How to Make a Pinch Pot

Video Transcript

Hi! This is Roy Stringfellow for expertvillage.com. Today we’re talking about hand building a ceramic clay pots and vessels. There are a couple of ways to do this. One of the ways is what we call a pinch pot. What you do is you take a small piece of clay or any size that you want, and you form it up in a shape of a little ball. For a pinch pot, what you do is stick your thumb in the middle of the clay and slowly begin moving it around until you finally have the desired thickness and the desired diameter that you’re looking for. These are some of the more old and traditional ways of making a pot. Long before modern time, our ancient relatives probably made pots very similar to this way of doing things. You simply make it something like this. Of course as you can see, a pinch pot is going to be a little more difficult than you think in making it symmetric and getting the kind of form that you want out of it. But this is a simple of idea of here is a pinch pot. The other kind of pot that you can make by hand rather than on wheel, which is the way many things are made, is what we call a coil pot. That’s by taking pieces of clay…I’m going to tear this one up…and making small coils out of them. Then laying the coils around the base and then stacking them on top of each other. So something like this. What we’ll talk about a little bit more is going to be the bases of the next pot that we’re going to be doing.

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