How to Make Ceramic Coffee Cup Handle

Ceramic cups designed to hold hot beverages, such as coffee, need handles to keep coffee drinkers from burning their fingers. Making and selling ceramic coffee cups can be an excellent fund raiser if you can make a few dozen at a time.

Difficulty: Moderately Easy

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• 3lb. ball of soft, unfired, wedged clay
• Dish of water
• Drying board
• Sharpened pencil
• Small sponge
• Plastic grocery bag

Making the Handle

1. Pat ball of clay into an elongated, rounded cone shape. Hold the large end of the cone in your left hand, and dip the small end and your right hand in water.

2. Smooth out and elongate the small end with your wet and slippery right hand until the round cone shape becomes a ball with a strip hanging down 4 to 6 inches. The strip should taper a little so that one end is a little fatter than the other.

3. Drape the wet strip over the fingers of your right hand to give it a curve, and pinch the strip off the ball. Keep your right hand wet and slippery or you will accidentally pinch off the strip before you mean to or make it uneven and lumpy.

4. Set the strip onto the drying board, bending the curve up into an arch resting on two points. The arch should look something like half a heart shape. The fat part of the handle should be the highest part of the arch.

5. Pat the rest of the ball of clay into another round cone shape, and smooth out another handle. Repeat until you use up all the clay and have several handles on your board.

6. Slip the board with the wet handles on top of it inside the plastic grocery bag. Leave the handles to dry to the leather hard stage. Drying times will vary considerably depending on the initial wetness of the clay and the humidity in your studio, but leaving them loosely covered overnight is usually safe. If your studio is especially dry, you should check on your handles every few hours.

7. Choose the best handle for your cup. When the cup and the handle are both leather hard, use a sharpened pencil to score the parts of the handle and the parts of the cup that will touch each other. Rub a dab of very wet clay (from the bottom of your water dish) into the score marks with your fingers, and smooth the handle onto the cup using a damp sponge.

Tips & Warnings

• Wet clay shrinks as it dries and is fired, so make your greenware slightly bigger than you want the finished piece. Make sure your handle is big enough to support the weight of the cup when it is full. Make sure your handle fits in a human hand. A slightly flattened cylindrical shape is easier to hold than a perfectly round cylindrical shape. Remember that your handle is an element in the design of your cup and should look like it goes with the rest of your design.
• Never drink out of unfired ceramic containers because they cannot be made sanitary. Never hold an unfired ceramic container by its handles alone, or the handles may break off. Never wet bone-dry greenware because it will instantly dissolve into the water.