Built at a kitchen table, after one too many ruined glaze days

I had been on the wheel about a year and a half when this started. Long enough to centre reliably and pull a decent wall, and long enough to have a shelf of pieces I did not like — not because the throwing was bad, but because the glaze had turned out to be something other than what I pictured, or because the mug I meant to make came out squat since I had guessed the clay wrong and run out of wall halfway up.

Glaze day was the worst of it. A week of work, and then a decision made in about four seconds over a bucket of grey sludge with a label written in marker. I would open the kiln two days later and find out I had covered a piece I loved in something that fought it. There is no undo for that. You cannot un-glaze a pot.

My husband is an engineer, and he watched me do this often enough to get quietly annoyed on my behalf. His first suggestion was software he already knew: learn Fusion 360, model the mug, do the arithmetic there. I tried. It sat unused within a week. The software existed and it was perfectly capable — it just was not for me. It wanted sketches and constraints and extrusions, and I wanted a rim and a belly and a foot. Nothing in it knew what a foot ring was, or that clay shrinks, or that the colour in the bucket is a lie.

So he built the thing I actually wanted, and I kept handing him problems. The clay calculator exists because I kept wedging the wrong ball. The fired preview exists because of glaze day. Calibration exists because the textbook shrinkage number was not my clay’s shrinkage number. The stamp exporter mirrors your mark automatically because I once printed one the right way round and pressed a backwards signature into eleven pots.

I am user zero, and I am the last review before anything ships. If it does not feel like pottery, it does not ship — not because that is a nice slogan, but because I am the one who has to use it on a Sunday with clay under my fingernails. Clayista is small, it is made by two people, and every feature in it started as a real problem on a real shelf of real pots.