Wedging Clay for Making Clay Bowls: Part 1

Video Transcript

Our next step is wedging the clay. And the first thing you want to do is roll your sleeves up. Wedging the clay is important because we don't want air bubbles, air bubbles are not our friend. What happens is if you get an air bubble in your piece, and you don't know it, you put it in your kiln, or you take it to your local pottery shop, and it goes into the kiln, into the bisque kiln, and as the heat rises, the pressure in the air bubble starts increasing, getting bigger and bigger, and it literally blows up like a grenade. When that happens, it goes everywhere and it takes out the other pieces that are sitting around in the kiln and then people get mad at you! So, anyway, here's how we wedge. We cut this square into sections and the next thing we do is we're going to wedge. I like to take the piece and stand over it, and this is plaster by the way, nice sturdy wedging table, and we start pressing down on it like this, and roll it back. Next, I start twisting my wrists a little bit. We put pressure down, forward, pull it back with our fingers, and do it again. We do this a few times - it might take you a little while to get a hang of this, but you've got to do it. Then roll this back so we 've got a nice cone shape. Now if you see the bottom, potential air bubble right there, and there's layers there. What I like to do is kind of pound it down a little bit on your table, and round it - round it off a little bit like that, so it's nice and smooth. There's no holes, no potential for air bubbles in there because once you find that air bubble it will mess you up as you're throwing.

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