You’re Gonna Need Supplies…

Now that ya’ll know a lil bit about how I began, I thought I would share exactly what I did to begin. Although, again, to emulate my approach may not be the best idea since it has taken me nearly a decade and I still feel like I’m in the beginning stages of being a “professional” potter (I use this term loosely). But I will tell you how I did it, anyway.

The first thing I did was devour information and how-to videos. I bought Simon Leach's Pottery Handbook on Amazon, subscribed to countless channels on Youtube, read blogs (wow, you’re doing that now! ), and essentially got so overwhelmed by information, I didn’t know how to actually begin throwing…

First, I made a dummy mistake by purchasing 50lbs of clay ONLINE to be SHIPPED. Do you guys understand why this is dumb af? No? Lemme tell you. Heavy things cost more money to ship. I was absolutely ignorant about how much clay should cost or would cost if I just went to a store to purchase it, and me being the I-hate-public person I am, I decided to go with the online option. It cost over 100 dollars to ship. One hundred freaking dollars for two 25lbs of clay. And I was just like, “Oh, yeah, let’s freakin do it.” Now, this is stupid because one bag of 25lbs of clay at a local pottery supply shop, such as Seattle Pottery Supply, will cost you about 20 bucks. You see? I was a dummy.

But the clay showed up. So, I chalked it up to a learning mistake that I would never make again, and began my at-home, self-taught, learning journey.

Aside from the wheel, and the kiln, and the clay, there were other tools that I needed to begin.

Tools you’ll need when beginnging:
1. Sponges. They’re, like, super important, because clay needs to be wet to be worked.

2. Wire Clay Cutter. This is a long, thin piece of wire that is used for slicin’ and dicin’. You’ll slice your bits of clay off the larger chunk it comes in, you’ll slice your pieces off your wheel, you’ll slice your pieces in half to see how thick they are. You’ll just be slicin’ all over your studio. I’m going to link the first kit of tools I bought further in this post, but after purchasing that, I splurged and bought a singular wire tool because it had good reviews. And lemme tell ya, it’s a nice one. I love it. You can grab one here: Wire Tool .

3. Needle tool. I use this for all sorts of stuff. You can measure the bottom of your thrown pieces, poke holes, cut off the rim of uneven pieces, use it for carving, etc.

4. Trimming tools. After you’ve thrown a piece and let it dry to leather-hard, you use your trimming tools to, you guessed it, trim. This will clean up your piece so it’s all nice and pretty.

5. A bowl or bucket. Now, I made the mistake of purchasing lil buckets a Home Depot at first, but it’s unecessary. Just grab a large bowl or big pot from your kitchen. This will just be the water you’ll need to keep by your wheel when throwing because what does clay need to be worked? That’s right. Water.

6. Rubber, metal, wooden ribs. These are great for compressing your pieces while throwing, flattening blemishes when hand building, scraping clay off bats (not the flying creatures), and other cool shit you’ll learn about later.

7. Bats or a bat system. Really, you can get away with not using them and just throwing right on your wheel, but for beginners bats make life way easier. That way, when you throw on your wheel, you can remove the bat with the piece still on it to move it to a place to dry. Without a bat, you have to wire cut the piece off of your wheel, which can cause warping.

There’s a lot more tools for pottery, but these are all you’ll need to start. Since I spent all of my money on shipping clay, I thought I would purchase a cheaper option for tools to start. I found this pack of sponges on Amazon, as well as this cool lil starter tool kit. These worked brilliantly for starting out.

After I got all of my tools and my clay and my area all set up, I dove in. I propped my phone up with a Youtube tutorial on how to center clay and I did it over and over and over again. I trashed a lot of clay. But the beautiful thing about working with clay is that it can have more lives than one. If you mess up, throw it in a bin to dry out and reclaim later. This is something we will cover at some point in this blog. But not today.

Learning to center can be insanely frustrating. It is difficult and tedious to learn. But not impossible. It took me months to learn how to center my clay. And again, when I fall off the pottery wagon and land in a pit of seasonal depression, ignoring all of my pottery passions, I have to relearn how to center clay. And it’s a bitch. Maybe it’s not this way for all potters, but it is for me.

This is where I shall end this post. Let me know how centering goes for you. I hope you’re a quicker learner than I was. Main takeaways from this post: don’t buy clay online when you can just go into a local supply store, don’t wait so long to start, and you don’t need the best and most expensive tools to begin. Good luck and happy throwing!