I made these ceramic travel tumblers by combining the cupholder-friendly shape and logo placement from Stanley tumblers with the ceramic tumblers made by @lue.pots on Instagram. 

In making this piece, there were four problems I had to solve:

Shape 

As with Stanley's, I wanted the body of the tumbler to fit into my car cupholder. Because clay shrinks, I had to figure out my thrown dimensions, so I went out and measured my cupholder. With these dimensions and my specific clay shrink rate, I inputed the numbers in the "final dimensions" of a Clay Shrinkage Calculator.

Another problem was figuring out how to get the shape I was imagining translated to the wheel. You can see in the images below the variations. 

Stamping the Logo 

I wanted a debossed look on the tumblers and the problem I faced here was getting a good deep imprint in the clay. The first few times I put in my stamp, the logo was not pushing deep into the clay enough. At first I thought it was a matter of timing the dryness of the clay and stamping it when it was a bit more wet. After many tries, I found I needed to add something on the inside of the piece to push back the force of my stamp; sandwiching the clay between forces from the outside and the inside. So, I held a glass cup on the inside of the tumbler while I stamped on the outside. 

I also realized the logo would look a lot better smaller so I got a smaller stamp.  

Mouth Piece Attachment 

A problem I encountered was timing the dryness of the clay when I attached the mouth piece. If you're a potter and have ever attached handles on a mug, you know the frustration of timing the clay so that they don't crack. I learned, just like with making a mug, that the tumbler could not be too dry and the mouth piece I was attaching could not be too dry either. Timing was imperative if I didn't want any cracks. 

With the mouth piece of the tumblers, I wanted a nice small oval shape. After some attempts, I decided to 3D print a mouth piece cutter to get a consistent shape. 

Glazing 

Glazing these are kind of tricky as I wanted the logo to be free of glaze. I put liquid wax into a squeeze bottle and then squeezed the wax into the logo. This worked a little bit, though since the logo is so deep, glaze would still find its way into the logo and I would have to manually scrap it out. In some of the mistake photos, the glaze ran into the logo because I forgot to wax it. My final solution was to put liquid latex in a squeeze bottle, squeeze the latex into the logo, and glaze the piece. Once the piece was glazed, I would pull out the latex.

To see how I make these tumblers from start to finish, check out my tutorial here.

The Final Result