Ceramic Plates: Trimming the Plate

Video Transcript

So to trim this plate here I'm going to use these two tools here. These are our trimming tools that I showed you earlier. First, I am going to simply trim the edge of this plate and I am going to use this larger of the two tools like this. Trim away a portion of the edge like so. So, you can see we have created a nice little lip and a groove. You can do any kind of shape that you want, I am just using a fairly standard shape. Now with a plate, I am going to use this tool again and draw it across and make sure this is a nice flat surface. As you can see, the clay is spiraling off of there nicely. Now, I am keeping in mind how much clay I have in the bottom here because I don't want to go through with this tool. Basically, the idea of a foot is to create a ring around the outside of your pot so it's not just one flat surface. When you have a large flat surface, especially on the plate, if you put it on a table and there was just a crumb of bread on the table, the plate would be uneven. So, what we are going to do, I am going to use my smaller tool for this, it doesn't matter you can use them either way. I am simply going to take a chunk of clay out of the center of my plate. Now, you can note that my clay is ready for trimming because it's sticking to itself and I'm able to simply discard it like that. Now what I am doing with this tool, as you can see, is creating a spiral pattern on the bottom of the plate. If I was to use a flat edge, I would be creating a flat edge on here. If I was to use this one, I would also get a flat edge. I can put little details into the foot with my tools using different sides of the tool. So, there we have a little defining ring at the end. So, as you can see we've created a nice foot on this plate. The concerns on the plate, again, it's a very delicate surface. We don't want to apply too much surface with our tool and we definitely want this surface to be good and dry or in the right stage of drying for trimming, especially on a plate because it's so large and flat. So now I'm going to detach this plate and in the next segment I'm going to talk about some final touch-ups and some last concerns before we file this piece.

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