Discover
Put your hands in it first.
Nothing here is a lesson. These are the things people ask us across the table, answered properly — and one of them you can try yourself, right now, before you read a single word about it.
Start here
A wheel, on this page.
Drag across the clay to push the wall out or draw it in. There is no score and nothing to get wrong — the point is to notice how much of the shape comes from pressure held steady in one spot.
Drag across the clay. Slowly.
Come, play with mud
Shape it however you like.
There is no right answer and nothing to get wrong. Push the wall out, draw it in, and see what the form wants to become.
Wheel speed
Even pull. The everyday speed.
Surface
While you work
Clay remembers everything. Every ridge your hand leaves stays through drying and firing — which is why handmade pots never look machine-made.
Firing is permanent — in a kiln and here. You can still start again afterwards.
Want it on its own, without the rest of the page? Open the wheel full screen.
Drag the slider
What fire actually does.
A pot shrinks as it dries, and again as it fires. Somewhere in the middle of this sequence it stops being clay altogether, and that change cannot be undone. Move through it slowly.
Stage 1 of 5
Wet clay
Soft, heavy with water, and completely undoable. Squash it back into a ball and nothing at all is lost.
- Shrinkage
- none yet
- Can it be undone?
- completely
Terracotta bodies typically lose somewhere between a tenth and an eighth of their size between wet and fired. The exact figure depends on the clay.
Once clay meets fire, it can last for generations.
Wood rots. Cloth falls apart. Metal gets melted down and made into something else. A broken pot just stays in the ground, more or less forever — which is why so much of what we know about how people used to live came from pottery.
Open any of these
Six things that surprise people.
Nothing replaces the weight of it
The real thing pushes back.
On a real wheel the clay is heavy, wet and moving. We bring the wheels, the clay and the potters to your venue across Pune.