The Ceramic Bowl I Made Seventeen Times (And What Version Twelve Taught Me About Getting Better)

The Bowl That Wouldn’t Cooperate

I have a ceramic bowl sitting on my kitchen counter that looks unremarkable. It holds fruit badly—too shallow—and the glaze pooled unevenly on one side during firing. Most people would call it flawed. I call it version seventeen of a design I started working on eight months ago, and it’s the first one I’ve been willing to eat from.

This year, I’ve been thinking a lot about the space between versions twelve and thirteen. Version twelve was when I finally admitted that my original vision—a deep, perfectly symmetrical bowl with a matte black interior—was fighting against everything I was learning about clay. Version thirteen was when I stopped trying to impose my will on the material and started listening to what it wanted to become.

The Lies We Tell About Progress

Most creative advice suggests that iteration is linear. Version two is better than version one, version three improves on version two, and so on until you reach some platonic ideal of your original vision. This is complete nonsense, and anyone who’s actually tried to develop a craft knows it.

Version eight of my bowl was gorgeous. Perfect proportions, clean lines, exactly what I’d sketched in my notebook. It also cracked in half during the final firing because I’d rushed the drying process. Version nine was technically superior—stronger construction, better clay preparation—but looked like something from a hospital cafeteria. Version ten was an overreaction to version nine, so ornate that it lost all functionality.

The real work happens in the spaces between these versions. In the three days I spent staring at version eight’s broken pieces, trying to understand what went wrong. In the moment I realized that version nine’s ugliness came from my fear of taking risks after the previous failure. In the afternoon I spent with version ten, trying to drink coffee from a bowl with ridges that cut into your lip.

Learning to Read Failure

Here’s what no one tells you about iteration: most versions won’t be stepping stones to something better. They’ll be dead ends, wrong turns, and occasionally spectacular disasters that teach you more than a dozen successful attempts.

Version six of my bowl taught me that I don’t understand physics as well as I thought I did. I’d designed an elegant curve that looked beautiful in my sketches but created structural weakness points that made the bowl impossible to fire successfully. Three different attempts, same failure point, same physics lesson I kept trying to argue with instead of accepting.

Version fourteen was my attempt to apply everything I’d learned about clay behavior, drying times, and thermal expansion. It was technically flawless and completely soulless. I could have sold it at a craft fair, but I couldn’t look at it without feeling like I’d optimized away everything that made the project interesting in the first place.

The Version That Changed Everything

Version fifteen happened on a day when I was tired of thinking. I’d been overthinking every decision for weeks, second-guessing each curve and angle. So I sat down with a lump of clay and just started working with my hands, no sketches, no measuring tools, no plan.

What came out was asymmetrical, slightly wobbly, and completely unlike anything I’d been trying to make. The walls were thinner than I usually dared attempt, the rim was irregular, and there was a small thumbprint pressed into the base where I’d held it while shaping. It looked like someone had actually made it by hand instead of trying to replicate a machine-made ideal.

When it came out of the kiln, I understood something about my own work that I’d been missing for months. I’d been trying to make the perfect bowl instead of making my bowl. The difference is everything.

What Seventeen Versions Actually Taught Me

The ceramic bowl project is over now, but only because I’ve learned what I needed to learn from it. Not how to make the perfect bowl—that was never really the point—but how to stay curious about a problem long enough for it to teach me something unexpected.

Version seventeen isn’t better than version one because it’s closer to my original vision. It’s better because it includes everything I’ve learned about clay, about my own hands, about the difference between what looks good in a sketch and what feels good to use. It holds soup beautifully, even if it can’t hold fruit. The uneven glaze catches light in ways I never could have planned.

The real skill isn’t in making perfect iterations. It’s in staying engaged with imperfect ones long enough to understand what they’re trying to tell you. Version twelve looked like a failure when I made it, but it contained the seed of every successful version that followed. I just had to learn how to read it.

What project are you on version twelve of right now? What would happen if instead of trying to fix what’s wrong, you spent some time listening to what it’s trying to become?

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