In an earlier post here, I wrote about what precipitated my start to making moonpots. I’d been long fascinated with the engineering aspect of the Yixing pottery and the event was just the catalyst I needed to try my hand at it. You may be asking yourself, “but where is Kest’s pottery wheel?” There is no pottery wheel needed to make these. In the video above, Part 1, you can see the simple slab pieces and how the paddling technique creates the curved walls. There is a 6” diameter slab (1/4” thickness”) on the blue banding dais around which the 20” (or so) slab is wrapped.

Part 2 shows the finished first half which is then flipped over. I then paddle the other half of the wall:

Part 3 ~ closing the pot. There’s air now trapped inside the clay (it’s a clay balloon!) which allows me to press and work on the outside of the pot without deforming it.

Once I get the vessel closed up, I can add feet, carve decorations in the walls, add a saddle for the lid, and more. As it firms up, I can paddle it and scrape it more to make it uniformly spherical.

When I was a kid, I was more than slightly obsessed with little boxes of any sort. Then, I didn’t know for certain why. Perhaps because they held my most important treasures and keepsakes; I stashed my secrets in them but I could have just as easily put them in a shoebox. I think it was the act of removing or raising the lids which made opening them something of a small ritual and emphasized the value of what I kept there.