How to: Hand Building Ceramic Doily Mugs

So my clay is ready and compressed and I already measured enough space for my mugs which I usually cut out. I'm going to do five inches by 11 today so I made sure that I had enough room here so it's okay if my door is hanging off the edge it's going to be in part of the mug anyway so. Three bottoms. What I'm going to first do is cut out the bottom since I want that center piece to be a center of one of the mugs. So since I'm going to do five inches I'm going to use my protein measuring ruler and make sure the center is at 2.5. And since this ruler is six inches not five I'm going to make sure I move over one inch to the line so that it's centered. And now that that's centered now I can do the five inches on and get a rubber rib and smooth that clay out. All right so now that that's done I'm going to go ahead and attach the bottom. I don't see how far it sits. An inch. I like to clean out the slip in that bottom edge. start to curl up the bottom lip. So while I do that I'm going to get my handles ready and I'll be able to roll this up. So what I first do since I don't pull my handles I make sure that my hardy backer board is moist so that it doesn't over dry my handles as I work on them. I want to cut them smaller and make it easier for me to roll out. So I'm going to cut about five or six inches for each handle. All right so now that I have three carrots I keep the top pretty thick just to give it some more support. So I have a couple ways that I do handle. So first one you can go ahead and just slap it down sort of flat in the back side. So I make sure I put enough pressure on the side and push down on my pointer finger to give it sort of that little stir ridge and I call it a day. So there's one. Not bad huh? For me that's a lot easier than pulling. So this is what I use since I used to use wood. I used to use plastic metal and I think the sturdiest thing that I could easily use to transport things or to allow things to dry slowly. I really like ceramic paddles and I put these in my greenhouse also since the little shelves that they give you at the greenhouse are pretty flimsy and this helps support everything in the shelf so it's easy to do. And I like the sheen on this too. It doesn't stick to it so that's good. So I allow the mugs to dry a little bit more so I can curl up the bottom. I'm gonna go ahead and give the mug a little bit more shape. I mist the inside walls just gently. I go in with a sponge. I usually start on one side of the seam and work my way around slowly and I just curl up the inside walls of the mug. So I curl up the inside walls of the mug as I keep my hand on the outside wall to protect it. I'll do this slowly and then you can sort of give the mug more of a bulging belly. So I'm only going about halfway up since I only want the bottom part to be a little bit more of the belly since I'll be adding a lip to the outside the top of the mug. See as you can see it coming out to my third time around. You see how I slightly touch the bottom seam so it doesn't lift and it gives it a little bit more support. A little bit I wouldn't mind really getting into smoothing that pattern right there. All right so now I'm slowly rolling out the lip as I'm still smoothing out the top. So I'm pushing down and out to bring that lip out. I sort of keep my index finger right below the lip to sort of guide the curve. So I usually roll out the bottoms on the table and I sort of like do this motion at the bottom of the table until it rolls up but since it's still a little moist I'm just going to do it sort of manually. So this is what I usually do is I just slowly start curling up that lip and I don't got to put it up all the way. I just want to sort of get the clay workable. That's the shape I'm getting now. Now as I go in for the second round get them a little bit closer to the body. So now what I do I hold the mug on its edge ahead and scored where the handle is going to be placed. I choose the seam just so that it hides that and make sure it's firm enough where it's sturdy enough for me to attach the handle to. I trimmed down my hands.