Every pottery mug template starts somewhere. Most start in a sketchbook. These three started in a museum.
Swan, Cocoon, and Drum are the three slab-built mug templates in The Mug Trio, our newest booklet for potters handbuilding without a wheel. Each silhouette traces its lineage to a specific ancient drinking cup in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, spanning roughly a thousand years and two civilizations, from Bronze Age Crete to Archaic Greece.
This post is the story of those three objects, how they became flat paper templates, and what changes when a mug shape carries that much history.
Why start with museum objects?
Slab building has a translation problem. A curved vessel is a three dimensional idea, but a slab starts flat. Turning one into the other means deciding exactly where a form bends, where it seams, and how a handle meets a wall. Ancient potters solved these problems thousands of years ago, without templates, without a wheel in many cases, and their answers are still sitting in museum vitrines.
The Met's Open Access program makes over 490,000 images of public domain works available under Creative Commons Zero, which means anyone can study, reference, and build on them. For a template designer, that collection is not just inspiration. It is a working archive of vessel geometry, tested by actual daily use across millennia.
So instead of inventing three mug shapes, we went looking for three that had already survived history.
The three source objects
Swan: a Greek kyathos, ca. 520 to 510 BCE
Swan's high, looping handle comes from a terracotta kyathos in the Met's collection (accession 41.162.115), Greek, Attic, dated to roughly 520 to 510 BCE. A kyathos is a cup-shaped ladle with a single tall vertical handle, made for dipping wine from a larger krater. This particular one is black-figure ware, decorated with a horseman between eye motif roundels.
That tall handle is the whole personality of the form. On the original it was functional, a way to reach into a deep vessel. On Swan, it becomes the looping curve that makes the mug unmistakable on a shelf. Swan holds approximately 12 oz.
Cocoon: a Minoan cup from Pseira, ca. 2200 to 1900 BCE
Cocoon is the oldest of the three. Its tapered flare comes from a terracotta one-handled cup (accession 14.89.4), white-on-dark ware, Minoan, dated to roughly 2200 to 1900 BCE, excavated at Pseira, a small island off the coast of Crete. It entered the Met's collection in 1914 and is on view at The Met Fifth Avenue.
This cup is around 4,000 years old. Someone drank from a vessel this shape during the Bronze Age, and the silhouette still reads as a good mug today. Cocoon holds approximately 8 oz, the smallest of the trio.
Drum: a Minoan cup, ca. 1600 to 1500 BCE
Drum's sturdy footed base traces to another Minoan terracotta one-handled cup (accession 14.89.2), dated to roughly 1600 to 1500 BCE, from the same 1914 acquisition group as Cocoon's source. The two Minoan cups are separated by about 600 years, which is a longer gap than the one between us and the printing press.
Drum is the workhorse of the set, low and stable with a defined foot. It holds approximately 12 oz.
From museum vitrine to flat template
Translating these silhouettes into printable pottery templates meant answering the slab builder's core question: what does this shape look like flat?
Each mug in The Mug Trio breaks down into a body, a base, and a handle, drawn as 2D pattern pieces sized for clay with 10 to 13% shrinkage. You print the template, cut the pieces from a rolled slab, and assemble. No wheel, no mold, no measuring. The proportions were worked out once, against the source objects, so every build starts from the same tested geometry.
The three templates are also drawn at the same scale, so the sections mix and match across all three mugs. Swan's looping handle fits Drum's footed body. Cocoon's flare takes any of the three handles. Three sets of parts, and the combinations are yours to play with.
What handbuilders get from historical forms
There is a practical argument for working from ancient vessels, beyond the romance of it.
These shapes were refined by use. A cup that survived a thousand years of daily drinking culture, then two thousand more years of history, has proportions that work: a handle you can actually hold, a foot that actually sits flat, a lip that actually pours. When you build a slab mug from one of these silhouettes, you inherit those decisions.
It also changes the relationship between maker and object. A mug is a small thing, but a mug that carries a specific place and date, Pseira, Crete, 4,000 years ago, is a small thing with a long memory. Potters who work through the booklet are not just following a pottery template. They are continuing a shape.
The Mug Trio, in short
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3 slab-built mug templates: Swan, Cocoon, and Drum
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Swan (~12 oz), Cocoon (~8 oz), Drum (~12 oz)
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Each template has its own handle silhouette and body shape
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Sections designed to mix and match across all 3 mugs
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Sized for clay with 10 to 13% shrinkage
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Available as an instant PDF download or PDF plus printed sheets
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Design notes inside credit each Met source object with its accession number
[The Mug Trio is available here.]
If you are new to slab building, our guide to using pottery templates walks through printing, cutting, and assembly step by step.
FAQ
What is a slab-built mug template? A slab mug template is a printable pattern for handbuilding a mug from flat sheets of clay. You print the PDF, cut the paper pieces, trace them onto a rolled slab, and assemble the cut clay pieces into a finished mug. No pottery wheel is needed.
Can beginners use The Mug Trio templates? Yes. Slab building with templates is one of the most accessible ways to make pottery without a wheel. The templates remove the measuring and proportion work, so beginners can focus on cutting, scoring, and joining.
What clay shrinkage are the templates sized for? The Mug Trio templates are sized for clay bodies with 10 to 13% shrinkage, which covers most common stoneware clays fired to their recommended cone.
Are the mug shapes really based on Met museum objects? Yes. Each mug traces its silhouette to a specific object in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Open Access collection: Swan from a Greek kyathos ca. 520 to 510 BCE (41.162.115), Drum from a Minoan one-handled cup ca. 1600 to 1500 BCE (14.89.2), and Cocoon from a Minoan one-handled cup ca. 2200 to 1900 BCE from Pseira, Crete (14.89.4). All three are public domain under the Met's CC0 program.
Can I mix the handles and bodies between the three mugs? Yes. All three templates are drawn at the same scale, so any handle pairs with any body. Three sets of parts give you room to experiment.
