A Beginner's Guide to Trimming

To trim our piece, we want to make sure it is leather hard. That means that when we trim away, the pieces aren't sticking to it, they're peeling away. We can center our piece by get it going slowly. Press your finger against the side to get a general idea. If you see your, excuse me, if you see your finger moving, we have a little work to do still. We'll use our needle tool to see which direction we need to push our piece to center it. So we can see that our scratch mark is on this line. I'm finding the beginning and end, and pushing straight from the middle, so we move it exactly as much as we need. And I'll rub this one out a little bit, and then do one more scratch test to make sure we're all set before we begin trimming. Once your piece looks like it's all set, you can take a few pieces of clay and put them around your piece. The key is to push straight down into the wheel head rather than the bowl, rather than your piece. You want to avoid warping that lip. So straight to the wheel head, and then gently against the piece. And we'll do that in three spots before we get to trimming our base. So the first thing I want to do is etch the inside and outside of my foot before I begin taking away the rest of the clay. That will prevent me from accidentally cutting into the area I want to keep. And when we trim from our foot, it's not a bad idea to add a little extra space to accommodate for any errors, especially when you first begin trimming. We'll get into that a little bit later, but we'll get into that a little bit later. Any corner tool will do the job for this. Anytime you're holding one tool, you're supporting it with the other. You're supporting one hand with the other. One finger on top, and one finger on your tool and hand to support. So this will act as the outside of my foot, and this will be... So this is what we want to see. With leather hard work, it should just peel off rather than stick. If it's sticking, you'll want to go ahead and give your piece a little more time to dry out. So then we'll go in with the bigger tool and start taking away these bigger chunks. Hand resting on the top of my piece as I trim. And you'll see my thumb is connected to my other hand. That gives me more control. My elbow with my tool hand is tucked into my body, so I have support. And I'm slowly making my way up. The thicker side of my tool is facing up at this point. That's because I'm cutting away a lot of clay at this point. I would flip my tool around when I'm getting to smoothing this out. But at this point, I'm still cutting away clay. So this is the side that I want to use. I'm being careful as I get closer to my foot to not cut excess away. This is how we end up doing that. I can flip my tool and go back over this. My hands are connecting. It'll become more innate. Once you've thrown more, you'll know the thickness of your walls. But when in doubt, you'll do the push test. If there's any give, you know you should stop trimming immediately. And if it's nice and solid like we're seeing here, we're still good to go. So when I get closer to my foot, I'll switch to a smaller tool to avoid trimming too much clay off. We're always cleaning up the trimmed clay so we can see what we're doing. And then we'll refine this after we've... We can refine this further once we've handled that clay as well. So now we'll move to the inside of our foot and see how we can get in there. So with my loop tool, when we're trimming the inside of the foot... Up until now, we've been resting our fingertips there. But we're cutting away, so we're going to move our finger to our foot. One finger is on my tool. I'm going to start in the center and then start pulling to the side. Remember that if you're right-handed, the right side of the wheel is the sweet spot. If you're left-handed, this side. So we're always going to be working right on the right side of our piece. So it'll look a little crazy at first, but we're going to go in and even everything out really nicely with our tools and our rib tools. Now we can go in with our loop tool and even everything out. It still feels pretty thick on the bottom, so I'm going to go ahead and get a little more clay out of there. I'm pressing in between to make sure I don't go too far. Do a little press test. You'll start to feel the clay thin out if you've gone too far. The mistake I want to avoid with this tool is I'm not going to get this loop tool on my foot side that's going to cut away by accident really easily. When we're cleaning up the inside, the thick side should be on the center so that as I go, I have a little protection from that accident happening. And then going up this way, I would do the same thing. A good example of why we give ourselves a little extra space for the foot. Now I have that extra clay to adjust the shape as I want. Rather than curved, sloping, I'm going for a sharper angle here. I'm keeping my wheel relatively slow throughout this whole process. That gives us more control. And I'm going to hold the rib over any areas that look a little more uneven and give it a chance to smooth out. And I'm just going to be careful not to accidentally get too close to my foot with this tool. This is just polishing everything up with barely any pressure. It's just softly touching. You want to be careful not to put too much pressure, just enough to do some little housekeeping at this point. I'm just paying a little extra attention to any areas that seem out of place on the wheel. When we see it moving, it draws out any areas that are inconsistent with the rest. That's why I'm doing a little polishing before I get it off the wheel. You can already see it's looking a little cleaner. This isn't anything I would recommend with a groggy clay body. If you ever are dealing with grog, you can use our rubber tool to push that right back in. And these also help polish it up really nicely. There you go.