Slow Drying your pottery (wrap it up)

You see this? You see this right here? This is called tap centering. So you could say you have to wrap it before you tap it. Today we're going to talk about wrapping up your artwork, and the main reason for wrapping up your artwork is to make sure it doesn't dry out extremely fast. Let's be honest, you're probably needing to wrap up your artwork so you can pass that class or you're not coming into your studio each and every day, so you're going to have to wrap it up. Now let's imagine it's your first day of class, you learned how to throw, and hey, you did a pretty good job at throwing, congratulations. So your teacher hands you a board or some type of plaster bat or some type of plastic bat even, something that's really absorbent that keeps your pottery stable, and you put it on a shelf along with a bunch of other people's work. But you notice some of their work is wrapped up in these plastic bags, and you wonder to yourself, why is it wrapped up? I don't understand. So let's say it's Thursday or Wednesday and you go home for the weekend, you come back on the next Tuesday or Monday or whatever your class schedule is, and you see that your pottery looks like this now. It looks really, really dry, it's really, really hard, and now that the teacher's trying to teach you how to trim all your stuff, you can't trim your stuff because your stuff is way too hard to trim. There's silica and dust flying everywhere, you have no idea what to do, you're desperately trying to re-wet your clay body, and it's just not working. There is one simple thing you need to do to make sure that your clay bodies do not dry out really, really fast when they're unattended, and all you have to do is wrap them up in plastic. I personally like to take these plastic trash bags and spread them out really long and thin, and even cut them up sometimes, and put all my pottery underneath these. When you put a plastic bag over your ceramic artwork, what it does is it creates this kind of bubble of moisture. You have to remember that you just threw these, and you threw them with a bunch of water, and inside this clay body is still a bunch of water, to the point where it's still ooey and gooey and mishy and moshy. Moshy's a word, don't look it up, just believe me, it's a word. And you kind of want them to dry very, very slowly. Let's assume that these things dry 25% each and every day, and you're gone for four days. That means that that 100%, they're going to be bone dry. You can't trim them anymore, and it's going to be extremely difficult to trim them. You don't want them to end up like this, where you literally can't tear any of the clay pieces off because it's way too hard. This isn't going to get you a passing grade. What you're going to do is you're going to get your plastic bag, and you're going to put them very, very gently over your pottery, just like this. This is going to keep in a lot of the moisture from escaping this little dome right here of plastic, so that your pottery doesn't dry out extremely, extremely fast, and become that untrimmable work. Potter tip! If you do want to wrap your stuff up with any plastic bag, make sure to crunch it up and lay it very gently over your pottery. Because if you put it down and decide to jerk it, the wet clay is going to bind to this plastic right here, and it's going to mess up your rim. So very, very gently put it on, and then go ahead and tuck it in, just like this. But be careful not to tug any of this at the top. You will mess up your rim, and at this stage, you most likely don't know how to fix it. So we're going to try a little experiment today. What we're going to do is we're going to throw a couple of bowls, and we're going to wrap half of them up, and the other half we're going to leave just air drying. But it's going to rain pretty soon, so the ones that are air drying are most likely going to dry extremely, extremely slow. And that's unusual, because usually on a bright, sunny, normal day, they would dry about double that speed. So let's test this out. But first we've got to throw some bowls. Okay so we just threw all of these, and what I'm going to do now is I'm going to cover everything from this point right here, all the way over here. And we're going to leave these two open, and we're going to see how fast they dry. The entire point of drying out your pottery is to make sure all the water content comes out of the clay, especially since you just threw with a lot of water. By doing this, what you've essentially done is trapped all the moisture that would come out of your pottery inside this little biodome of plastic right here. So no moisture actually gets out. And if you leave it out to dry like this, it's going to try and equal out with the humidity with the air around it. So let's say it was a really, really hot, dry day outside. Your pottery is going to dry extremely, extremely fast. If you don't want it to dry really fast, you can make a little biodome of moisture around it, just like this. And this is the entire point of wrapping up your pottery. I'm in Sacramento right now, and it's about 56 degrees outside. And it's raining, which means there's a lot more moisture inside the air than would be if there was no rain outside. So it's a lot more moist in here. Which means even if I let these sit out by themselves, they're probably going to dry slower than on a normal day. That being said, they're still going to dry a lot faster than whatever's in here, because whatever's inside here is keeping the moisture inside. So we're going to come back tomorrow, and we're going to see how dry these are in comparison to these right here. Day two. Okay, it is now the next day, and as you can see, it's a little bit windy, and it's actually really rainy outside still. So it's still really moist and humid inside my studio and outside my studio. Which means this is going to dry a lot slower. A lot, a lot slower. Look, I can still move it. See? If it was a sunny day outside and anywhere above 90 degrees, I could probably throw these at the beginning of the day, and they would be done by the end of the day, and I can most likely trim them midday. So let's look at the ones inside here. And remember, when you unwrap these, make sure you unwrap them slowly, because they will mess up. Yup, these are still extremely wet too. I can make as many dents in them as I want, see? So it's only been about eight hours. Let's come back at the end of the day, tonight, and see how these go again. Keep in mind, leaving your stuff out like this doesn't guarantee it's going to stay wet like this. The only reason why it's working right now is because it's extremely rainy outside where I live right now. Twelve o'clock midnight. Okay, guys, we're checking on it one more time, and you see, this has been out to dry all day long, even though it's really rainy and wet outside, so let's see how this one's doing. You see, now I can touch this all I want. I can probably take it off, and it doesn't really move that much when I touch it. This has been air-drying the entire time, and as a little side note, the main reason I put a lot of my pottery on wood is so that it soaks up the bottom water at the bottom of the clay body. That is the primary job of putting stuff on plaster, wood, and anything else that's very water-absorbent, and as you guys can see, this is very hard to move. This is not moving anymore, unlike earlier, but this down here is still wet, and that's because gravity is taking the water down, and it's drying from the top to the bottom, which is why a lot of the times when this is a little bit dry, we can still trim that nice bottom, but once again, it's really, really hard to move this up here. This doesn't move that much, but this down here, you can tear off all day long. It's still nice and moist and wet. This stuff is still in the wet phase. Please don't take little chunks of me. No, why would you? Let's check over here on the wrapped stuff. Carefully, do it carefully now. Ah, yes. Now, all the stuff inside here has been inside of a nice little biodome of moisture, which means that this is most likely, yep, still extremely movable. You got it. You see the difference now? Air-dried stuff? Mm, stuff that has not been able to dry for quite some time. I love my pottery and want it to survive the whole semester and get a good grade. I didn't wrap up my stuff because this is an extracurricular class and I don't care. But I do hope you guys are starting to see the point that if you wrap your stuff up, it stays a lot more moist a lot longer and doesn't dry out as fast. This really helps and comes in handy when you only visit your class two days a week and you really can't visit your pottery every single day like most potters can. So we're going to wrap these back up. We're going to come back tomorrow and check on these and see if they're ready to trim, and then I'm going to show you guys that these are still going to be extremely, extremely wet even on the third day. Tomorrow for sure. Let's check on these. I put these right here upside down so that water would go downwards towards the top instead of the opposite direction, and it seems to be working. These right here have been left out for two days straight and they're no longer mushy. You hear that? These are not ready to trim. These are now in the leather phase, and these are good. I've left these out. It's been raining for two days and it's been quite moist in the air, so a lot of water hasn't come out of these. But let's check on the stuff that I wrapped up. This stuff right here is still super, super wet and flexible. It is nowhere near the leather phase. This stuff here is going to stay wet for quite some time unless I leave them out and let them air dry. But this is the point I've been trying to make to you guys. Leaving stuff out dries it a lot faster than if you wrapped it up. Now if you do decide to take the stuff off, be very careful and lift upwards. Don't lift backwards or forwards because you can very easily do some of this action here and very, very easily mess up the rim just like that. It's a lot better to make sure this stays in good form by lifting everything away from the edge like this. I say as I mess up the stuff that I'm unwrapping in front of your eyes. This stuff is going to stay nice and wet unless I let it air dry. But hopefully you guys can clearly see the difference. Look, I can hit this all day long and make almost no marks inside this clay body. But this right here is still super gooey. I can very easily make an indent inside this and take off a little bit of clay on the way. And there's two things I want you to keep in mind whenever you're doing this. Number one, stuff dries slower whenever there's more moisture in the air around the atmosphere. So if it's rainy outside, stuff's going to dry a lot, a lot slower. But that also means if it's windy or really sunny outside or a really high temperature, it's going to dry a lot faster. So please don't try and leave stuff out in 100 degrees of weather and then be like, oh Dante said I can leave it out for two days. No, no. Dante said you can leave it out for two days when it's super rainy and moist outside. Your stuff's going to dry in like eight hours. And if you do that, it's going to get super, super dry and you won't be able to trim it. So suffice to say, if you don't wrap it up, you don't get no trim. You see what I did there? So this right here has been out in rainy weather for two days total just air drying. I have not wrapped this up at all. So let's trim this and see how it does. Ah, yes. Do you see this? Do you see these long strips of nice bendable material right here? This is perfect. This is what I love whenever I trim. These two days and this soft, soft, wet weather has been extremely good for my pottery. These long ribbons that I'm taking off here while I trim are exactly what I want when I'm trimming. This tells me that my pottery is nice and beautiful. Well, look at those gorgeous things coming off. If you're ever trimming your work and you don't have these nice ribbons and you have tiny little chunks of dry clay and silica coming off of your pottery, that most likely means your stuff is a little bit too dry to be trimming. You should most likely try and trim it in the leather stage instead of the leather hard or the bone dry stage. I've already made a video on trimming your first bowl as a beginner potter and stages in which a bowl is proper to trim and improper to trim and how to get around some of the better tricks on trimming. If you haven't seen it, I'll link it down below for you. And check it out. This is exactly what I wanted. This came out perfect. Just fine. The reason I made this video is because I'm getting a lot of questions on Facebook and Instagram and YouTube of new students asking me, hey, how do I make sure my stuff dries a lot, a lot slower? Because by the time I get back, I don't actually have time and my stuff's way too dry to trim. And as soon as I tell them they should probably be wrapping up their artwork, they freak out like my teacher never told me that. So hopefully this helps some of you guys. So thank you, Dirty Potter, for joining me today. If you'd like to see any of my artwork, the links are always down below. For your beautiful, beautiful eyes to see. Make your kilns burn hot, and I will see you, Dirty Potters, next week. Over there is the dry stuff. Over there is the wet stuff. Over there is a brand new relationship. And over there is I've been with you for ten years and I'm tired of your shit so I'm dry.