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Starvard University · Pottery
Learn hand building from Mary White and the American Arts and Crafts potters, and turn a lump of prepared clay into a set of cups you can drink from every day.
Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this course.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
Pottery starts with mud you can hold in your hands. You squeeze it, roll it, and stack it into a cup, then heat makes it hard like stone, forever. A teacher from 1904 named Mary White learned the first steps alongside her readers, and in this course you will learn them too, one small pot at a time.
You start with a lump of mud and finish with a mug you drink from every morning. No craft closes the distance between raw earth and daily life quite like this one. Clay costs little, forgives much before it is fired, and asks mainly for clean hands, a table you do not have to protect, and patience while things dry. In return it gives you objects that outlast trends and, cared for, outlast their maker.
Mary White wrote How to Make Pottery in 1904 for readers with, in her words, no other qualification than the wish to learn. She was part of the American Arts and Crafts moment, when handmade work was pushed back against factory goods, and her book teaches the way the era's best studios worked: build by hand first, decorate simply, and send pieces to a real kiln. Where her century's practice is unsafe today, around kilns and lead glazes, this course says so plainly and teaches the modern way. Follow her sequence and you will finish with work that is genuinely useful, not merely decorative.
The whole course in brief
What you will be able to do after this course
The eight lessons
Lesson 1
Mary White opens her book with geology a beginner can hold in one hand. Clay, she writes, is what might be called the drift of the rocks of ages past. Stone is mostly silica and alumina, and where feldspar bearing rock has slowly broken down in weather and water, the fine remains become clay, in its purest form a hydrated silicate of alumina. Surface clays gather impurities on the way: decayed leaves darken the top of a bed, and iron, the great colorist of pottery, turns other clays red and fires them into the familiar flowerpot color.
Potters sort clays by the heat they can stand and the work they suit. White divides hers into groups, from soft red ware that fires at the lowest heat up through stoneware and porcelain, and she tells beginners they will mostly live with two friends: ball clay, fine and plastic, and fire clay, which stands fierce heat. A mixture of the two, she says, will give good results. The modern version of that advice is simpler. Buy prepared clay from a pottery supplier or your community studio, in a body matched to the temperature that studio fires, and keep the bag label so you always know what you have.
Preparation decides whether the making is pleasant or miserable. White has her readers sift dry clay and add the powder to water, never the other way around, so every particle wets at once, then dry the surplus on plaster slabs, which drink the extra water. Store working clay wrapped or in a covered crock with a damp cloth so it stays soft. Before any project, wedge your lump: cut it in half with a wire, slam the halves together, and knead, repeating until the clay is one even consistency with no air pockets hiding inside. Trapped air expands in the kiln and can break a piece you loved, so this unglamorous step is real craftsmanship.
Lesson 2
The pinch pot is pottery at its oldest and most direct: one ball of clay, two hands, no tools at all. White notes that small pieces such as dishes and candlesticks may be moulded with the hands from a single piece of clay, and your first pinch pot will be just that size. Take a ball of well wedged clay about as big as an orange and roll it smooth between your palms. Push your thumb into the center, stopping well short of the bottom, so a thick floor remains under your thumb.
Now pinch the wall between thumb inside and fingers outside, turning the pot a little after every squeeze so the work travels evenly around the circle. Small pinches, many of them, beat a few heroic ones. Feel for thick and thin places as you turn, and spend your pinches where the wall is fat. Aim for an even thickness of about a quarter of an inch, the wall White asks for on her coil built jar, and keep the rim level by checking it against your fingertip as you work. If the rim tears or cracks at the edge, smooth it at once with a barely damp finger, because small cracks grow.
Rest the pot upside down for a short while so the rim firms up, then set it right side up and refine it. Flatten the bottom by tapping the pot gently on the table so it sits without rocking, tidy the inside with your thumb, and smooth the outside with a fingertip or a wooden tool. White's potters cut their initial or mark into the bottom of every piece, and you should too, while the clay is still soft enough to carve cleanly. Make a second pot right away, a little larger, and notice how much your hands have already learned.
Lesson 3
For anything taller than a teacup, White trusts the strong and simple process of building up with coils of clay, the method she calls the Indian process, and coil building is still how hand builders everywhere raise large, honest pots. Begin with a base: pat or roll a flat round of clay about five inches across and half an inch thick on a plaster tile or a board. Draw the circle of your pot's footprint on it, then score that line with cross hatched strokes of a tool and brush it with slip, which is simply clay thinned with water to the consistency of very thick cream.
Roll your coils on the table with the palms of your hands, working near the base of the thumb with a light push so the clay rolls evenly instead of flattening. White makes hers about an inch thick, then flattens them slightly and tapers one end to a long point. Stand the first coil on edge along your scored circle, supporting it with thumb and middle finger on either side while your forefinger presses it firmly down onto the base all the way around. Join the tapered ends by pressing them together until the seam vanishes, and smooth the join inside and out with your fingertip or thumbnail.
Build in stages and let the clay help you. White warns that it is far easier to flare the walls outward than to bring them in, so keep the walls as nearly vertical as you can, especially at the start. After the second row, rest the piece for half an hour or so until it stiffens a little, then add two more rows, testing the shape against a cardboard outline you cut before you began. Smooth the inside before the walls grow too high to reach. Coils joined with scoring, slip, and real pressure will dry and fire as one wall, not as a stack of rings.
Lesson 4
A slab is clay persuaded to be flat, and flat clay opens a second family of forms: boxes, cylinders, dishes, and tiles. Roll it the way you roll pastry. White pounds her tile clay flat with the thick part of the hand, then rolls it with a rolling pin until it is a little less than half an inch thick, and for a bowl lining she rolls a sheet three eighths of an inch thick. Modern potters add two wooden guide strips of equal thickness under the pin, one on each side, so the slab comes out even from edge to edge. Roll on canvas or cloth so the sheet releases cleanly and can be lifted without stretching.
Slabs meant for building should rest until they are leather hard, firm enough to hold an edge but still cool and slightly flexible. Cut your pieces with a sharp knife against a straight edge, then join them the coil builder's way: score both surfaces, brush with slip, press together, and run a small coil of soft clay into every inside corner and smooth it in, like a weld. A cylinder is one rectangle rolled around and joined to a base circle. A box is five honest decisions. Support fresh joins from inside while you work, and turn the piece often to check that it stays square.
Tiles teach the slab's great lesson, which is warping. White's tile clay is loaded with grog, already fired clay ground small, because grog shrinks not at all and so lessens cracking and curling as the tile dries. She rolls the tile inside a wooden frame, then reinforces the edges, because thin edges dry and shrink faster than the middle and pull the tile out of flat. Copy her habits: roll on a level board, keep the thickness even, decorate the face lightly, and dry the tile slowly under a board. A tile that dries flat has beaten the hardest part of the craft.
Lesson 5
A built pot is usually at its ugliest just after building, and White's finishing sequence is where it becomes handsome. When the piece has dried enough to hold its shape, scrape it with an oval steel tool with a saw toothed edge, bent to fit the curve, taking the worst unevenness off with short strokes in different directions, inside and out. Fill hollows the honest way: wet the spot with slip and press in clay of the same consistency as the piece. Then go over everything with the smooth edged oval tool, follow with a damp sponge, and polish with your fingers. Handle the pot by cradling it in a hollowed hand, never by its rim, which is the most fragile part of any unbaked piece.
Timing governs every finishing move. Soft clay smears, leather hard clay scrapes and carves beautifully, and bone dry clay is fragile and dusty. White warns that a very dry, light gray piece should be smoothed with sandpaper rather than a sponge, because even a little water may crack it at that stage. Trim the bottom now as well: cut a shallow ring inside the base so the pot stands on a neat foot, bevel sharp edges so glaze will flow over them, and incise your maker's mark if you have not already.
Decorate simply, and let the method fit the clay's dryness. White's favorite, incising, asks only for a drawn design and a pointed tool: carve one clean, firm line with a bevelled edge, never undercut, and deepen the parts you want to accent, like the maple seed design on her small bowl. You can also cut the background away to leave a design in low relief, apply small lumps of clay of the same consistency onto a scored and slipped surface, or pierce a pattern through the wall, keeping piercing at least three quarters of an inch below the rim so you do not weaken it. One quiet design, well cut, beats five competing ones.
Lesson 6
Clay shrinks as it dries, and almost every drying crack is shrinkage arguing with itself: one part of the pot has shrunk while a wetter, thicker part has not yet. White states the rule behind most failures with complete clarity: adding wet clay to a piece that is much drier invites a crack, because the new clay will do its shrinking against a wall that has already finished. Uneven thickness, a heavy base under thin walls, and one side drying in a draft while the other side stays damp all set up the same argument inside your pot.
Drying well is mostly drying slowly and evenly. Keep new work covered loosely with plastic so moisture leaves at a gentle pace, and set it away from radiators, sunny windows, and direct fans. Parts that dry fastest, like rims and handles, can be wrapped a little more closely so the thick parts can catch up. White rests her building work in stages, half an hour here and overnight there, and her finished jar dries for days until it is pale and what potters call bone dry. Frozen clay, she also warns, is ruined clay, so winter work dries indoors.
Learn to read a dry pot before you hand it to the kiln. Bone dry clay is pale and even in color, feels room temperature rather than cool against your cheek, and sounds faintly crisp when tapped. Small cracks found early can be mended White's way, with slip and clay of the same consistency worked in well. But keep the modern beginner's mercy in mind: a piece that cracks badly before firing can simply go back into the water bucket and be wedged again tomorrow. Nothing is lost but an afternoon, and recycling greenware without shame is something working potters do every week.
Lesson 7
Firing is the moment mud becomes stone, and it is the one step in this course you should not try to own. White is honest about this in 1904: a potter must plan, before anything else, either to own a good kiln or to know of one where pieces can be sent, and she adds that makers of art pottery near the principal cities will fire work for a reasonable fee, with much less risk than an amateur could manage. That is exactly the modern community studio. You make at home or in class, and trained staff load and run the studio kiln. Most work is fired twice: a bisque firing, her biscuit firing, that hardens the clay so it can be handled and glazed, then a glaze firing that melts the coating into glass.
Glaze, White explains, is needed because baked clay alone will not hold water perfectly, and a glaze is a thin skin of glass: hard materials like flint and china clay held in a melting flux, colored with metal oxides whose fired colors often look nothing like the powder you brushed on. Apply it as she directs, in spirit: pour it inside a cup and roll it around so the whole interior is covered, brush even coats outside, let each coat dry, and always wipe the foot of the piece clean and bare, because glaze that touches a kiln shelf in firing will fuse your pot to the shelf.
Now the safety lines, stated plainly because the old book cannot state them for us. White's century used lead oxide as a glaze flux and even she warns readers to wash their hands thoroughly after glazing, because some of the materials are poisonous. We go further today, and there is no exception: never use a lead glaze, an unlabelled glaze, or a found recipe on anything meant for food or drink, and only use glazes the maker certifies as food safe, at the temperature your studio fires. Fire only in a proper kiln, in a ventilated space, run by someone trained; never improvise firing at home, and never open a hot kiln, because White is right that cooling too fast cracks ware. Her book describes building your own kiln and mixing lead glazes; this course does not follow those parts, and says so honestly.
Lesson 8
Your final project gathers the whole course into something you will use daily: a set of handmade cups, four if you can, made to belong together. Decide the shape before you touch clay. A set pinched, coiled, or built from slabs will all serve, but choose one method and one clay body for all four, and sketch the height and width you are aiming at. White's cardboard outline trick from coil building works just as well here: cut one profile guide and test every cup against it as you build, and weigh each lump of clay before you start so the cups begin life the same size.
Build the cups over several days, not in one sitting. Form the bodies first and let them firm up, then refine the rims until each one is comfortable against a lip, because a cup meets its drinker there. If you add handles, make them from clay of the same consistency, score and slip both joining surfaces, press them home firmly, and then dry the handled cups especially slowly, since handles and walls dry at different speeds and that difference is where cracks begin. Smooth the interiors with extra care, trim a small foot on each base, and sign every bottom.
Finish the set through the full cycle. Let the cups dry bone dry, take them to your community studio for bisque firing, then glaze the insides and outsides with one certified food safe glaze, wipe every foot bare, and send them back for the glaze firing. When they come home, wash them, fill one with water overnight to check it holds, and then do the important part: use them. A handmade set will not be identical, and that is its charm, not its failure. If a cup ever shows a cracked or flaking glaze, retire it to holding pencils. The rest will carry your mornings for years, which is the whole point of White's book: pottery for beauty and use.
Sources
This course is taught from a classic text that is free for anyone to read. Every method in the lessons traces back to this book, and it is free to read in full at Project Gutenberg.
Graduation
You started with the drift of ancient rocks and finished with cups that hold water, take a glaze, and sit in a row on your table. You can prepare clay, pinch, coil, and roll it, dry it without cracks, and hand it to a kiln with confidence. Keep making, keep the good ones in daily use, and let the failures go back into the clay bucket. Congratulations, potter.
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This course is part of Starvard University, striving for greatness.
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