Solving a pottery problem

I’ve been making pottery again (finally!) in the new studio space at my house. I actually managed to get a space in the garage cleaned out where I now have a wheel, kiln, shelf space, and a table. Later, I’ll post about the nerdy setup I’ve put together for my kiln that will collect data about firings. For now, I have just been trying to make some pots and get a feel for the clay again, as it has been about a year since I did any work.

One of the things that has been interesting to me is how many little things the community studio I worked in had in place. I knew things like glazes and decorating materials would be something I had to take care of, but there are also things like ware boards, cleaning sponges, table-mounted wire, scale, etc. that I used pretty regularly. Some of these things I’ve put together myself (like the table mounted wire that I use for “stack and slam wedging” - there are lots of videos of this, but I love this dude’s old-guy-intensity about it), others I’ll just have to work around (instead of running water in sinks, I have a three bucket cleaning system). The crew over at Claymakers definitely has the space well set up to be productive and there are little details in place that you may not even know you needed. One that I ran into recently is a template for evenly dividing circles.

Circles everywhere

When you throw most of your work on the wheel, you deal with the circular nature of pieces a lot. And when decorating, it’s nice to have a design join well around the pot. To do so, you often need planning and measuring to make it come together. I was decorating a bowl and making a poor showing of the measuring part and wishing I had the little template from the community studio that had circles marked out in various increments (thirds, quarters, eights, etc.). Plastic templates can be found easily online, but priced out pretty high and would take a few days to arrive. I did a little searching and didn’t find any downloadable templates I liked - those that looked promising were all in that black hole that is Pinterest. So, in the DIY spirit of potters everywhere, I decided to make my own.

I laid it out using Affinity Designer software and printed out a small version before sizing it up to 12"x12" and printing it on the big printer. I think it turned out pretty well and thought I’d share it with the world. So, if you have need of a template to help you divide circles up to 24 times, please download and print one of the PDF’s below. If some of you get some use out of it, too, I’ll feel much better about the time I put into it. I’ll start with two, but will likely add at least two more to cover odd fractions (these first two cover dividing by: 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, and 24). The concentric rings start at 1" in diameter and go up to 6" for the Letter-sized template and up to 10" for the large one.

• Circle Division Template - Even - Letter
• Circle Division Template - Even - 12" x 12" - You’ll need a printer that can print very wide paper for this one to size correctly. You could probably print it cheaply at Kinko’s, even though they aren’t called that anymore.