How I started to be a potter. First month. June 2020

6 min readAug 25, 2020

Hi there, I am Kate, beginner potter from Hilversum, Netherlands.

I began my pottery journey in June 2020. I decided to keep notes of how my working process is going and publish monthly updates. I think doing it will motivate me to move on and maybe it will help someone else to start their own pottery journey.

I have been working as a UI/UX designer for the last 8 years. But it happened to me that I had a mental crisis and emotional burnout at my previous job. As the result I decided to quit and change what I do for living.

I chose pottery without any experience, but with a huge interest. Due to quarantine, I didn’t have an opportunity to go to any live courses, so I bought a wheel and a kiln and began to watch videos on YouTube about how people do it. It was tremendously hard, still is, but progress slowly becomes more visible as I keep on practicing.

I would like to share everything that I found useful for myself: purchases, links to the videos and articles, and my photos.

Organizing a Studio

Name. Logo. Clay Stamp.

The first thing I did was coming up with a name for my studio and creating a logo. I am originally from Russia, so I wanted the name to be a Russian word, something meaningful and something that non-Russian-speaking person could pronounce (you know that Russian language is hard, don’t you?😈). I came up with a word “dobro” which means “kindness”. I created a logo in vector format. After that I found a person on fiverr who created a 3D model of this logo. After that I found a company that prints 3D models and printed my stamp there. It came out inexpensive, but thin parts of the logo are not sharp enough because of the 3D printing capabilities. I am planning to change this stamp to a metal one in the future.

Pottery Wheel

Speaking of a wheel and a kiln, I tried to find something not the cheapest but reliable and of a good quality. For the wheel I picked up Shimpo Whisper-T, it’s a non-standing one but has adjustable legs. The cost was around € 1200.

I like that it is really quiet, makes almost no sound at all. And it’s also good at keeping both low and high speed rates.

I also bought a Shimpo stool with adjustable legs.

Kiln

For the kiln I chose Nabertherm Top 60 eco. It’s around € 2300. It has 60 litres and has a temperature controller. You may fire around 30 mugs at a time within this amount of volume. If you don’t have it locally, Rohde Ecotop 60L is a similar option for the same price.

Clay

I’ve made a mistake buying the clay for the first time. I read that chamotte clay has some advantages. So I bought a clay (G&S 264) with 0–0.5 mm chamotte. I had a hard time with this clay as the grog particles were too coarse for working on a wheel. The clay with this chamotte feels very rough and stubborn. There were plenty of scratches on my hands since I started.

In a week I bought other types of clay for testing: chamotte-free clay (G&S 208) and clay with a smaller chamotte 0–0.2mm (G&S 254) in order to find out which one is my favourite. I enjoyed working with both of them, but the clay feels easier when there’s no chamotte.

In the end, I settled on G&S 254 clay.

To sum up, chamotte is a good thing, it reduces shrinkage and adds structural strength to your pots and also might prevent such defects as cracking. But make sure you pick the finest one (0–0.2mm) otherwise you most likely won’t manage to work with it on a wheel.

Glazes

I bought several powder glazes and diluted them in buckets in order to color the pots by dipping them. Also decided that next month I will mix my own glazes using some recipes from https://glazy.org/. Keep in mind that you should always wear a 3M mask when mixing and diluting glazes! There’s a real danger of getting sick with silicosis so you should always follow the rule and wear a mask.

Tools

Here’s a short list of initial tools that I’ve bought:

Two cheap wooden bats for the wheel (I had to attach 2 pins to my wheel before that);
Mudtools starter kit (contains a sponge, polymer ribs, trimming tool, wire, etc.);
Apron;
Needle tool;
Brushes;
5L and 10L buckets;
Plaster board for recycling the clay;
3M mask for mixing and diluting the glazes;

Progress

I decided to start with throwing mugs first. The first month felt very hard. I wasn’t able neither to center the clay nor to pull the walls.

The most important thing is to learn how to center, pull, raise, and thin clay on the potter’s wheel.

I have understood how actually hard it is in comparison with the impression you get while watching the videos made by experienced potters. You understand what you need to do, but your hands don’t do everything the way they should and you don’t “feel” the clay. I would like to say, if you are also starting with throwing — don’t give up, keep practicing, just stay strong and keep working on your basic skills, constantly revising and analyzing how you are doing it and what you could do better. It will get better.

After about 3 weeks, I had first positive results. After a month, I made my first 6 mugs and one coaster.

After glazing:

During the first glaze firing I combined different glazes with each other right on the mugs. I didn’t really like the results. One mug didn’t even had color, though it should have been orange, I think I didn’t mix it well before dipping. Therefore, I decided to make some test tiles for the glazes next time. It is an efficient way of working with the glazes, as your test tiles will show how a glaze or a combination of glazes will eventually look.

Reclaiming clay

Be prepared, if you’re going to be working with clay everything around would be pretty dirty, especially during first couple of months. At that time I had a lot of waste because most of the clay I was using didn’t end up as a pot. I couldn’t center or pull the walls properly, so I had to utilize these pots and put them into buckets. All of the utilized clay was accumulating pretty quickly. But luckily clay is recyclable. So what you need to do is just buy a large plaster board (plaster is good because it consumes liquid and dries your clay pretty fast), add some water to the utilized clay, mix it with a drill and a mixer tip, and put the smooth clay mass on your plaster board to dry out till it has its initial condition. Wedge that piece properly and wrap it in a plastic wrap (you may use the one that you use at your kitchen).