Pottery Pitcher: Trimming Pitcher on the Wheel

Video Transcript

O.k. so here we have our pitcher; it's been sitting in the drying rack for a couple of days and now it is ready to trim. Now with a pitch like this we have an irregular shape on the top which makes it really hard to flip over and trim the base; on within other lessons I've showed you how to throw a chuck which is useful with things with long necks and if you want to find out how to throw a chuck to trim a pot like this refer to our lesson on the bottle necked vase. However what I'm going to show you now is something a little different and simpler; it's just simply trimming it while it's still on the wheel and for this I'm going to use these trimming tools here, and I; I, I haven't removed it from the bat from when we we're throwing it so it's on center nicely right now. So I'm going to simply turn the wheel on and take my trimming tool and put it down at the base, and start trimming off excess clay. And you can see that it's ready to trim because the clay is simply falling off and not sticking to the pitcher; I'm going to go again. Now often times while you're throwing a pitcher you're going to leave some excess clay down here at the base because you're pulling out the form and it helps to hold it up so we can go ahead, and take that off now. You want to keep in mind how much clay is down there because you don't want to take off too much and make it too thin in the base but we do want to carve it in to form a nice elegant base on it; going up the walls, thinning them out. O.k. so the last thing we want to do now is take one of our rib tools here and simply take away the bottom piece; the excess at the bottom here. You can see what we're doing is creating an undercut and defining an edge, and a base for this pot. So now we want to take the; our wire tool, go under it nice and slow, wait for it to pop off and lift it up off the bat. So we've taken our pitcher here and we've detached it, and we've done our trimming while it's on the wheel and what we're going to want to do is take our thumb; and simply press it in and form a foot. Now normally on a wheel; if we we're trimming on the wheel we would be doing this with a trimming tool however you can see how that's quite effective, now we've created a nice foot for this to sit on. O.k. so the next thing we're going to be doing is pulling a handle for this pot and then attaching it; and I'll be showing you how to do that next.

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