Potter, and the person who writes everything here
47 posts on MyClay
I started with a bag of clay on a kitchen table and no idea what I was doing, and I made every mistake in this archive at least twice. The pots cracked in ways nobody could explain to me, the glaze crawled off in patches, and most of the advice I could find online was a confident sentence with no reasoning attached.
MyClay is the reference I wanted then. Every post takes one question, gives the short answer in the first three lines, and then explains the mechanism underneath — because once you understand why clay cracks, you stop needing to memorise thirty separate rules about it.
I work mostly in mid-fire stoneware at cone 6, hand build about as much as I throw, and fire an electric kiln. Where a post covers something outside my own practice — gas reduction, industrial slip casting, professional prop sculpting — I say so in the post and point to people who do it daily.
The first year
Everything cracked
Air-dry clay on the kitchen table, then a community studio membership. Learned the hard way that drying, not making, is where most pots are lost.
Learning the wheel
Centering, badly, for months
Spent more hours centering and recycling the same ball of clay than making anything with it. Still the advice I give anyone starting out.
Firing my own work
A second-hand electric kiln
Bought a used top-loader, learned to read witness cones, and found out how much a controller can lie to you about what is happening on the bottom shelf.
Glaze testing
A wall of test tiles
Started mixing glazes from raw materials and testing systematically. The tile wall taught me more than any recipe book, and it is why every glaze post here insists on testing first.
Now
Writing it down
Documenting the answers properly, with the reasoning attached and the sources cited, so the next person does not have to reverse-engineer them from forum threads.
Where a post covers ground outside that list, it says so and cites people who work in it daily. Every post carries its sources at the bottom.
Pottery slip is just clay and water blended to a cream. Here are the three recipes that matter — joining slip, decorating slip and casting slip — and the ratios for each.
Slip is clay mixed with water to a liquid consistency. It is used as glue for joining, as paint for decorating, and as a pourable material for casting into moulds.
Coloured slip is white slip plus a stain or oxide, measured by dry weight. Here are the percentages that work, how to test them, and how to keep colours consistent between batches.
Every ceramic glaze is silica, a flux and alumina, plus colourants. Here is what each part does, where it comes from, and why glazes only work in a narrow range.
Dipping, pouring and brushing glaze onto bisque ware, with the preparation and thickness checks that decide whether the result is even or patchy.
Mixing your own glaze from a recipe: the equipment, the weighing discipline, sieving, testing and the safety rules that come with handling dry glaze materials.