A morning at the wheel

The studio in the morning is cold. There's a period between switching the heater on and the room actually warming up where you just have to accept the cold hands and the clay that doesn't want to move the way it should. The kettle goes on first. There's a ritual to it.

Clay is weighed out the night before — 500g balls for the medium pots, 650g for the larger ones. They sit under damp cloth overnight to equalise moisture. Dry clay and wet clay behave differently on the wheel and you want consistency before you start. The difference between a good throwing session and a frustrating one is often just preparation.

Centring is the part that never fully becomes automatic. You can throw fifty pots and still have a morning where the clay won't sit true, where it wants to wobble and you're fighting it rather than working with it. On those mornings you either slow down and coax it, or you accept that today is a trimming-and-glazing day and come back to the wheel tomorrow.

When it's going well, throwing has a quality that's hard to describe to someone who hasn't tried it. The clay responds to pressure in ways that are partly predictable and partly not. You open the floor, raise the walls, thin them with your fingers from inside and out, and the form appears. Not all at once — there are several passes, each refining what the last established. A good pot takes about ten minutes. A bad one takes fifteen before you cut it off the bat and wedge it back into the reclaim bucket.

Six pots in a session. Sometimes five, if one goes badly and I don't rush to replace it. They come off the wheel on small wooden bats, covered with polythene, left to firm up. In twenty-four hours they'll be leather-hard and ready to trim. In three days they'll be bone dry. The kiln takes a week to fill, so there's time. There's always more time with ceramics than you expect, and less patience than you'd like.