About
Us

There is no shortage of pottery advice online. What is in short supply is advice that explains itself. Most of what you find is a confident instruction with no reasoning attached — dry it slowly, score and slip, do not fire it wet — which is fine until something goes wrong and you have no idea which rule you broke or why it mattered.

MyClay exists to fix that. Our aim is simple: take one question at a time, answer it in the first three lines, and then explain the mechanism underneath, so you end up understanding the material instead of memorising a list.

What we do

We publish 47 articles across 18 topics, covering wheel throwing, hand building, glazing, firing, wild clay, sculpting, and the polymer and air-dry materials that need no kiln. Every article is built the same way:

• A short answer at the top. Three lines. If that is all you needed, you can leave immediately — we would rather be useful than keep you on the page.
• The reasoning, not just the rule. Once you understand that cracking is a moisture-gradient problem, thirty separate rules about drying collapse into one idea.
• A note from actual practice. Each post carries a specific mistake and what it taught, because the failures are more instructive than the successes.
• Diagrams that carry information. Every article has a featured infographic and an in-article diagram drawn for that specific piece, not stock photography.
• Sources at the bottom. Every article cites the references it leans on, so you can check us and read further.

How we write and check

Ceramics is full of confidently repeated folklore. Where a claim is genuinely contested — whether air bubbles really explode pots, for instance — we say so rather than picking a side and stating it as fact. Where a number depends on conditions, we give the condition to check rather than a figure to trust.

Articles carry a published date and, where they have changed materially, an updated date. Both are reflected in the sitemap and the feed, so you can always tell how current something is. We correct errors when readers point them out, and reader corrections are the single most useful message we receive.

Who writes it

Everything here is written by one person: Robert, a studio potter working mainly in mid-fire stoneware at cone 6, who hand builds about as much as he throws and fires an electric kiln. Every article carries his byline, and the studio note in each one describes a specific mistake he actually made. Where a post covers ground outside that practice — gas reduction, industrial slip casting, professional prop sculpting — it says so plainly and points to people who do it daily.

Robert's author page sets out the full route in, from a bag of clay on a kitchen table to a wall of glaze test tiles, along with the editorial rules every post here follows.

Our promise

• Always free. Every article stays outside a paywall.
• Reader first. The answer comes before the story, the site stays fast, and nothing is padded to reach a word count.
• Honest about limits. When something depends on your kiln, your clay or your local conditions, we say so instead of pretending to a certainty we do not have.
• Responsive. Spot a mistake or want a topic covered? Tell us, and we act on it.

Safety comes first

This craft involves kilns above 1,000 °C, silica dust, open flame and materials you should not breathe. Our articles flag the risks they touch, but they are general guidance and cannot replace the manual for your kiln or the safety data sheet for your materials. Please read our Disclaimer — for this subject it genuinely matters.

How the site is funded

MyClay is supported by advertising. That covers hosting and lets the library keep growing without ever charging readers. Where we name a supplier, brand or product in an article, it is on editorial grounds and we receive no payment for it unless the page says otherwise. Our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy set out exactly what advertising and analytics collect, and how to opt out.

For machines

Every page is server-rendered, so crawlers and AI agents get complete HTML on the first request with no JavaScript execution required. Each article is also available as its markdown source by adding .md to its URL, and the site publishes an llms.txt index and a full-text bundle for retrieval. Quote and cite us freely with attribution and a link.

Get in touch

Have a question, a correction, or a topic you would like covered? Email contact@myclay.online or visit our Contact page. Every message is read by a person.

Read the archive — 47 articles, newest first.