Making a Pinch Pot

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I’m Jenni Fritzlan. I am a potter and an instructor at Ploughshare. In this video, I’m going to show you how to make a pinch pot.

For anyone wanting to learn how to do hand building, a pinch pot is a very good place to start. It seems like a simple little thing to do. But what a pinch pot will teach you to do is to control the clay.

And it’s fun for children. They enjoy taking a ball of clay and jamming their thumb into the middle to make a little pot. But a pinch pot is good for any age.

A pinch pot can be as simple as a little bowl to put knickknacks, or it could be as elaborate as a footed cream pitcher.

I’ll just start here by making a small ball. The more smooth and the more round that you get it to begin with, the smoother the finished product is going to be. Once you have a nice round ball, take your thumb and poke it straight down into the middle.

Then you can begin to squeeze. Squeeze with the long part of your fingers, not just with your fingertips. A squeeze. Then turn. And just keep squeezing and turning until you go all the way around.

And continue to go around until you get the walls of a consistent thickness.

You can see now that the bowl is a little rough on the lip. This is where you really begin to fine tune it and this is where you really learn to start controlling the clay. I’m going to take it where it’s thin– you see there’s a thin spot here and it’s thicker here.

I’ll work the thick spots out to be the same as the thinner spots.

I’ll also work up any clay from the bottom.

I’m just feeling around to see if the walls are all consistently the same thickness.

Now, I’ll begin to work the lumps out of the top of it. You can push the clay back and forth.

Just keep working with your thumbs and fingers to smooth out the cracks. And work all the lumps out.

While you’re working with the pinch pot to get the walls all of an even thickness, keep the pot cupped in your hand as you work with it. But once you have it pretty much the right thickness, you can set it down on the table.

Gently tap it. And then use your finger on the inside– or your thumb– to smooth it around. And that will create a base for your pot.

You can also, at this point, turn it over and use your finger to smooth out any cracks or crevices on the outside.

That’s basically it for a pinch pot. You can keep working on it to smooth it. And make them a little bit bigger. Start with a small pinch pot. But you can go to making a bigger size pinch pot and make several matching pinch pots and you’d have a set of salsa bowls.

Or you can try making a square pinch pot. Or a rectangle. And all those different things will help you to manipulate the clay into the shape you want it to be. And this will help you later for many other projects.

There’s a lot of different projects that you can do. Very tall vases. Different pieces that you can make. But if you learn how to make a pinch pot now, it will help you later to make much bigger and more elaborate pieces

If you don’t have access to a kiln and you would like to do this at home, you can by self-drying clay at a craft store and finish it out yourself at home. You wouldn’t be able to use it for food, but you can paint it with acrylic paints and then use it for a little knickknack dish.

Here’s a little pinch pot. Make lots of them.

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