How to Make a DIY Clay Candlestick Alana Cuellar

If you are thinking about new interesting forms to try to spice up your holiday sales season, making DIY clay candlesticks is a fun project to try—especially during this festive time of year when candle-light dinners might be more common! 

In this post, an excerpt from the November/December 2024 issue of Pottery Making Illustrated, Alana Cuellar shares how she makes carved, wheel-thrown candlesticks. The carved designs create a lovely opportunity for pooling glazes! Give it a try! - Jennifer Poellot Harnetty, editor

PS. To see how Alana makes beautiful highly carved tiles, check out the full article in the November/December 2024 issue of Pottery Making Illustrated! Not a subscriber? Subscribe today!

Carving a Relief Candlestick

I start with a 1–1½ pound (16–24 ounce) ball of clay to throw a simple, straight-sided candlestick form with a flared foot (1). Allow the shape to stiffen to a leather-hard consistency—soft enough to still carve but stiff enough to hold it’s shape.

Once leather hard, clean up the edge of the foot and use a loop tool to carve out a chunk of clay from the middle of the underside so the resulting pot isn’t too thick or heavy (2). I like to do this by holding the candlestick in one hand and gently twisting the loop tool where I want to remove clay in a confident motion, which might take a little practice.

Plan how you want to carve the candlestick. Again, straight or gently curved lines are the easiest to cut. Rather than breaking this pot down into a grid of repeating motifs, I think of the candlesticks as a stack of shapes and try to consider how to compose the stack in a way that interests me.

I always begin by defining the top of the candlestick. Using your X-Acto knife and a banding wheel, gently turn the pot and cut away V-shaped pieces of clay along the rim (3). Continue to define the part of the candlestick that will hold the candle by making two parallel, horizontal cuts (4), angling the cuts toward each other, and removing the resulting small band of clay (5). Be careful not to cut too deep as you could cut the candlestick in half.

Gently sketch out the rest of your plan with the tip of your knife (6). Cut out wedges of negative space to reveal the shapes you want, as with the tiles. I use the lines on my banding wheel and make little marks on the clay as I’m planning the design to make the spacing somewhat consistent. On the candlesticks, I like to go back with a tiny loop tool or a sgraffito tool and add lines for texture (7). If there are any crumbs of clay left after making your marks with the loop tool, wait until the pot is bone dry to brush them away. The band of lines on the upper side of this candlestick reminds me of an Elizabethan collar.

Like the tiles, these are fun to glaze in something that will highlight the textures and patterns, but I don’t think the inlay strategy will work as well on this vertical, more complex form. Once fired and in use, you can clean the melted wax out of the relief carved candlestick by soaking it in hot water. This will soften the wax and make it easier to pry off the pot, though layers of melted wax could be a beautiful feature of this pot too!

Alana Cuellar is a Venezuelan-American potter living in Wisconsin. To her, handmade objects contain quiet magic that cultivates pleasure and joy. The pots she makes are intended for use in everyday life.