Clay Dust, Sharp Wire, and the Studio Rules I Won't Bend On
Okay, so before we get any deeper into slabs and coils, we need to talk about the rules. Not the fun stuff. The stuff that keeps your lungs, your fingers, and your kitchen table intact.
I'll be honest with you: most pottery instruction skips this part or rushes through it like a warning label nobody reads. I'm not going to do that. Here's the thing, though, none of it is complicated. You just have to actually do it, every time, not just when you remember.
Clay dust is the one I take seriously
Wet clay is harmless. You can eat off your hands after working with it and be fine (please still wash them). Dry clay dust is a different story. Silica dust in your lungs is bad news, and it's the kind of bad news that adds up over years, not something you feel that day.
So here's the rule: you never sweep a dry studio floor. Ever. If there's dried clay crumbs or dust on your table or floor, you wipe it up wet, with a damp sponge or rag, and you wring that thing out in the sink, not in the air. Sweeping just launches the dust back up where you'll breathe it. Same with sanding a bone-dry piece before it's fired, if you're doing that at home: do it wet, or wear a mask, or better yet, do it outside.
This isn't me being dramatic. This is just how you do it if you're doing it for years, which I hope you are.
The wire is sharper than it looks
Your clay cutting wire looks like nothing. It's a piece of wire with two little handles. It will still open your finger if you're careless with it, especially if you're pulling it toward yourself instead of down and away. When you're cutting a slab off the block, keep your other hand well clear of the path, and don't rush it. I've never cut myself badly, but I've come close enough times to know it's not a "probably fine" kind of tool.
Cover everything. I mean it.
We live at about 4,600 feet, dry air, hard water, the whole package, and that dry air is working against you every single second your clay is exposed. I will say this in every lesson until it stops being funny to you. A slab that looks fine when you step away for ten minutes can be skinned over and cracking by the time you get back.
I learned this one the expensive way. I lost an entire batch of bowls because I stepped away to answer a work email and the slabs dried out from the edges in. Fourteen minutes, tops. Gone.
So: plastic wrap, damp towels, or my actual go-to, which is a shower cap from the big Costco pack. I buy them by the dozen for this exact purpose and nobody believes me until they try it themselves. It's a perfect little dome that seals right over a bowl or a cup in progress. Nobody at the register asks questions.
Score and slip. No exceptions.
This is the one place I don't budge, and I want you to hear it as a rule, not a suggestion. Every single time you join two pieces of clay, you score both surfaces (little crosshatch scratches with a fork or a tool), you add slip (that's just clay mixed with water into something like pudding), and then you press them together. Every join. Every time. I don't care if the pieces feel tacky enough to stick on their own. Score and slip anyway.
I've watched enough joins fail in the kiln to know this isn't optional, and I've had this argument with a studio instructor who thought I was being overly rigid about it. We're still friendly. I still think I was mostly right.
A small story, because it fits here
Last year, a few weeks after Maddox was born, I was up at two in the morning doing a feeding, wired and not sleeping anyway, and I went and got some clay out because I needed my hands to do something other than worry. I didn't measure carefully. I didn't check my joins as closely as I should have. It's a lumpy, honestly kind of ugly little pot. But I scored and slipped every seam out of pure muscle memory, even half asleep, even exhausted, and it held. Nothing cracked. That's the whole point of a rule like this: it works even when you don't have the bandwidth to think hard about anything else.
Before next time
Find a corner of your kitchen or garage where wiping up wet is actually realistic, not a carpeted spot you'll regret. And if you don't have shower caps in the house yet, grab some. You'll use them more than you think.
~erin