What Pottery Template Weekly Actually Is
Pottery Template Weekly is a subscription-based resource that delivers vector and raster templates for pottery forms — wheel-thrown profiles, coil-building guides, and slab-cutting patterns — on a recurring schedule. Most of what you'll find is organized by vessel type: mugs, bowls, vessels with curves, lidded jars, and so on. The templates are designed to be imported into vector software and scaled to whatever diameter or height your production requires. I figured out the practical workflow after my first order arrived in a ZIP file with three separate folders and no index. Here is how I actually use it. Step one — download the current week's files and copy them to a dedicated folder before opening anything. The compressed archive mixes SVG, AI, and PDF formats, and it is easy to lose track of which format belongs to which tool if you work directly out of the download location.
Step two — open the template in Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape. I use Inkscape because it is free and handles the SVG exports fine. Set your document units to millimeters immediately, or you will spend twenty minutes trying to figure out why a 150 mm bowl came out the size of a dinner plate. Step three — trace or import the profile onto your work surface. For wheel throwing, I lay the template under a transparency sheet and mark the key diameter points directly on the clay bat with a needle tool. For slab work, I print the template at scale, tape it to the cutting surface, and use it as a physical guide. Step four — adjust the template for your specific clay body. This is where most people make mistakes. A template designed for stoneware at 12% moisture behaves differently from one meant for porcelain at 14%. The walls shrink and slump during drying, so I scale the template up by about 3-5% depending on the recipe, then test a single piece before committing to a batch.
Step five — save your adjusted version under a new filename. Never overwrite the original weekly file, because next week's drop may replace it and you will have lost your modified work. The whole process for a standard mug profile goes from download to ready-to-use template in roughly 12 to 18 minutes once you know where everything lives. The first time, it took me about forty-five minutes because I opened the wrong folder and spent twenty minutes looking for a file that was labeled differently than I expected.
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What the Templates Actually Cover
Each weekly delivery typically contains between six and twelve template sets. The profiles are broken down by form factor rather than by size, which means you get a mug profile, a small bowl profile, a wide bowl profile, and maybe a lidded jar profile. Each set includes front and side views when relevant, plus the rim contour line that most template systems skip entirely. The file naming convention is where beginners get tripped up. Pottery Template Weekly names files using a format like MUG-STD-V2.svg or BOWL-WIDE-PRO.svg, but the letters do not always match the description in the catalog. I learned this the hard way when I spent an afternoon trying to use a template labeled "standard" and found it was narrower than anything I would call standard for a 12 oz mug. The workaround was simple — measure the diameter on the file's artboard itself rather than trusting the filename.
Where The System Breaks Down
Pottery Template Weekly works well for throw-centered and slab-built forms that stay close to rotational symmetry. It does not work for hand-building irregular shapes, coiled vessels with intentional wobble, or anything that requires asymmetric foot rings. The templates assume a center axis and uniform wall thickness, which means they cannot account for the way raku pieces crack or warp during firing. Another limitation is the lack of thickness guidance. The templates show profile outlines but rarely indicate wall thickness at any given point. If you are working with a thin-walled porcelain vase, you need to figure out the thickness yourself or combine the template with a separate thickness chart. I keep a small spreadsheet with wall thickness recommendations for different clay bodies and vessel sizes, cross-referenced against the template dimensions. That takes maybe ten extra minutes but prevents a dozen cracked pieces later. The download schedule is weekly, but the library of older templates is accessible if you maintain your subscription. Cancel and you lose access to previous weeks' files. I kept every download for three years and now have a local archive that functions as a personal template library. That archive has saved me more than once when a specific form I needed was not included in the current week's drop.
A Counter-Intuitive Thing No One Mentions
Most people treat these templates as final shapes. They are not. They are starting coordinates. The actual form changes as the clay dries, and the change is not uniform across the profile. The base tends to shrink more than the rim because it carries more mass. I discovered this when I made a batch of 8 oz mugs using the template exactly as delivered and ended up with lids that did not fit because the rim had shrunk inward by about 2 mm while the base had shrunk by 4 mm. The fix was to scale the rim portion of the template slightly outward before tracing. I did this by selecting the top 15% of the profile path in Illustrator, scaling it by 1.02 on the X and Y axes independently, and then rejoining the path. It sounds complicated but takes about three minutes once you know the steps. After that adjustment, my lid fit rate went from roughly 40% to nearly 90%.
When I Would Skip It Entirely
If your studio specializes in large functional ware — plates over 300 mm, table vases, or anything that requires custom foot designs — Pottery Template Weekly is not efficient for your workflow. The templates are optimized for studio-scale production in the 8 to 20 oz range. Going significantly larger introduces scaling distortion that the vector paths do not account for, and you end up spending more time correcting the template than you save by using it. In that case, I recommend building your own master templates using a physical exemplar. Measure an existing piece you are happy with, digitize the outline, and create a scaled-up version. It takes longer upfront but pays off after the third batch because you eliminate the guesswork entirely. For smaller studios doing consistent mug and bowl work, the weekly system saves 10 to 15 minutes per project compared to freeform sketching and measuring. Over a month of production, that adds up to roughly two hours of saved setup time. The templates also reduce the error rate on repeat orders, which matters when you are fulfilling the same order three times in a row for different clients.
The resource is available through their website at potterytemplateweekly.com. You subscribe, receive the weekly files, and manage your archive locally. Nothing ships physically, so there is no waiting for delivery. If you run into the naming confusion I described, measure before you trust and save your modified versions separately. That is the part that saves you from frustration.
