Beginners guide to basic pottery tools

Hello you dirty potters! How are you today? Today we're going to be talking about some tools in the pottery realm that you're either going to experience or need, especially as a beginner potter. Some of you are either deciding to take classes for pottery, whether that be in a shared studio space, some of you are starting this journey on your own, buying your own equipment, or some of you are just taking a class in your school as a general elective. Either way, we're going to go over the most basic tools so that you know what they do, some of the ones that you're going to need, and some suggestions about etiquette and some tools that you're going to prefer over other tools. There's a lot of tools in the pottery world and once you get to a certain level of crafting, you understand how to use those tools in different ways. Today we're going to go over a lot of those tools. We're also going to go over some real talk because trust me, you don't want to be the person who has like a wall of tools that all do the same thing when you could have just bought this one tool that does all the jobs of the other tools. Now I do understand that a lot of my videos are geared towards more beginners of the ceramic art world. Granted, there will be a lot of information in this for the intermediate potter, but if you're one of those people and you just want like a one sentence answer and you want a link in the description below of where to get your stuff, you're just like, I want to know what to buy so I can get on with my day of my life. I'm going to put this timestamp up here for you. I'm going to put it in the description below. You can either go here or click that timestamp and it's going to take you to like one or two word sentence that will show you what you're supposed to buy and why. But I do think you should watch the rest of the video because it will teach you what these tools are for and it'll show you some of the nitty gritty of what these tools can do for you and your pottery experience. Yeah, I'm just letting you know now impatience is the number one thing that will destroy this art form. Let's start out with the pin tool. Yes, it is called the pin tool. I know some of you have been using this and you've been calling it the pokey thingy. It's not called the pokey thingy. It's called a pin tool. The pin tool is generally used for two things, especially for beginner potters. It's used to measure the bottoms of whatever you're making for a vessel at the moment. So if you're making a bowl, you're making a cup, a lot of us will put this pin tool at the very bottom of our vessels, put our fingers down there until it touches the clay, pull it out, and that amount of space is the amount of space that's left for the bottom of our vessels. This makes sure that we don't go too deep or we don't leave a super large amount of clay at the very bottom, especially because when we trim, we don't want to go through the bottom of our vessels. Granted, a lot of more experienced potters such as myself stop doing this over a certain amount of time. You see this pin tool used more for modifying the pot after that point than measuring the bottom of your pot. And after making so many of the same pot over and over and over again, you just see potters just banging stuff out over and over again as if they already know the depth because their muscle memory helps them with that process. You could say the more experienced of us already know how deep we can go before we start hurting the vessel. The second thing that a lot of us use this for is to either even out or cut off certain parts of our pots while we're throwing it on the wheel. Usually what happens is we cone up and down, we center, we throw a pot and we notice there's a tiny bit at the top that's uneven from the rest of it. And instead of throwing the pot all over again or having a wonky top, we'll just do this little trick where we slide the pin tool over the very side of the clay, it spins, it goes through the clay body and we just pop that right off and that evens out the very top. We smooth it out with a sponge and it's like having a brand new top. The pin tool is a must for me. I almost always have it by my side. Granted, I don't use it all the time because sometimes I don't need to do either of those two things. Those are the two primary ways that you're probably going to use this, especially as a wheel thrown ceramicist. I will say though, if you're a sculptor, there's going to be a very short amount of time where you don't really know what tool to use for what and you're going to start like trying to cut off pieces of slabs and clay and make shapes with this tool over time. You're going to stop doing that very soon after you realize that literally every other tool does a better job than this. This is pointed, but it's not too pointy, but it's rounded after that point. So it makes this kind of weird uneven edge. Most of you are going to move over to the exacto knife or some type of small blade, but there is a small time where sculptors will start to use this as some type of carving or sculpting tool. After a while, they find better tools. Usually the wooden knife, the wooden knife is a tool that is primarily used for either straightening out clay or cutting off the skirt off of the bottoms of your pots. If you don't know what I mean by skirt, I mean this. Usually when we throw a pot, we just throw the pot and then we worry about the bottom layer. The trimming phase comes later on, but if you decide to trim the very bottom or what we call the skirt right before you take it off of the wheel, it makes the trimming experience way easier. Even if you're someone who doesn't trim the bottom of your pots, a lot of us will still do this. But this is cool because the wooden knife isn't really sharp enough to actually cut you. It's made of wood and it's not very sharp. I actually have two of them right here in my hand. This one is dulled down because this is my primary one. It used to look like this and now it looks like this. But the wooden knives are not at all sharp enough to actually cut you, but they do go through clay. Wooden knives are a must have for me, especially as a wheel thrown ceramicist. If I'm being honest with you, I can get a sharper version of the wooden knife and use it as a pin tool. So if I had to choose in between a pin tool and a wooden knife, I would choose a sharpened wooden knife over just a regular pin tool. I can technically cut off and measure my clay with my own mind and muscle memory. Then I can do every other thing with this. This is necessary to cut off the skirt of my pot unless I throw really, really well or I have a special rib design for that potter tip. A small potter tip here with the wooden knife. Not only can you straighten out your clay in this fashion, and you can also cut off skirts from your pottery in this fashion before you take it off the wheel to make it easier for you to trim or not. It's your business. I prefer a trimmed bottom, but sometimes people just like sloppy bottoms, especially as a wheel thrown ceramicist. You are most likely going to go through a phase where you start making lines in your work like this. You start making single lines, putting glaze on the inside of them, wiping it off, putting glaze over that, and you end up making stuff like this. Or you start making lines in your pottery and you go up and down, you start doing the wave technique, right, with lines, and it's fantastic. It's a great time to be a potter. I will tell you this now. Someone is going to try and sell you a tool that does this thing when this tool right here, the wooden knife, already will do this for you. Most tools in your pottery career will make this weird line wavy pattern. That's why I don't suggest you do it with the pin tool. The pin tool is so sharp that sometimes it goes directly through your clay body, but the wooden knife is usually not sharp enough to cut anything except for clay. So because of that, this is a perfect tool to make lines in your pottery. I'm only telling you this because some snake oil salesman is going to come along and be like, oh look at this tool, it does this one specific job, when realistically the wooden knife does like three different jobs. You don't need to waste your money on random tools that do one job when you have this tool that does a bunch of different ones. The wire tool. The wire tool is a must-have, especially for wheel thrown ceramicists. This is used in a couple different ways. Number one, we use this tool to take the pottery off of our wheel heads. If you don't do that, you might use a bat. We'll explain what a bat is later, don't worry about it. We also primarily use this to cut large chunks of clay off of the bag that we got from the store we bought the clay from. So you get the big bag of clay, you cut whatever chunk you want off, whatever weight you want off, and you wedge specifically that chunk. Otherwise you're gonna be like ripping clay off of the bag with your bare hands trying to cut it with a knife. Trust me, you're gonna want one of these. The wire tool comes in a bunch of different shapes and sizes from different brands and creators, and there's even some of them that make little designs whenever you cut anything off. In the more intermediate and advanced stages, you'll start to find that people start serrating their pottery with this kind of stuff, but that's more of an intermediate to advanced thing. You really have to know the thickness of your clay or make your clay body extra thick so you can slice off an entire piece of your pottery without making giant holes inside the body of the clay. When you start to understand how thick your clay body is and how much you can take off of without kind of disturbing the continuity of the clay body, you can start doing designs, you can start doing a bunch of stuff. This is a must-have for anyone who is beginning to throw their stuff on the wheel or even sculptor. A little potter tip with this tool here, if you can't find one of these or you can't get your hands on one of them for any reason whatsoever, you can very easily go to a kitchen store and get yourself a cheese wire. It's pretty much the same thing. Secondary potter tip, there's always going to be some cringy little teenager in the comments below or in your classroom who's going to describe this as a garrote. This is not a garrote. A garrote is a completely different thing, and the fact that you keep calling this a garrote means you've never actually handled a real garrote in your life before. Stop it, you watch too much anime. The sponge. The sponge is something that almost all of us are going to use at some point in our ceramic art career. As you get better at ceramic art, especially that of on the wheel, you might stop using this, especially if you like finger lining your work or you like more smooth textures, or you might like something a little bit more natural feeling. A lot of us on the wheel start to make our stuff more uniform and perfect and symmetrical, and as we get more experience, we start to kind of imitate and appreciate things that are more natural feeling. The finger lines of the potter, a little bit of clay messed up here, a thumbprint here. We start to really get into more of the spirituality of the pot and the individuality of what it can really tell us about that time. But when you first start out, especially as a beginner potter, you start using a sponge. Now there are a bunch of different types of sponges. There's this weird yellow sponge that'll probably come with your beginner pack if you decide to buy a pack. There's an elephant ear sponge. I have a really old one here. I named him. His name is Lucky because he has survived a literal apocalypse. There's the well-known and very coveted mud tool sponge. I love the mud tool sponge. I'm not sponsored by them at all, but what's in a mud tool? As many of you probably know already, the primary way that we kind of hydroplane and moisten our clay is water. We have a bucket of water next to us. We take a bit of that water, we put it on the clay, and we start to mold it and form it. And once it drinks up all that water, it starts to get dry and cause friction. We add a bit more water. The sponge is primarily used to carry that water from the bucket onto our work. Not only does it go directly to our work, we're allowed to kind of take up water, hold it while we throw, and as we throw, we'll squeeze the sponge a tiny bit, which will re-moisten the clay body so we don't have to keep on stopping and going back and forth to our work, to the water bucket, from the work to the water bucket. The sponge becomes a necessary tool, especially when you're making very large things. Sometimes I'll make stuff that's like a foot or a foot and a half tall on the wheel, and I can't really carry this tiny bit of water in my palm to the places I need it to be. I can only moisten my hands. Because of the sponge, I could take that water, put the water exactly where it needs to be, either on the side, bottom, top, or inwards of the vessel, and just keep on throwing. Trust me, not only are you going to need one of these, you're probably going to go through a couple of them as well. I'm heavily convinced in 500 years, when the apocalypse is over, they're going to raid all the studios in my area, and they're going to think I worship these things, because they found like a hundred of them underneath the desk. They're going to think we're sponge hoarders. Entire books are going to be like, oh, the ancient potters of Sacramento, back in the early 2000s, worshipped these little yellow things. I don't know what they are. You know, because by that point, though, we'll have moved past sponges, since we're going to run out of water soon. A little potter tip here. A lot of beginner potters, especially beginner potters, have a bad habit of taking this, putting it in their water bucket, soaking up all the water, and just dousing their piece with water. And that isn't too great. This is primarily used to put water exactly where it needs to be, when it needs to be there, so that you can have better control over your work. I'm letting you know this now, because there is a large problem with oversaturation of water in the clay body, and having your piece flop down. You're working on a piece for 20-30 minutes, you've oversaturated the clay body with water, because you have this big sponge full of water, and you're just dousing your stuff, and you keep wondering why your piece keeps flopping. That is a contributing factor to it. So try to make sure you put water where it needs to be, and when it needs to be there, instead of just thinking more water is better. Keep in mind that every sponge does something a little bit different. The beginner sponge that comes to your packet is probably like this circular sponge thing. It's really, really thick. You can most likely cut it in half, so that you can feel the clay body through your sponge as you're throwing, because super thick sponges have a tendency to get in the way of you feeling your actual clay body. So I suggest a lot of you take that big circle, put it this way, and just cut it directly in half, so you can kind of have two sponges, first of all, but also feel the clay body as you're throwing. It really helps with that tactile sensation. Secondly, different sponges do different things. For example, that mud tool sponge I was talking about earlier, I have the one that doesn't really soak up a lot of grog. I use this one for porcelain instead of grog clay. One of them is meant for finer clay, one's for grog clay, one's for sculpting. There's one that you can kind of use as a general workhorse or throwing sponge. These sponges kind of mimic the rest of the sponges in the clay world. There's elephant ear sponges, there's those weird yellow cake sponges that you get when you first start. Each one handles different types of clay different ways. So if you decide, hey, I really like throwing with grog clay, there's a sponge for you out there. If you like throwing with porcelain clay, there's a sponge for you. Low fire clay, there's a sponge for you. Different sponges do different things, but you will probably end up with a little collection of sponges, and I suggest you figure out which one is your favorite. My personal favorite are the elephant ear sponges. They're a little bit expensive, but generally speaking, what you do is you buy a huge sponge, pay a little bit extra, and then you cut that sponge into your preferred size. I like mine very tiny, so I don't need a lot of water, but I can feel the clay body through my fingers. That's why even when I get that beginner sponge, when I first started out, that huge yellow one, I would cut it vertically so that way I can feel the clay through my fingers, and now I have two sponges. Pottery side story, which is I think the first time we've done this, but I think it's important. I remember in my second year of ceramic artwork, my master, my teacher, Yoshio Taylor, was telling me these stories about how certain towns would go through water droughts, so whenever they went through these droughts, instead of getting a lot of water, like a lot of us just get a bucket of water like this size, right? Fill it up, put it there, our tools are in there, our sponges are in there half the time, we dig through, we don't really worry about water conservation too much these days, but I remember him telling me stories about how certain towns would just start running out of water, and because of that, they would get the potters, and they would have a cup, a literal cup of water to throw with per day, and that was your allowance of water for the entire day, that's what you got to throw with. Not only was it considered a necessity back then whenever they had a water shortage in certain towns, it was also considered just generally polite, not rude, and moral to use the littlest amount of water you could on your hobby or your artwork, especially if you're producing for your bottom line and not the rest of society's. Because of that, a lot of that has trickled down into pottery culture over time. You will notice, and I don't know if you experienced this yet, but you will notice a lot of the older potters will find some type of pride or some type of of skill level in using the least amount of water possible that you can on your work. The less resources you use to make your work, the more proud they are of some reason, and even to a certain extent in me, that's trickled down to me a little bit. When I see someone use a very small amount of water to throw a big piece, I go, ooh, fancy. There seems to be a cultural standard in potters noticing you don't use a lot of water when you throw. Impressive, young one. The bat is usually some sort of disc that attaches to the top of your wheel head, so when you throw your piece, you can just take the piece directly off of the wheel instead of hydroplaning it with the wire tool or taking it off any special other kind of way, and you can just keep working. Lots of potters have a bunch of bats next to them, so they can just keep producing and producing work. They throw a cup, they take the bat off, they put it to the side, they put it on a board or something like that, and they just put another bat on, keep throwing. This allows a lot of production potters just keep pumping out the same type of work over and over and over. Somewhere along your pottery experience, you're going to see in either your shared space or your classroom these weird kind of discs. I have a couple of them over there, but I primarily use them for bats, and you're going to wonder, what are those for? Those are generally used for making plates or used for people that can't hydroplane their piece very easily off of the wheel. Granted, those are usually very large pieces, but a lot of production potters will use these as well. The way it generally works is that you have two little holes inside of your wheel, looks like this. You'll put a nut and a bat wing, pretty much a nut and a bolt, through these wheels that'll fasten these nuts on, that'll fasten these nuts, and once they're there, you put the bat that has little holes inside them to fasten that on top of the wheel head, and it doesn't move usually. Be warned though, a lot of bats only have one size. The bat pins and the bats that I use have two sizes, so on the bottom of my bats, I have two holes here, and then further in, I have two holes here and here. That's just because a lot of wheel heads have different sizes, and they want to accommodate all wheel head sizes, but be warned, if you ever see one, you flip it over and only has two holes, ask the producer, ask whoever's selling it to you, like, hey, what size is this for? And know the size of your wheel head. That's generally not a problem whenever you buy bats, but it does kind of suck to go to the store, buy bats, assuming that it is for your wheel head size, get home, be like, oh, well, these don't fit. There are also old school bats, generally made of plaster. I used these when I first started. I didn't know bat, like, plastic bats that absorb water over time existed. That's generally how people use them. I take my pieces, I hydroplane them off, I put them onto wood, some type of wooden surface, the wood absorbs the water, I trim it later over time after it air dries and gets absorbed from the bottom from the wood. But these kind of plastic bats will also absorb water over time. I don't know what material they're made out of, but they seem to absorb water just fine. That being said, a lot of older potters will use these plaster bats. It's more of a rare thing to see, especially out of classrooms, but this is kind of the way I was taught. I would get slit, put it on my wheel, put the bat on top of the wheel, and it would stick really hard. I would then throw my stuff on top of that plaster bat, and I would take it off by jimmying it off later on. Another potter tip. I am so sorry, there's a lot of potter tips. This is probably a long-form video, but I did give you a timestamp, so I kind of don't want to hear it. This is technically two potter tips. One of them is more of an etiquette thing for the studio, and the other one you're going to see, and you're going to wonder why people do that, and I'm just going to tell you right now. You're going to notice a lot of potters, such as myself, don't use bat wings to fasten the nut and the bolt together through the pottery wheel. This is because we have been through the hard times. What generally happens in a classroom is that you'll get the nut and the bolt and the bat wings, right, and you'll fasten those nuts and bolts together on the wheel, and you'll use the bat, or somebody else will use the bat, and a lot of people will not take the bat wings and the bolts off of the wheel, and clay will get into those holes of the nuts and the bolts and the bat wings, and it will end up kind of like becoming this cement mix on the inside of the wheel in those holes, and it will almost never come off without professional tools or like the strength of Odin himself. Because of this, I heavily suggest after you're done throwing your piece, make sure you take the nuts and the bolts off of the wheel. Otherwise, you're going to have to use the bat all the time, all day, every day, and you won't have a choice unless you take them off, which is very difficult to do. My wheel head doesn't come off of my wheel. I don't have a replaceable wheel head, so if that ever happens to me, I either have to use chemicals or very strong tools or buy a whole new wheel. But in general, it is considered pottery etiquette to take the bolts and the bat wings off and put them in their own place after you're done using and cleaning up your wheel. I've gotten way too many wheels where I start throwing, I didn't notice the bolts, and the wheel's spinning around just hitting my wrist with these giant metal pieces sticking out, only to find out the teacher's like, oh yeah, someone left those on like three years ago, we just can't get them off, and we can't change the wheel head because these wheels are old, and we don't have enough money to buy another one, so you're either going to have to use another wheel or use a bat. The second thing is more pottery etiquette, and this happened a lot whenever I went to different classrooms. There's always going to be one person who figures out how to use the bats and the bolts and the bat wings and just tie them on, and they go, I don't have to learn how to take a pot off of the wheel if I just keep doing this, right? But that causes an issue, because people who need to make plates, and people like me who are making stuff that's like one or two feet tall, are like, I don't have any more bats left. It is considered proper etiquette, especially within a shared space for pottery culture, to only use a bat whenever it is necessary to use a bat, otherwise you're using a resource that people would need, just because you want ease of use for your tool. It's not even like taking the last slice of pizza, it's kind of like you have a classroom full of hungry students, and one person took like 70% of the pizza and said, there you go, 30%. And you're like, well, we're hungry too. Big sponge. Unlike little sponge, it is sponge, but it is big sponge. As soon as you get into your classroom setting, you're probably going to notice a bunch of these laying around. They're probably stacked somewhere. They probably come from HDX, or they come from Lowe's, or something of that nature. You can buy like five or six of them for about 20 bucks, and they almost last forever. They're primarily used for cleaning up your own space or keeping your own space clean. They're also used for cleaning up your table. They're used for cleaning in general. They're kind of like painter's sponges. That being said, I've found a bunch of different uses for them. I don't throw with a wheel head, as many of you can tell, it's because I don't like to throw super dirty. I like to try and throw a bit cleaner. But to kind of curb that, I put a sponge in the direction in which my wheel is spinning, so any water spins into that sponge. It keeps my wheel generally clean. That's one way I use it. The other way I use it is that all my tools are generally put on that sponge. That's because potters have a very bad habit of losing their tools a lot of the time, and instead of going through that, I just figured to put my tools all in one place. It does a fantastic job of holding your pin tool, because a lot of people lose their pin tools or put them in their water bucket and end up poking themselves. You don't really have to worry about that with a sponge. You can just do this and put it off to the side, and that way it's easy to grab, and you always know where it is, and you're not poking yourself. Either way you slice it, you are going to need one of these sponges. I'm hard-pressed to find a studio where I've never seen one of these sponges. These are kind of based in the pottery world. We kind of know what these are when we see them in a studio. If you don't know where to get them, I'll put a link down below. They were a bit difficult to find for me as well, because I didn't know they doubled as paint sponges. So instead of looking on pottery stores for, you know, big yellow sponge, I just went to a paint store, and they sold a large pack of them for like 20 bucks at most. This one's a big one, it's going to seem kind of weird. A water bucket. The water bucket is based. You are going to need this primarily to hold the water that you're going to be throwing your piece with on the wheel, and even if you're a sculptor, you're probably going to need some source of water next to you. Generally speaking, the water bucket is used to kind of put water near you as you throw or sculpt. It's fairly self-explanatory. That being said, you will notice some type of ease of use. I'm technically ambidextrous, but I prefer my right hand for power and my left hand for finesse. And because of that, I put my water bucket to the left of me because that's where all my tools and my sponges and things are. I generally grab a lot of my tools and whatnot with my left hand as my right hand stabilizes because that's my power hand. Generally speaking, if you're right handed, your bucket goes on your left. If you're left handed, your bucket goes on your right. It's a little bit easier to reach with a lot of those finesse tools. That being said, one very large potter tip that I can give you here is that you should get a bucket that is a little bit shallow. If this is the base level, all I need to do is dip right in here to get my water and my tools. I've seen far too many students have wrist pain or some type of problem with their elbow or shoulder or hands, especially if you're a bit older because they pick buckets like this. So what they have to do each and every time they grab a tool or they grab their sponges or they grab anything out of their water bucket, they'll end up cruxing their wrist much like this. So they have to do one of these every time they want a little bit of water. It seems like a very strange thing to say, but trust me, you're going to want a shallow water bucket because it'll save your shoulder. It'll shave your elbows. It'll save your wrist. Trust me, you're going to want something a bit more shallow so you don't have to do a Michael Phelps every time you try and get that water. A potter's trim tool. The potter's trim tool is a necessary thing, especially when you go into the trimming phases of your work. You know, because you can't trim without a trim tool or at least a knife. There are a bunch of trim tools on the market. There's a lot of them. They all do different things. Granted, there's two primary ones that you're probably going to start off with, especially if you're a beginner potter. This one will probably come in your packet. This is considered the loop tool. The loop tool has two edges. One side is a loop. That's why they call it the loop tool. And the other one is more of a squared side with the edges not really doing anything. There's also the pair trim tool. This is my favorite tool. The pair trim tool essentially does the same thing the loop tool does. The only difference is that one side covers more area while the other one doesn't. This side here, the blade rather, is the same as the other one with a little rectangle or a little triangle at the top. And the loop over here is pretty much covered by this space right here, which is also just a smaller loop. A little potter tip here is that a lot of people don't ever try one or the other. They're raised with this one, so they go, I don't really need that one. Or they're raised with this one, so they go, I don't really need that one. I will say, I use both of these tools. I use this one for sculpting. I use this one for pottery. Generally speaking, I use this tool for throwing pottery and this tool for sculpture because there's always those nitty gritty places I need to get into with a smaller tool. But this tool over here is used for pottery just because it does the same functionality as this tool does, but it has much more surface area, so I can technically cut off three times more of the clay body and make my job faster, three times faster in fact, by just holding these two sides and kind of skimming the bottom as if it were a knife instead of using this tiny little piece right here. I just get way more functionality out of this tool, especially when I'm making just regular old pottery. Unless my pottery is super, super, super small, I generally don't need to use this tool for anything that this tool couldn't do a little bit better. So generally speaking, I use this one for pottery. Unless I'm doing really, really small pottery, like, like for ants. Moving on to the next tool, ribs. At some point in your ceramic artwork career, you are going to run into some variety of these. Most of the other tools I've been showing you have, like, a couple of different forms. There aren't, like, a super large amount of them, but ribs come in, like, a billion different forms. Granted, lots of them have different utilities based on what they do and how they feel. For example, sculptors tend to stick more towards rubber ribs. Rubber ribs come in a bunch of different forms, but they're very bendable, they feel good in the hands, they don't cut you unlike some other ribs, and on top of that, they feel really good on grog clay, something that I mentioned in earlier episodes. Sculptors like to use grog clay because it has a little bit more body and stability when you're working with it, has a bit more grit to it. There's also ribs in the form of wooden ribs. The thing with wooden ribs is that this is the most basic shape of a wooden rib that you will most likely find. It's just a wooden rib-shaped tool with a little hole in the middle. A lot of these have these little holes in the middle just so you can handle it for stability's sake, things of that nature. It's a lot more comfortable to hold it like this than it is to kind of like jostle it around and you might be hurting your thumb muscles and things of that nature. So a lot of these wooden tools end up putting this little hole in the middle just for ergonomics sake or just for comfort of holding it in your hand. There's also my personal favorite and something you probably see me using all the time, the metal rib. The metal rib for me is a home run. It's very, very bendable. I have like a whole cup of these, a little mason jar full of these, different materials, different types of metal, right? They're very bendable. The thing is that if you don't know how to use them and you don't bring some respect to the table with these, they will end up cutting your thumb at some point or another. The metal ribs are one of my favorites because you can end up morphing them to any shape you want, unlike a wooden rib that you're just kind of stuck with this one shape. But with a rubber rib, you can form it into any shape you want. But the rubber rib doesn't do a very good job at sloughing off a lot of the extra water and excess clay that might get on your clay body. The metal rib does both of those things. On top of that, they generally come in this shape right here. But as you can see, I've modified mine. So mine, instead of having two rounded sides, ends up having one cut off side and one rounded side. This way, if I need to make a self-supporting curvature inside of a bowl, I can do it with this rounded side by pushing in to the bowl itself as I'm making that cylinder. Or if I feel like cutting off the bottom whenever I'm throwing on the outside, I can very easily do that as well. I also have this sharp point right here. As I told you earlier, you can make lines with almost any tool. This sharp point here is very useful for making lines inside of any of my pottery. This one tool encompasses like seven different tools for me personally. That's why I love the thing. But it does come with the danger of accidentally cutting you sometimes because you do have to remember it is a piece of metal. So sometimes it'll cut you. No matter what type of rib you choose, there's going to be different shapes per material of rib. There's different shapes of metal, rubber, and wood types of rib. And they all come in different comfort levels. They all promise they can do some sort of special thing. But no matter what you use them for, you're going to end up settling on one type of rib. I know tons of potters and sculptors who use the wooden rib and they swear by it. And there's the metal rib, which I swear by. And then there's the rubber rib. There's a bunch of different types of those. Companies are constantly coming out with different types of ribs. And sooner or later, you're going to find one that feels good for you, that works for you. And you're probably going to stick to one of those sooner or later. Potter tip. There are so many potter tips. I deeply apologize. But you need to know. A small potter tip here, and I know I'm kind of drilling this point home. Sooner or later, someone's going to try to sell you a different variation of a rib that does the same job that a lot of your other tools in the studio do. For example, right here, I have the basic wooden rib. This thing kind of looks just like a regular old rib, right? It has a little hole in the middle. So that way you have ease of use for comfort when you're using it, while you're throwing whatever you're throwing. But on top of that, there's also these monstrosities right here. This was a tool that was given to me quite some time ago. And of course, it has the standard kind of hole in it. So you can use it as you wish. But there are so many different types of wooden and rubber and metal ribs that do the exact same job. For example, this one here promises to make these kind of concentric lines in your work while having a place to hold. So you can kind of comb through your work. It also has this little grip right here. So this way, if you hold it this way, you can rest the blade of your hand inside that while you use it like this. On the other side of the tool, it has two separate what I like to call line makers. They're literally just pieces of the tool that make lines. But these ones on this side are a little bit more spread apart, while these ones over here are a bit closer together. I also have different variations of this that other people like to send to my PO box over time. This one right here, of course, has the hole in the middle with the little ergonomic grip and has some lines over here. And each side pretty much just gives you a different variation of line. It's really not that special. I also have a third one of these that is a little bit longer, but also pretty much just makes little tiny lines in your pottery. Believe me when I tell you that sooner or later, you're going to run into somebody who's going to try and sell you new fancy tools or ways to make money with the same exact type of tool you've been using that have a rib, but they just form them a little bit differently. So that way you think, oh, I'm getting more out of the rib. Not really. When realistically speaking, you could have very easily put those lines inside of your work yourself with the use of this one tool. God, I feel like such a dad. We don't need to buy that new fangled whatchamajigger. I could just put in five more minutes worth of work to make that exact same thing. I'm not wasting money on that. I will say it's kind of true, though. Anything that these super fancy, dancy, ergonomic, handleable tools can do, I can very easily do with this tool right here with like five more seconds of work on each. But it's not that it's not that impressive to me. That's pretty much the list of basic pottery tools that you're going to come across. Let's go over some weird tools that you're probably going to see and wonder what they're all about, whether you need them or not. Some things of that nature. Let's go over what I like to call skill gap tools. No, that's not what they're called. I call them that because they pretty much fill a skill gap. Before I start this section of the video, I want to say I'm not shaming anybody for their input device. I'm not saying you should or shouldn't use these tools. None of these tools are like that in this video. That being said, I do want to be realistic with you about the pottery community and generally speaking how they're used in your own work. The Giffen Grip. The Giffen Grip is quite an expensive tool that essentially fills in the skill gap of learning to center your pot when you trim it on the wheel. It's a big piece of plastic that has these little grips on the side. I think it's about three of them. And as you spin it, after you attach it to the wheel, it closes in on that pot, perfectly centering it so that you can get ready to trim it. A lot of us use these to wax our bottoms. Some of us use these to glaze. I personally don't use these because I center my pot by either tap centering it or centering it myself. And then I put little pieces there and the grip part of the Giffen Grip are essentially big wedges of clay for myself. It pretty much does the same job, but this will usually run you about $180 to $200 to do the same job that you could easily do yourself by trimming on the wheel with these three little pieces of clay I mentioned earlier. I have seen plenty of classes where students will use these to trim or wax their feet or things of that nature or whatever, and it all works out fine. Granted, if you want your own personal one, it's going to cost you a little bit of money. The Giffen Grip has a couple different versions. It has one with some longer grips or some longer tongs, and that's usually used to trim larger pieces. There's also the base version that has just the grips on the very bottom. You spin that and it grips on it perfectly. This way, you don't have to center your stuff on the wheel whenever you're trying to center it to trim it. It auto centers things for you for every aspect except for throwing. This isn't exactly a positive or negative tool, but I will say a lot of the pottery community sees someone use this tool and we correlate it with a higher chance of not being able to do that job without that tool. If I see somebody use the Giffen Grip or see someone using the Giffen Grip, I go, okay, well, there's probably a much higher chance now that you either can't trim by yourself without the use of that tool as far as centering your stuff goes when you trim, or you're just using it because it's ease of use to wax that one thing. It's kind of like seeing somebody ride a bicycle with training wheels on it. There's the general assumption that like, okay, you probably need the training wheels because you probably can't ride a normal bike without said training wheels. You don't know that about that person. That person could just really love training wheels. That being said, the chances of that being a reality are a little bit lower. The automatic handle maker. The automatic handle makers are essentially what looks like a trim tool, but its entire job is to make handles for you in specific shapes that come preset with the handle makers. This way you can get this little tool, run it through a bag or a block of clay, and it usually comes out a specific shape, usually the shape of a handle. The one thing I will say about this tool is that I like it. It's awesome. The only difference is that whenever I pull my handle through the block of clay with the handle makers versus pulling my own handle, while I'm pulling my own handle, it's very smooth. It's running across. It's hydroplaning across my hands. But when I use a handle maker, there's still like sharp edges from the tool on there. And so I have to spend the time that I would use pulling a handle in order to smooth out those things. So instead of the skill gap being, oh, I don't have to learn how to pull handles. I can just use this. Now I have to learn to smooth out clay with a brush, which is fine. You're just trading one skill set for another, though. I thought this was super cool. I thought these were amazing until I told my teacher about these. And he got kind of like, oh, did you not know those existed? And I was like, what do you mean? It was I think they just they just came out from Diamond Core like three months ago. And he goes, oh, no, we've known how to do that. You get a piece of metal, you shape it into whatever shape you want. You run it through your clay body. It comes out a certain shape and you smooth it out. And that's your hand. And I was like, no, show me, show me. You're lying. That's that's cap. Show me. So I'm now going to do to you what he did to me. Are you ready? Are you ready for your little mind to be blown? Yeah, the handle maker tools are not special. I thought they were super cool until someone showed me that. And I was like, oh, I'm really just buying the shape. I could just buy any trim tool of a certain shape and it will make that exact shape as a handle. The only trouble I find with these types of tools is that I have to smooth out the other side, because if I fire them this way without smoothing out the sides in which I pull out, then it ends up being a super jagged, rigid part of my pot. If you learn how to use these types of tools proficiently to make your handles, it'll essentially fill in the gap of you learning to pull your own handle yourself. That being said, do not make the mistake of thinking just because these are new that they're super duper special, ultra rare handle makers that are one of a kind. I did it in front of you right now with three pottery tools, one of which is actually from diamond quartz, just a regular old trim tool. Granted, my teacher showed me that he didn't do it with the tool. He got a scrap of metal, bent it into a shape. So technically speaking, when you buy these types of tools, you're not really buying a handle maker. You're buying the shape of a handle maker because you can't make the shape yourself because you want a consistent shape. But it does fill the skill gap of learning to make a consistent shape with your hands. This will make it for you. Well, thank you Dirty Potters for joining me today. I know that was kind of a long list and a long video, but a lot of people have been asking me a few questions and I want to address them over the next coming weeks, especially for 2022. Lots of people are like, what kind of clay should I use? But I don't have a singular suggestion for what clay you should use. I have a base suggestion, but it's really dependent on you and your work. I just kind of wanted to lay this down for the expectation of the tools that you're most likely going to see what they can be used for and maybe some things that you don't know they could have been used for sometime in the future in your pottery experience. That being said, that was the high majority of tools that you are going to experience in your first beginner year of ceramic artwork. And even if you're starting off by yourself, that's a lot of the tools that you're going to need. Even me, myself, I have literally everything that I named on that list for you. And that is all I throw with. I have a sponge, a trim tool, a wooden knife, a pin tool, and a wire tool always next to me. And I make the high majority of my work looks like this with all of those tools. I don't need any more tools than just those. And for those of you who just skipped to this timestamp, just to see what you should buy for your packet of beginner tools, they sell packets of beginner tools already to go. But I do have a word of warning for those tools. They look like this generally, but generally speaking, there are two different types of packets. There's generally a cheaper one and a more expensive one. I don't know what it is, but I bought them both. And one of them feels very cheap to me. Whenever you buy the pin tool, the end of it bends very easily. It pokes you all the time. A lot of the metal ribs end up like stabbing you or cutting you. It's very flimsy metal. I don't know what it is, but the more expensive packet of tools like $5 more and the tools last way longer. They don't hurt as much. They have way better ease of use. If I were in the store or online shopping with you right now, and there were two packets, I would tell you to buy the more expensive one. Generally speaking, it doesn't have more tools or anything. It just has better quality stuff. I will put a link down below for you if you want this packet. This packet has the high majority of the tools that I've named inside of this episode. Well, thank you Dirty Potters for joining me today. I really hope that helped you out. I'm trying to get a lot of beginner and intermediate knowledge out there. We just did an episode on crazing. That was pretty cool. There's also a weird level of the pottery community that stops going to pottery shops and we start going to kitchen stores. I don't know what it is, but kitchen stores have the best pottery tools. I don't understand what it is about them, but after a while you stop buying pottery tools and you start going to kitchen stores because you're like, well, they probably have what I need for cheaper and with more utility. Thank you for your patronage. I can already feel some of my words welling up in people who are watching this like, I use a different grip and I know how to trim. No, you don't.