You can move this picture: drag it, press and hold then drag on a touch screen, or use the arrow keys.Printable guide 08.11

The Clay Hole University · Project Guides

Chip and Dip Platters That Do Not CrackPrintable pottery guide

The whole method for a wide platter with a bowl joined to it, in the order you do it, including the fortnight of drying that decides whether it survives. Both routes, the wheel and the slab, and the join that most of them fail at.

$10.005 guides, 1 free
  • Skill level: Intermediate
  • 29 printable pages
  • 9 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 Chip and Dip Platters That Do Not Crack printable guide?

It is the whole form on paper: what you are actually making, which of the three shapes to pick and what each one costs you later, how to throw a wide platter without the floor splitting, how to build the same thing from a slab, how to join the bowl so the seam holds through both firings, and the staged drying schedule that is the real difficulty. Then feet and trimming order, glazing and firing, a paper version of the page’s fit calculator, a diagnosis page, the full quiz with an answer key that explains every answer, a practice log and a glossary.

Prefer to read it online first? The “Chip and Dip Platters That Do Not Crack” lesson is free, and always will be.

  • 29printable pages, US Letter
  • 6quiz questions, with a full answer key
  • 9hand-picked videos, each with a QR code
  • 16glossary terms in plain language
  • 2workbook pages you fill in yourself
For the part that happens after you go home

Nobody loses one of these at the wheel

A chip and dip platter is two ordinary things stuck together. A wide shallow plate and a small bowl, neither of them difficult, and most people make both halves in one evening without any trouble at all.

Then it sits on a shelf for a fortnight. The rim is thin and open to the room, the seam under the bowl is the thickest clay on the whole piece, and they finish drying days apart. Whichever one gets there first has nothing left to give, so when the other one finally shrinks, it pulls against something that has stopped moving. That is the ring crack in the bisque, the platter that rocks on a table, the rim gone slightly oval, and the bowl that quietly lets go in the glaze firing.

Every one of those was decided on day two, while you were at home. This guide is mostly about day two.

Look inside

Real pages, for a wet bench and a drying shelf

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

  • Page 3 of the “Chip and Dip Platters That Do Not Crack” printable guide: what you are in for, before you start, shown with the sample watermark
    What you are in for, before you startWhat the piece asks of you, what to have ready, the six things worth knowing before you touch clay, and the eight ways people lose one. Read this page and you already know where the difficulty is.
  • Page 5 of the “Chip and Dip Platters That Do Not Crack” printable guide: the form, drawn and labelled, shown with the sample watermark
    The form, drawn and labelledA cross section with its numbered key beside it rather than on the page after, so the rim, the foot, the field, the join and the well are named while you are looking at them. Under it, the three shapes and what each one costs you to live with.
  • Page 12 of the “Chip and Dip Platters That Do Not Crack” printable guide: why it cracks, and when it was decided, shown with the sample watermark
    Why it cracks, and when it was decidedThe mechanism in full, with the videos that show it being done. Clay shrinks only while water is leaving it, and the two halves of this piece finish days apart.
  • Page 22 of the “Chip and Dip Platters That Do Not Crack” printable guide: every platter, and how the fortnight went, shown with the sample watermark
    Every platter, and how the fortnight wentYour room, your clay and your shelf are not in any book. Write down six platters, what you did and what came back, and the third one will not surprise you.
Flip through the free sampleTen pages, free, no email required.
Why this one belongs on paper

The important days are the ones with nothing to watch

Most of what decides a chip and dip platter happens with your hands full or with the piece under plastic on a shelf, and neither of those is a moment to be holding a phone.

  • It does not go dark

    A join takes both hands, slip and a wooden tool, and it takes longer than a screen stays awake. The page is still open at step five when you get back to it.

  • It lives with the piece

    The drying schedule runs for two weeks and you need it on days one, three and six. Tape it to the shelf and it is there on all three, which a browser tab never is.

  • You can write on it

    The practice log has room for six platters. Clay, width, floor, joined or loose, days under plastic and how it came out. Two or three entries and you stop guessing at your own room.

  • Nothing loads

    The videos are on the page as codes you scan when you want them, not embeds that have to fetch. In a studio with the wi-fi it has, that matters.

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 mechanism first, then the routes

    The cross section and its numbered key are on one page, side by side, so the words that name the parts are beside the drawing rather than on the sheet after it.

  • The calculator, worked through

    The lesson has a box you type one size into. On paper it is a table of eight platters with the firing cost and the shelves each one fits on, which shows you two things the box will not tell you unless you go hunting: the widest round platter that fits any shelf in the building, and why a long oval fits all four.

  • Every number checked against the studio

    Clay weights, floor and rim thicknesses, foot ring position, shelf sizes, firing prices and both cone numbers, read from our own fact sheet and our own pages rather than typed, and dated on the page so you can tell when they were true.

  • Checked against our other lessons

    The floor thickness in this guide is set against the plates lesson, which measures platters the same way and publishes a table of them. Where the two disagreed, the lesson was corrected as well as the guide.

  • The join as a sequence

    Eight steps in the order you do them, plus the one that has to happen before any of them, which is trimming the foot and signing the bottom while you still can.

  • A bench sheet and a diagnosis page

    One page holds the join, the drying schedule and the numbers. Another works backwards from what came out of the kiln to what caused it and what to change.

Why the University is free

The lesson is free. It always will be.

All of the teaching in this guide comes from the free “Chip and Dip Platters That Do Not Crack” lesson, and that lesson is not going anywhere. The printable is the same teaching, rebuilt for a bench.

Somebody brings me a platter with a hairline all the way round the bottom of the dip bowl and wants to know what went wrong in the firing. Nothing went wrong in the firing. The firing is just the first moment anybody could see it.

The ring crack, the platter that rocks, the rim gone slightly oval. Not one of those is a scoring problem and not one of them happened at the wheel. They happened on a shelf, on day two, while you were at home.

So the honest advice is boring. Bag it when you would rather not. Give it two weeks when you were hoping for two days. Nobody has ever ruined one of these by being too patient with it.

Dan Pearce, founder of The Clay Hole
The series

Build a little pottery library

Every printable guide in The Clay Hole University series takes one free lesson and rebuilds it for paper: the teaching in the order you do it, the numbers checked against the studio and dated, the videos as codes you can scan, a quiz with an answer key that explains itself, a glossary, and somewhere to write down what actually happened.

Put any five printable guides in your cart and the cheapest one is on us. Put in nine and the two cheapest are on us. It happens automatically at checkout, no code to remember.

See every printable guide

  • 5guides in your cart1 on us
  • 9guides in your cart2 on us
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 lesson is not going anywhere. The guide is that teaching rebuilt for paper: the drawing and its key on one page, the join as a numbered sequence, the calculator worked through as a table instead of a box you type into, a diagnosis page, a bench sheet, a glossary, the quiz with an answer key that explains every answer, and a log to write your own platters into. It also prints, which a lesson full of video players does not.
Do I need a wheel?
No. The guide covers both routes in full, and the hand built one is the easier way to a big platter. It is also the only way to a square, an oval or a free form one. Everything about the join, the drying and the firing applies the same either way.
Is this for beginners?
It is marked intermediate, and not because any single movement is hard. A wide shallow plate and a small bowl are both ordinary forms. What makes it intermediate is that the piece has to survive about two weeks of your attention after the interesting part is over, and the decisions that lose it are made while it still looks perfect.
What do I actually get?
A PDF you download and print, or read on a screen. The page count, the video count and the number of questions are shown at the top of this page, and they are read from the file itself rather than typed here.
Will it print on a normal printer?
Yes. It is set for US Letter, black text on white, with no full bleed and no page that needs colour to make sense. The diagrams are line drawings and the codes scan from a black and white print.
Can I print it more than once?
Yes, for yourself, as many times as you want. It is licensed to you for your own use. The short version of the terms is on the last page of the guide and the full version is linked from it.
Do the video codes expire?
The codes point at our own short addresses rather than straight at YouTube, so if a video moves or is replaced we can repoint the code and your printed copy keeps working. Every video belongs to the potter who made it and every one is free to watch.
Does it cover what a big piece costs to fire here?
Yes, and it is one of the reasons to read it before you weigh out clay rather than after. There is a table of eight platter sizes with what each one costs to fire and which member shelves it will fit on, worked out with the studio’s real rule, and the two answers people are usually surprised by are in it.
I already made one and it cracked. Is this still useful?
That is what the diagnosis page is for. It works backwards: find what came out of the kiln, read what caused it, and take the one change into the next one. Almost everything on that page is a drying fault wearing a different costume, which is good news, because the fix is nearly always the same fix applied earlier.
Is there a version I can get for free?
The whole lesson is free to read online and always will be, and there is a free ten page sample of the guide itself on this page with no email required. The paid file is the rest of it.

Slow is the only technique on this page

Compress more than feels necessary. Join at matching hardness. Bag it longer than you want to. Let it have the shelf for a fortnight. Do those four and the wheel work is the easy part.

Get the guide · $10.00

The Clay Hole University Printable Guide Terms

Licensing, safety, digital delivery, and refund terms

Your copy is yours. The guide is not.

Your purchase gives one individual purchaser a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable license for personal use only. You may download the guide to your own devices, print copies for your own use, write all over them, spill clay water on them, replace a coffee-damaged copy, and generally use the heck out of what you bought.

What you may not do is distribute the guide to anyone else, whether you charge for it or not.

That means you may not share, forward, email, upload, post, publish, copy, reproduce, resell, sublicense, redistribute, or otherwise provide the guide, or any substantial portion of it, to another person. You may not place it in a shared drive, group chat, membership library, online community, file-sharing service, studio resource folder, classroom packet, employee handbook, course, workshop, or other shared collection. You may not make copies for students, members, employees, friends, classes, studios, schools, groups, or organizations.

You may not remove or obscure copyright notices, watermarks, attribution, or other ownership information, or sell, republish, or commercially exploit modified or derivative versions of the guide.

Purchasing the guide does not transfer ownership of its copyrighted text, photographs, illustrations, graphics, layouts, worksheets, or other original content. Those rights remain with The Clay Hole and their respective rights holders. Copyright law protects the expression contained in these guides, while ideas, methods, techniques, and processes may have different legal treatment.

If you would like to use one of our guides with a class, studio, school, team, or other group, contact The Clay Hole about permission or group licensing. Please do not make twenty copies and call it manifesting.

Pottery is wonderfully unpredictable. It also carries real risk.

We work hard to make The Clay Hole University accurate, useful, practical, and ridiculously thorough. But pottery is a hands-on craft involving countless variables that no written guide can completely control or anticipate.

Depending on what you are doing, ceramics may involve extreme heat, kilns, electricity, gas, flame, sharp tools, spinning machinery, heavy equipment, pressurized equipment, silica-containing dust, fumes, chemicals, raw materials, stains, oxides, glazes, combustible materials, hot surfaces, breakable objects, and other hazards capable of causing serious injury, illness, property damage, fire, or worse.

These guides are provided for general educational and informational purposes. They are not a substitute for hands-on training, competent supervision, your studio’s safety procedures, applicable laws or codes, Safety Data Sheets, or the instructions and warnings supplied by the manufacturers of your clay, glaze, chemicals, tools, kilns, equipment, protective gear, or other materials.

Studios, kilns, clay bodies, glazes, firing schedules, electrical systems, ventilation systems, equipment, environmental conditions, application thicknesses, material formulations, and individual techniques vary enormously. Something that works beautifully in one situation may fail spectacularly in another. That is part of pottery. Occasionally, it is a very expensive part of pottery.

You are responsible for determining whether any technique, material, combination, firing schedule, tool, or process described in a guide is appropriate and safe for your specific circumstances before using it.

Use appropriate protective equipment. Use adequate ventilation and dust control. Read manufacturer instructions and Safety Data Sheets. Follow your studio’s rules. Obtain qualified instruction when a process or piece of equipment requires it. Test materials and techniques before committing important work to them. If you do not understand how to perform something safely, do not proceed until you do.

Never assume that a ceramic surface, glaze, clay body, firing method, finished vessel, repair, decoration, or other result is food-safe, microwave-safe, dishwasher-safe, oven-safe, structurally sound, chemically stable, or suitable for any particular purpose solely because it appears in or is discussed in one of our guides. Verify suitability independently when it matters.

Ceramics also refuses to sign contracts promising beautiful results. Colors change. Glazes move. Kilns have opinions. Pots crack. Materials interact unexpectedly. Manufacturers reformulate products. Equipment behaves differently. The Clay Hole does not guarantee any particular aesthetic, functional, firing, glazing, structural, or other result.

By choosing to use the information in a guide, you accept responsibility for your own materials, equipment, workspace, safety decisions, testing, methods, and results. To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, The Clay Hole and its owners, employees, contributors, and affiliates are not responsible for injury, illness, property damage, lost work, failed projects, kiln or equipment damage, financial loss, or other loss arising from or related to your use of, or reliance upon, the guide.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits any right or liability that applicable law does not allow us to exclude or limit.

Digital guides, immediate delivery, and refunds

These are digital products delivered electronically and made available for use immediately after purchase. Unlike a physical book, a downloaded digital file cannot meaningfully be returned to us once it has been delivered.

By completing your purchase and requesting immediate access to the guide, you consent to digital delivery beginning immediately. Where applicable law provides a cancellation or withdrawal period for digital content, you acknowledge that beginning the download, access, or delivery of the digital content may cause that cancellation or withdrawal right to end.

Once access to or delivery of the purchased digital guide has begun, the purchase is final and non-refundable except where a refund, replacement, cancellation, or other remedy is required by applicable law.

If the file you receive is corrupted, inaccessible, materially different from what was described, or there is a genuine technical problem with delivery, please contact us. We would much rather fix the problem than leave you staring angrily at a PDF that refuses to PDF.

Terms version 2026-09-19b