How to Make a Stoneware Pottery Bowl, from Beginning to End — Narrated Version

This time I'm going to be showing you how I throw, trim, glaze and fire these 1lb medium bowls, or 453g, as potters tend to use both imperial and metric measurements so it can get a bit confusing. As always the clay is wedged up, weighed out and then I individually give each little lump a small spiral wedge just to bring all the pieces together. This is a high iron stoneware clay body I'm using and for these simple shaped bowls I like the clay to be very soft. For more complicated and taller forms I tend to use clay that's a bit firmer, but for these bowls I don't need it and it really helps to speed up the centering process at the beginning. Once on the wheel I begin by centering the clay. In this process my aim is to simply squeeze the clay into the middle as best as possible so that there are no wobbles or undulations or pockets of air left. Coning it up and down like this is like giving it a final wedge but on the wheel and it helps to align all the clay particles which makes the clay more plastic and better for throwing. If you skip this process and you leave a few undulations in the clay they'll only come back to bite you later on as as you throw the clay these problems just become exaggerated. After it has been centered I can open up the mass of clay and begin pulling the walls up. I purposefully leave the bases thick on these so there's ample clay later on so I can trim away a nice foot ring. It's perhaps a centimetre or a centimetre and a half and I can judge this just by eye at this stage. As I pull up the walls on the bowl I'm making sure to leave them quite thick especially the rim as in a moment I'll begin to stretch them out and if the rim is already too thin as I do this it can simply split ruining your hard work so far. So as I gradually pull my clay out towards my throwing gauge's pointer which is the rubber spike you can see protruding from the left the thickness of the rim gradually gets finer and finer as the diameter gets wider. I set my throwing gauge beforehand simply by throwing a bowl and measuring it with a ruler. Once it's at the correct dimensions I just set my throwing gauge. Equally you can use the bristles of a paintbrush but you don't want to use anything too firm as it can damage the rim if they happen to collide. Then remove a skim of clay from the underside and then use a sponge to remove any excess slip before using a sharp metal kidney to remove much of the lines and to neaten up the interior form. Generally speaking it's best to finish this part of the pot off as best you can during the throwing stage as trimming the interior form later on once leather hard can be a pain as all the turning simply falls straight back onto the tool and the area you're working in. Once the rim has been chamois leathered smooth I undercut the piece with a wire, dry off my fingertips of slip and then carefully pry the bowl off the wheel and set it aside on my wear board. The throwing stage of these is quite fast and simple so it only takes a few hours to throw 80 to 100 of them and once they've all been thrown I let them sit out overnight to firm up to leather hard by the permitting of course as in hotter months they would dry out too much but at the moment in the I always start trimming the firmest board first and then work my way backwards leaving those that are still a little bit soft to do last. I want my bowls to be just on the firmer side of leather hard enough so that if I were to squeeze the rim it doesn't alter the whole form too much. I begin by quickly tap centering the bowl into the middle and then I use three soft lumps of clay just to push down around the rim which holds it firmly in place to keep these lumps of clay from drying out throughout the day as I'm trimming. I occasionally just dunk them in water which keeps them nice and soft and usable. Then I take my pair of calipers which are measured to about 5.5 centimetres and I score in a line on the foot. This line marks the outer boundary of my foot ring and I don't bother with another interior line as I can work out this measurement just by eyeballing it. I then proceed to my favourite part of the process which is trimming the outside form of the bowl. Here I'm trying to echo the interior form but on the outside, removing the excess clay that was needed to support the overhanging walls at the thrown stage and neatening up the form making it look better and the overall pot lighter. All of these turnings that are being removed can be recycled later on. I just soak them in water and once they've slaked down I can put them onto plaster backs and eventually I can wedge that clay back up ready to be thrown into new pots. As the years have gone by and I've made more and more pots the more I realise I think I'm a potter that prefers the trimming process to the actual throwing process. There's something that's just so deeply satisfying about it. Once the outer walls are trimmed I begin to remove clay on the foot ring itself. This foot ring I divide into two parts by trimming in two facets which you'll see more clearly later on. One of these facets creates a groove which acts as a glaze catch later on and the other will remain bare as a nice area to stamp my maker's mark on. Once the outside walls have been trimmed and the foot ring defined I can begin to remove clay from inside of the foot ring. I push out to adhere with the corner of the turning tool to really remove as much mass as possible as quickly as possible. You might also notice that my hands are always touching whenever I'm trimming. This makes all your motions a lot more stable which is exactly what you want when turning pots. All my movements are controlled and stable and I make sure that I turn through any wobbles presented to me in the bowl. I don't let the bowl's wobbles dictate the way I trim, I just trim right through them. These days I know how deep I can go with the foot ring. Trim so many it's become almost second nature but what really helps is the fact that each thrown bowl is exactly the same as it means I can trim away the exact same amount on the underside afterwards. Finally I use my handmade maker's mark to stamp what is essentially my signature onto the lower facet of the foot ring. Stamping in my maker's mark displaces some of the clay on the foot so afterwards I just run my fingers over top like this pushing down slightly to make it flat once again and that's it. Now just to repeat this process 80 more times. I then lift it away and it's always quite a surprise to feel just how light it is compared to when it went on. Approximately half the weight is removed during this process making the bowls much lighter. All the bowls are then placed on their rims and are allowed to dry slowly over a couple of days until they're completely bone dry. Once all the moisture has left the clay body place them into my electric kiln so I can bisque fire them overnight. Bisque firing makes the clay much stronger and it also makes the pots absorbent which is necessary for when they need to be glazed. Before that I need to wax the foot rings. I tap center the bowls and then generously brush on a layer of wax over the foot ring and two of the facets either side of the base. The layer of wax acts as a simple wax resist when I'm glazing and it means glaze isn't absorbed into this portion of the foot ring which is necessary as there can't be any glaze that comes into direct contact with the kiln shelves during the firing otherwise the bowls will stick to the kiln shelves and I have to break them off which destroys the bowl and damages the expensive kiln shelves. Once waxed I place the bowls foot ring to foot ring and as the wax hasn't fully dried yet the two bowls fuse together slightly and as the wide diameter of the rim holds the pot firmly in place means I can move them around like this very easily and afterwards when it comes to glazing them individually with a little pressure you can snap them apart. I could simply place the bowls inside each other but I don't like any waxed portion touching any area that's going to have glaze put onto it as even a tiny speck of wax would stop the glaze from being absorbed into an area I want the glaze to be so stacking them like this where wax only touches wax is a good way to do it. Each bowl is then grasped with a pair of tongs and dunked into the glaze but usually I hold it for about four or five seconds before slowly removing it which tends to leave the glaze's surface far neater than if I were to quickly remove it from the glaze and here you can clearly see the area where the wax has resisted the glaze. This is a red iron oxide colored crackle glaze which once production fired will come out as a dark green color. The more red iron is added to the glaze the darker green it'll look once fired although the more red iron you add the more fluid the glaze becomes during the firings and also the color slowly diminishes and becomes black and even brown so it's just a matter of finding the right percentage of red iron oxide that works well with my type of reduction firing and the type of clay I use. If I use a different clay body the glaze itself will look entirely different too. After being glazed the bowls take a couple of days to dry out again and that's when I do the cleanup and as this happens the dark pink color here slowly lightens as the moisture leaves the vessel. As it dries out like this the glaze's surface goes from being very tacky to very powdery and it's much easier to clean up the glaze's surfaces when they're powdery as you can simply rub away any excess drips or the tongue marks which is always the first thing I do as you can see here. The excess powder that's removed simply fills in the holes and you'd never even know there were tongue marks. All I'm doing here is trying to make the surface as even as possible all over the vessel as the more even it is at this stage the better it'll look once finally fired. The bowl of water underneath collects all of the dust and eventually I add this back to my larger buckets of glaze just by sieving it back in so again there's really very little wasted. The excess glaze that comes off as powder also falls straight into the water so it isn't being left around so that you can breathe it in which you really don't want to do as essentially glazes contain thousands and thousands of tiny particles of glass shards so keeping dust to a minimum and wearing a mask is a must. Once the surface is totally smooth and even I begin to clean up the foot ring itself and I do this with a sponge that's saturated with water. The bottom facet that I trimmed kind of acts as a guide for my sponge which makes creating a nice even line here much easier. I'm trying to make the line here as even as possible I don't want there to be any undulations where the glaze dips below the foot ring and I make sure to sponge out all of the glaze that goes inside my maker's mark. This is slow time-consuming work but I really think that the effort you spend here making the glaze as pristine as you can really pays off at Once the outside of the foot ring is done I can begin sponging off the inside of the foot ring which is altogether a more tricky process simply because of how fiddly it is. Cleaning up all my glazed ware like this is one of the tasks I don't really ever look forward to so generally speaking I'll spend a few days doing this solidly all day just so I get it over and done with. It's definitely laborious but it's also the final step in the making process and it means I can finally pack them into the kiln and do a few gas firings and at long last be able to see some completed work. So that was the cleanup for one bowl and usually I'm cleaning up four to five hundred pieces in any one go just to give you an idea of the time and scale of this process. Now it's time to pack my gas kiln. This is a Roda KG340 which I'm currently firing off of mains gas. Each pot is carefully loaded in making sure that no two pieces are actually touching as if they do they'll stick together and I'll have to break them apart ruining them. This is slow careful work. Each pot is double checked just to make sure it's in the right place and on each layer I'm trying to squeeze in as many pots as I physically can so that my firing is as cost effective as it can be but also the denser the pack the more easily you'll be able to put the kiln into reduction later on during the firing. After each layer is complete I carefully place over the kiln shelves for the next layer and gradually fill it all the way up. The tubes you can see in the background here are the flues of the kiln. This is where the exhaust escapes during the firing and by manipulating how quickly this exhaust can leave by sliding dampers over them during the firing is how you control the strength of reduction. Reduction being a specific atmosphere you place the kiln into where you throttle how quickly the exhaust can leave making it burn inefficiently as there's just not enough oxygen and as a result the flame seeking oxygen reaches inside the pots themselves and changes the molecules there stripping away the oxygen which in turn changes the colors of the pots to the greens that you'll see later on in this video. The following morning I'll come in very early to start the firing. I light each of the four burners and put them onto a very low pressure and of course I've lit the kiln with the doors open. You never want to light the kiln with the doors closed as that's what can cause them to blow up. I then tightly screw close the door and over a couple of hours just very gradually increase the temperature which I do just by upping the gas pressure a little bit. If you increase the temperature too quickly you risk blowing up the pots inside so it's best to take it slow. When the kiln reaches 860 degrees centigrade I initiate reduction which I do by increasing the gas and air pressure significantly and then by sliding the dampers to about halfway closed. You'll know when it's a strong reduction as there will be a smell that emanates from the kiln which is like sulfur or spoiled eggs. The more obvious sign though is that flames will begin to shoot out of the spy hole and out of the flues at the back and I keep the kiln in reduction all the way until the end of the firing which is about at 1295 degrees centigrade and finally once my cones have bent over to the right position which I can see through the spy holes in the kiln's door I know it's time to turn the kiln off. The whole firing itself takes about nine and a half hours and as the kiln is completely manual I have to be there the entire time keeping an eye on it constantly checking it and changing the settings to make sure it stays on track and finally the kiln is crash cooled down to a thousand degrees before being closed up again. The silence is always so nice after a long day at the studio. About a day and a half later the kiln will have cooled down enough so that I can finally open it. I crack the door open and slowly let the hot air out. It's still about 150 degrees centigrade inside so I still have to wait a little bit before I can unpack them. This is always an anxiety-inducing moment as throughout the entire process of firing you've never actually seen the pots so it's actually only when you open the kiln that you know if everything's gone okay or not. The tinkling noise you can hear is the sound of the glazes contracting over the clay body underneath and at last I can unpack the pots. Each is inspected as I take it out of the kiln to check for defects or any other irregularities. So far this new kiln has been pretty good. I'd say about 95 percent of the pots come out absolutely perfectly with the other five percent needing to be re-fired or simply thrown away. There's always some loss with handmade ceramics it's just the way it is and I think most potters you'll ever talk to will be very accustomed to failure and losing large portions of work. I usually start at the bottom as the lower shelves are much cooler than the top and then later once the top is cooled down I can begin to unpack that. And here are the bowls you saw at the beginning of the video and that pink glaze you saw me dunk the bowls into is the darkest green version you can see here. Each is a little different, some are slightly darker hues and others have more dots of iron over the surface pulled out through reduction and it's this variance which I like so much. No two pots are exactly the same. And that's it. The end of the process. Weeks and weeks of work. It always feels so good to finally have the pots finished at the end of their long journey. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time.