Pulling handles: the fourth one stayed on
Pulled handles are the part of mug-making that looks easiest and is not. You take a carrot of clay, wet your hand, and stroke it downward until it lengthens into a strap, then bend it onto the mug. I can pull a decent strap now. Getting it to stay attached through drying and firing took four weeks.
Handle one cracked at the top join while drying on the shelf, a hairline that opened to a gap by the time it was bone dry. Handle two cracked at the bottom join. Handle three, which I attached with extra slip and a lot of hope, cracked at both. The mugs were fine; the handles were fine; the place where they met was not.
The cause was moisture mismatch. I was pulling the handle fresh and wet and attaching it to a mug that had been drying since the previous Tuesday and was well past leather-hard, almost stiff. The wet handle shrank as it dried and the stiff mug did not, and the join tore. Slip does not fix that. Nothing fixes that except making the two parts the same wetness when they meet.
Handle four went like this. I threw the mug at the start of class, and while it sat I pulled a handle, laid it over a rolling pin to set in a curve for twenty minutes, and then attached it when both the mug and the handle were at the same soft leather-hard stage, firm but still cool and damp. I scored both surfaces with a needle, wet them with slip, pressed firmly and worked the join with a wooden tool so there was no visible seam. Then, and this is the part I had skipped, the whole mug went into a plastic box with a damp sponge for the week, so the join dried slowly and evenly instead of in the studio’s dry air.
It came out of the box the next Tuesday with no crack, and out of the bisque kiln the week after still whole. The handle is slightly too thick at the top and I pressed a thumbprint into the bottom join by accident, but I am keeping that. It is the first mug I have made that you can pick up by the handle, and it holds about 300 ml. The three failures are on the shelf at home as pencil pots, which is what cracked-handle mugs are for.