Learning the Pottery Wheel at 50

Diane Foster signed up for a pottery class the week she turned 50. Her first twenty bowls collapsed. Her twenty-first is on our office desk. It is a little lopsided, glazed a soft sea green that pools darker at the bottom, and it holds paper clips, a few stray buttons and, on most afternoons, someone’s half-eaten granola bar. It is, by any honest measure, not a perfect bowl. It is also one of the most admired objects in our office, and the story behind it is one of the best we have heard this year.

Diane, a hospital billing manager from Kansas City, Missouri, wrote to us last spring after reading our makers issue. She had spent three decades working long hours at a desk, raising two children and taking care of everyone else. When her birthday came around, her daughter asked what she wanted to do for herself for once. Without thinking, Diane said she wanted to get her hands dirty. A week later she was sitting at a pottery wheel in a community studio, wearing an old apron, watching a lump of wet clay wobble violently in front of her.

Centering is everything

Before you make anything, you have to center the clay on the wheel. It takes most beginners weeks. Centering means pressing a spinning lump of clay into a perfectly symmetrical mound, so that it turns smoothly without wobbling. If the clay is even slightly off center, every bowl you try to throw from it will lean, twist or collapse as the walls rise.