Pottery Pitcher: Drying the Cylinder

Video Transcript

So we have thrown our pitcher and as you can see this pitcher has run into a few problems. So I would like to talk now about drying your pot because as we can see this is a very good example of how something has gone wrong. What happened here is I left too much water inside the pot when I was throwing and that water seeped into the walls and collapsed my pitcher. So you can see how when we leave water in there and this pot dries unevenly it sinks on itself. So we will put this one aside and I have thrown another example here and this is a different pitcher. Obviously I have thrown a different shape just to illustrate the different form and we will be using this for the rest of our exercise. And so what I have here is a drying rack and I have these pieces of wood here that I can put my pots on to and simply place them into the rack. I have adjustable shelves here so that if I make large pieces or small pieces I can use this rack. And the objective of drying is to have this piece dry out nice and evenly and slow so there is no harsh drying spots and we don't get any cracking on the pot. This particular drying shelving unit is open and this is because it is winter time in Oregon and my concerns are not that this is going to dry out too quickly. In the summer time I have a closed in cabinet with a door on the front that seals in nicely and will lock in the moisture inside and allow this to dry nice and evenly. Now often times the top will dry out quicker than the bottom, so I sometimes just like to drape a piece of plastic over the top of my vessel so that the top will dry slower than the bottom. Note I am not actually sealing it there I am just laying it on there loosely. If you happen to come into your studio and see the bottom of the pot is drying out too much and you are not ready to trim yet you can also just take a piece of plastic and wrap it around the base and this will ensure that it stays moist enough to trim. Now this is still very wet and it is not going to pop off the bat yet so we are going to leave this on the drying shelf and come back to it later and I will show you how it is trimmed.

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