons that pick up where this one leaves off

Each one is free to read online, and the codes in the guide take you straight there.

Questions

Good to know

How is this different from the free lesson?
The teaching is the same, and the free lesson is not going anywhere. The guide is that teaching rebuilt for paper: a learning dashboard at the front, the diagram and its key side by side, a bench checklist, a dish log to write in, a one page summary, a glossary and a quiz with an answer key that explains every answer.
Do I need a wheel?
No. The method the guide would pick is built from slabs, with a rolling pin or a slab roller, and it gets a full ten step walkthrough. The wheel route is in there as an alternative, because a domed lid is a bowl you have not turned over yet, but nothing in the project needs one.
Is this too early for me?
It is marked Intermediate, and not because anything in it is hard to do with your hands. It is the first project most people meet where the size is not yours to choose, and where two pieces have to come out of the kiln still fitting each other. If you can roll an even slab and score a join, you can make this.
Does it work for the butter I buy?
Yes, whichever shape that is. There are two standard sticks and the guide measures both, then shows you how to build one dish that holds either. That is the failure it spends the most time preventing, because a dish built for one shape can work all year and then stop the week somebody brings home the other.
Do I need a fancy printer?
No. It is set for an ordinary home or office printer on regular US Letter paper, with nothing important near the edges, so normal printer margins cut nothing off.
Does it print in black and white?
Yes. It is designed to stay readable in grayscale, and the pages that matter most at the bench, the checklist and the one page summary, were checked that way on purpose.
Can I print just part of it?
Yes, and most people do. The bench checklist, the one page summary and the dish log are the three worth having on the bench. They are numbered pages like any other, so you can print those and leave the rest on a screen.
Can I read it on a screen instead?
Yes. It is an ordinary PDF and it reads fine on a tablet or a phone. The workbook pages are the ones that want paper, because you write on them.
How does delivery work?
It is a digital download. The link arrives by email and on the order confirmation page right after checkout, so you can have it printed and on the bench the same evening.
What happens if the guide is updated?
Every edition carries its version number on the last page. When we correct or improve one, the new edition replaces the old one in the shop, and we can send the updated link to anybody who already bought it.
Can I share it?
It is licensed for your own use. Print as many copies for yourself as you like, on as many of your own devices as you like. Please do not pass the file on, upload it or use it with a class or a group without asking us first.

Measure first, multiply, start the arch above the butter

Do those three and the making is the easy part. Get any of them wrong and no amount of skill at the bench will save it, which is why this one is worth reading before you cut a slab rather than after.

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