this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2025
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Pottery

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In an attempt to improve my throwing practice I’m going to take a 200 cylinder challenge. I figure why not share my pain with the community in case someone is masochistic like me. Linked are the details to the challenge and a progress tracker one can use. Enjoy!

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[–] Arcanepotato@crazypeople.online 2 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

Hell yeah!

I created an imgur gallery to track my own. I'm keeping 1/5 to trim each time because I love trimming so it's an incentive.

https://imgur.com/a/NkP6mkr

[–] peregrin5@piefed.social 1 points 14 hours ago

brilliant idea!

[–] ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 5 days ago (2 children)

I don't know the first thing about pottery, so please forgive me if I'm saying something stupid.

When I want to get good at something, forcing myself to do exercises or train myself with no other purpose than the training itself never works for me. Instead, I try to find some interesting or worthwhile project that requires me to acquire the skills I need to complete it.

In your case, instead of a challenge to make 200 cylinders - that you yourself reckon is masochistic - why not make 200 pots for some community that could use them? Something like that, with a purpose. I bet it would be more rewarding and you'd get the practice with a sense of purpose to boot.

[–] Arcanepotato@crazypeople.online 2 points 15 hours ago

In your case, instead of a challenge to make 200 cylinders - that you yourself reckon is masochistic - why not make 200 pots for some community that could use them? Something like that, with a purpose. I bet it would be more rewarding and you'd get the practice with a sense of purpose to boot.

There are many more steps from throwing a cylinder to creating a piece that can be used. And these steps have separate skills, need access to specialized equipment, is expensive, etc

One of the reasons to do this over and over again is to cut the cylinder to see the cross section. This will let you see what is off on your technique, and see how you are progressing.

The clay can also be recycled, it's only wasting a small amount of material that doesn't make it back into the reclaim pile.

[–] peregrin5@piefed.social 4 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

With pottery you can indeed approach it from a project based approach, which a lot of us (including myself) do in most cases. However, a clay artist may find that they aren’t improving very quickly or becoming as fluent as they would like to be. With throwing pottery, developing the muscle memory is important and this can only come by doing LOTS of throwing.

This is where such a challenge shines.

Another blocker for myself and I assume many other potters is the tendency to be perfectionist and trying to complete every pot you throw. This will just slow you down and often can become a mental blocker to getting started if you are finding yourself discouraged because your pieces aren’t turning out how you want them to turn out.

It can feel like you aren’t improving anymore and you’ve hit a wall. I think this comes from trying to "play it safe" due to trying to always create finished products so you leave things thicker and chunkier than you could make them because if you push the boundaries you risk the pot collapsing.

By making a determination that all the pots you make for this challenge WILL be destroyed, you free yourself from that mental block. It’s the “get the failures out early” approach and reduces the fear of failure since you know it’s destined for reclaim anyway. You can begin to experiment with trying to take your pieces higher or thinner without caring too much if the piece gets destroyed in the process.

Doing this exercise is about doing a targeted level up of your throwing skill. Cutting them in half and analyzing your weak points to do better on in the next cylinder is the most efficient way to improve.

It also doesn’t prevent you from doing your other pottery projects should you decide to do them. This particular challenge has no rules on pacing. Take a month, or a year if you want. Do things in between. Just complete it.

I would recommend against making 200 pots with the determination to offload them on some community or other. After being fired, the pots you make can never become throwable clay again. And you’d be essentially trying to offload your poorly made practice pots on someone else who generally doesn’t need them. Not to mention that would require 400-500lbs of clay and firing fees which would get prohibitively expensive.

The goal of this is to never have to “think" about making a cylinder again. Your body will just know how to do it, quickly, fluently, and to a high degree of quality.