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.

There are (and only will be) 13 of these made and sold. You can view each individual piece below. 

The Final Result