Complete teapot tutorial with cane handles.

Good morning, it's Vaughan at westgillbellpottery.ca in Nova Scotia, Canada and welcome to Canada. I'm actually going to throw some teapots but I haven't made any with cane handles for quite a long time and sometime late last year I remember somebody asked me for some and I don't have any so I usually put clay handles on mine but I thought I'd make some and so that involves two little lugs to actually attach the cane handle to on the top but it'll be a fun project because I'm going to glaze them with the new glazes to add sort of some nice pieces to the displays that I'm actually doing because I've got quite a good collection of each colour at the moment. So the bat system is by Bill Wright at artisanpotterytools.com and these are the seven and a quarter inch bats and I'm actually throwing about two and three quarter pounds of in the 519S from Pottery Supply House in Toronto. It's a stoneware with some grog in it with the glazes and it's working pretty good. It's got a slightly different colour response to the 519 which doesn't have grog but it's still quite a nice colour response. So two and three quarters pounds. My elbow is pushing against the wall of the support for the wheel so that I've got some extra oomph because I'm lower down so I don't have as much body weight over the clay. I've got to think about our backs especially since I'm getting older. I've had bad backs several times throughout my life and it isn't fun but I have a friend at the moment who has a bad back and my sister too so we should be taking care. So it's a little off there in the centre. I'm going to keep going on it a bit. Sometimes you can feel a lump is perfectly in centre and then there's just one area that has a little bump. So now I'm going to go down right to the bottom and leave about quarter to three eighths of an inch at the base all over. If you want to check your base you just use a pin and push it in to make sure you've got a good thickness because by the time I'm done as soon as you put the clay back over with some pressure it fills the hole that you just put in. But I don't need to do that because I've done this quite a lot. I expected this clay to be a little bit of an issue for throwing but it's been pretty good. It dries a little fast as you're pulling the wall. That must be the grog allowing the water to enter the clay body itself a little faster. Bemix is a really great clay to throw by Laguna. I'm going to cone it a bit just to make sure that we don't get too wide since I'm going to have quite a narrow top. Pushing in hard on the outside now I'm going to start bellying because I have pretty much the height that I need. This is actually a little more clay than I would normally use to make a teapot shape but because of the cane handle I just wanted to have some thickness up top. I'm using my finger to pull in a little bit there so pushing in here and also here. We're actually getting some more. We don't have any snow on the ground at the moment and it's January 17th so we're having a pretty mild winter. Not so the rest of Canada but we're supposed to get some snow tomorrow but only maybe three inches or so. You never know. I really have to be careful because the water is soaking into this clay faster because of the grog. This isn't finished as a shape but I'm going to try and take off the slip so we can stop this piece from drying out. Sorry if I'm getting too soft too quickly. Also when you're doing pulls and opening the belly it's nice if you make sure that the inner wall is smooth and lubricated all the way up but not over wet. So I use the sponge pretty much just to even the moisture out on the inside so my finger won't stick and slip when it's on the inside. So I'm going to take the water off the actual out a bit now because I wish you had tiny hands when you've got to throw pieces with narrow tops. Actually I always figure the better design for a human being is three hands and three arms because I'm always looking for an extra support. Okay so this is now fairly even all the way up and it's my fingers slipping so I'm going to try let's give a little moisture to it just slippery on the top there so it's even and now I'm going to try to push that top in a little bit more because I thought the lid is still got to be a little smaller than that. This is where you have to watch the belly to make sure you don't encourage a wobble. That's probably better. Now I'm going to use my finger on the inside and pull up a bit and then I'm going to put a shoulder on it and now I want to create a little wall that comes up to support the lid. So I'm thinning a little bit there. There's no water added to the to the clay so I've got to be careful that it doesn't drag but there you go that was just enough moisture to keep it slippery and I'll have to think I'm going to have to use it I know I think I'm not going to get away with it sometimes you have to use a pin at that point then I will use the rib wooden rib here to actually push that and define it a little better and put it on top to knock down any slip that may have built up a bit higher. Wooden ribs drag so I use the metal most of the time I think that's a good form. Get some clay out the bottom. I'm going to make five or six of these with the different color pieces that I've been doing. So let's have a look to see if I've got my calipers here to make sure I'm getting the right size. I've thrown two already. Okay how big have we got? Do I need to open or close? Oh it's exact so I think I'm going to open up just a touch. I like to give myself about an eighth of an inch clay because the clay's thickness. This is such a quiet time of year I mean we literally go home all day when nobody comes into the shop upstairs so it's nice to be able to concentrate on making pieces and I'm actually getting quotes on putting solar panels on the new studio. We've been told we can put 12 kilowatts on the roof of the studio which is since my kilns are 10 kilowatts I'm guessing they put 12 on. I should be able to fire my kiln I'm hoping three to four times a week and be able to pay for it with the sun. There you go. So I could have opened this up a little bit more on that belly but that's a nice enough shape but maybe I'll put it back on later on and open it up a bit more and now I have to do a lid. Yeah like today is totally cloudy but last summer was sunny every day. It was the best summer. Tourists say it was the best summer they've ever had here so you can't expect that every year. So this will be a spout it's a tiny bit of clay probably about 50 grams of clay here I would think. It's hard to center little bits of clay as well sometimes I throw these off the hump that screw is catching me it's not a screw it's a pin it catches your hand a little bit as you're centering so it's hard. I've got to go right through these to the bat. Yeah I should have probably combed the clay I can feel it rippling a little bit but sometimes you can actually go back down. I haven't raised it too thin so I can squash it back down and now I'm going to pull it back up again so it's almost like wheel wedging. Now little tiny short stubby spouts are actually fun sometimes but I try to make my spouts a little longer or I might try several different ones here. The one thing I noticed in my new studio I fired the kiln yesterday up there. I do all my tile work up in that new studio and firing the kiln in there with being such a well-insulated building it gets hot in there. It was actually 89 degrees in January in my new studio and I worked in there last night and I literally had to take my sweater off and it was just so warm in there. Sitting there carving tiles in the evenings is nice but it was too hot yesterday with that kiln. I have a fan sucking the air out of the kiln while it's firing but the radiant heat from it is just really warm. So spouts. You can use a rib to get yourself a nice curve. That's actually dragging on that thing but anyway the rib can give you a nice curve. I can get my finger in there because it was going to use this rib too but that's all I need. I'm going to make six or eight of those. I can make the spouts a little narrower but you can cut these also later on but I think yeah let's just make the spout a little narrower here. You don't want it to glug glug and gurgle when you're pouring with a teapot and I'll be trimming the top a little bit. I don't like them to flare out too much but just a little bit and then with these you can just use a pin or a wire and just cut them loose. There you go. I should have cleaned my bat but there you go. A little spout for the lid. The lids are pretty quick. Squash down, cone up a little bit, squash down, cone up a little bit. That's what I should have done to the spout but it's such a tiny piece of clay it was hard to do it and I'm going to do these with a little bird knob on the top so we'll just have to go down a tiny bit so we'll leave a little thickness in the base so that when you stick the bird on you don't cave it in and then you just that's just opened it up a little bit. A little finger upside down pushes in and then you can wet it a touch and then we'll measure it to make sure. Now spouts can be quite tall and then there is a trick where you can stop the spout from falling. This just pushes underneath to lift the the flat rim a little bit, the shoulder area and then it gives you a right angle and I'm going to press a little bit to it but if you can get a fairly tight fitting lid which is risky because you don't want it to be too tight and then it doesn't fit after the firing you can put a little notch on your lid here and actually stop the lid from falling out when you're pouring but I always put my finger on the lid anyway when I'm pouring so but I've had when I've been trial and playing or like when I tip it over to pour the lid will just fall out so you've got to stop it because that's where it will get broken and if you're like me I hate making replacement lids. Okay see how the fit is. These calipers or I should do it so you can see I guess I've done this before. Okay there you go so that's a nice little lid. I've got a shoulder lifted up a little bit there so we'll have a nice curve to it when we trim it. I can yeah I can leave these on the wheel again on the little bat. I've got plenty of these bats so I need six to eight of these and I'm going to make six teapots and six to eight spouts and I'll have to make little coils to hold the handle. Okay I threw these all last night, last evening I should say and I've got six teapots like this and then I have six little spouts all thrown and a bunch of lids here that are all the same size. For my tools I've got a little loop, a little lug tool here to pull to instead of rolling coils that's artisanpotterytools.com where I got that. It's exactly like a clay knife, a little hole puncher for that. I like to put holes where I'm putting the spout and a little scoring tool, a pot of water and some paintbrushes so that's what you need to do this and I'm just going to put you on um sort of a quiet, well no it's not so bad I can talk through the first one, but what I do is determine where the spout's going to go and you can do that a couple of ways. One simple way is to simply take a look at it. These are firmed up a lot more than I thought they would in the down cupboard so I'm gonna have to wet the bottom of the spout and then you can position it and just take a look what's it gonna look like because you remember when you put one of these on, I should do it so you can see, that part there should not be above the actual top there otherwise when you're pouring the liquid will come out here before it comes out here so you've got to determine where this is going to go and it's going to have to have an angle like that but be lower down I think so we don't actually get the, you know, we want this to pour before it comes over the top there. So you're going to cut this using one of these tools is pretty sort of nice you can just take a little, you can cut it evenly, take some out get down so you don't distort it too much then you've got your even cut and let's see whether this makes it fit better. It's getting there but it's still a little bit big so I can take a bit more off. It's basic now I can see the cuts are even I can just kind of go down take a bigger dent still pretty even that's getting a bit better now so I'm going to start shaping it which means just kind of pinching it out a little bit so I can get it to blend into the actual pot itself. The pot itself is quite soft let's see trying to get it so that there's no hole there. It's not bad because I can kind of punch that with a little bit of clay. Now here's the determination, that is still higher than that so this has to come down a titch and this is grog clay so let's get it off here because it's too easy we've got to get that lower once it's in a decent position let's see yeah that's below now so then I can just kind of I'm determining where my hole is and just kind of make some marks there so I can put the holes in the actual teapot. This is very groggy clay now if the pot is quite soft this the piece may actually stick in the hole but that's why I like this because you can punch it out and I don't know how many holes you need to do this see this pops it right out I dip it in water it came out then on its own okay so we've got those holes there then this is very soft so we don't need to do anything other than it might be a good idea to just give it a rub with some slip just kind of giving it a little bit of tooth as they say and then this I just dipped a few times it's very soft now as well so I'm simply going to place it to center it over the holes take another look to there and then push it down and I put a paintbrush opposite so I can get something to push back a little bit and simply press it down and I use my wire to get this even and just cut up a little bit because I always feel like it looks like the end of a saucepan if you don't like the saucepan handle and then just move your brush backwards and forwards to thin out with your thumb underneath so it doesn't crack so you're trying to thin out the spout at the lower part there and make it hang over just a touch here's the dilemma you don't want it to get too thin because it will crack but the thinner it gets the less chance you'll have any drips coming out when you're pouring so always tell the customers that Robin Hopper told me dab a bit of butter over the end of your spout and it won't drip that's the spout make them marks all over the teapot that you can get rid of those later on now here's the little lugs we have our little handle tool here and make sure this isn't stuck to the board that you can pull it through let's see if I cut this the right length just a little bit to use all the slab simply pull the coil out so instead of rolling these I'm doing that I could roll it and I would never get it quite as even as that so I've got two little lugs we want two the same size and we want to be able to thicken them a little bit when we join them so I'm going to cut them down about there that's way too high but I'm going to squish them down a little bit with doing this picking up the actual the area where they're going to get joined so this one I should do this on a dusty surface so it doesn't stick I mark the teapot with two little x's where that cane handle touches at this point so I'm going to join the handle there and I'm going to make it go out at an angle so we can kind of assess the shrinkage you know so this is about six inches across is like feeling so I'm going to have to make the area here stick out an extra half an inch at least so instead of being vertical like that I'm going to make them go out so they are about six inches plus a half an inch apart I'm eyeballing it to make sure that the lights you see what I'm saying so they're at an angle so the handle will not reach at this point but when it shrunk they should be the right size I have had these angles for years and I just never use them I always use clay handles this is grog clay so it doesn't crack as easily when it's drying as the smooth clay because the shrinkage rate of grog clay is not as much but I'm going to watch these very carefully that area at the top there is where you might get a crack so the more watch I do here adding to it the more shrinkage you'll get too so you don't want to do this much at all they're a bit sloppy at the moment they're not too bad actually but they're falling down a little bit but that's what I've got to do to all 60 pots and I've got to watch them carefully so they don't actually and I'm going to clean up this spout a little bit more as well but it's a bit soft at the moment because it's caving in a little bit and so I'm going to make sure I can just change the form enough without pushing it into that on this second teapot I'm taking this tool and I cut off some like that instead of putting little b's in either side I cut some off the top area there so when I put the spout on I can angle it a little nicer I figure this might be a little better way of doing that um I think those v's were I have to stick play back back in so this might be a better way of doing it and I can still brush it in but when I do this I try to flare out the bottom part because it's quite thick there so you're going to let it play which will be nice because you can make it blend you know quite easily but that's where we can actually turn it up and then put the holes in the same and what I was saying about that hole puncture I can and I do that because I'm used to the other clay cracking when you've got thin bits that dry faster than the body of the piece so just you know check it every couple of hours every just pieces drying nicely you can unwrap it for a few minutes put plastic back on because you're just trying to slow that those areas from drying down faster than the rest of this piece so so I probably will take those off put them on take them off put them on and then when I put them in the damp cover tonight I take them off completely because they can in a damp cover they won't dry out much at all anyway but that's number two I was thinking about making little birds for the knobs on the teapot but I think I'm just going to throw some regular doorknob type things so cone it up and you decide where you want to have them what size these are pretty fast and easy to make you can cut through with a wire or you can simply use a pin I try and do it where there's a little swelling of the clay so I can push it down so you attach it to the lid just a tiny little knob okay the lids are dry enough so I can trim I don't throw my lids very thick so I don't have to take much off the center the lids are not leather hard and the knobs are totally fresh thrown five minutes ago so I don't really have to do much to make them stick they're so I just score the area there and the knob can be placed and I'm going to put my finger underneath when it's centered that's pretty close to centered already so what I do is I lift it put my middle finger underneath and just move it around with some pressure from underneath there so we know that it's actually being back pressure that knob's a little large isn't it you know just that's what the overhang was done when I was pouring it off I would leave a little bit of clay now it will spin if I put pressure on without too much water so you've got to be careful but I like to kind of just oh it's pretty good straight away I don't mind if they have a little wobble with the knob it's not like as I showed you Armada once told Bernard Leach it only wobbles when it's spinning just knock it off that's better but that's pretty good that's what I'm going to do to all of them now so the teapots are pretty much complete now except for decoration where I will do some stamping and some actual textures I trim them but they have to wait until tomorrow and we have a snowstorm tonight and there's a likelihood of a power out overnight so who knows what will happen tomorrow but anyway it took a bit longer it's three o'clock now to assemble these and it's taken most of the day which is pretty slow for me but we've had a lot of other stuff going on okay it's actually two days later we had a snowstorm and then power out for the last two days so um so I'm just getting to these and I kept them in my damp cupboard the whole time and they're still good so that's very nice now because these have lugs on them let's just make sure this doesn't fall out the nice way of trimming these is by turning your lid which was this way obviously upside down and it gives you the height of that is taller than the points of the lugs so you can actually trim without sort of resting it on those lugs so you just have to turn it over carefully put it in there and then tighten up your giffing grip now if you just have a regular wheel without a giffing grip this is actually hard to trim because I think the chuck that I have would get in the way of those lugs would get in the way of it because I have a chuck that I can trim on as well and I have various ones I even have a lid that's been sacrificed to do this kind of trimming as well but I do have a varying supply of chucks this one I wonder if this would work let me try it before I do the trimming oh look at that it worked so if you make a special chuck that you can actually support this on and then you fasten lumps of clay and it'll still be really precarious to trim like this but you need to be able to trim obviously even when you've got lugs like the one on the teapot here it's really hard but you would have to throw yourself a soft clay cylinder like this and you can trim right on but I bisqued this one so I've always got it ready in case I need it like that fasten this down with great huge wads of clay to hold it and then basically put your hand on the top and when it's spinning you'd be able to hold it down so it wouldn't spin off but I have a giffing grip so I'm really lucky but I think this is well worth the purchase and I know they've come down in price recently and there is a knockoff now on I think it's the Timu website where they make a small giffing grip as well but anyway I am just going to trim it on top of my lid like that as I said I even have I think it will work this one which will work which is an already fired so why risk the lid that I've got the lid pot if I can fire it on the bisque it's worth keeping a lid if you ever have it done one knot for the teapot just use it for a trimming piece let's see if I've got that securely on there that's not very secure let's see if it's centered close still not there so let's give it an extra tug to make sure it's on there properly and then you can trim yeah we had two days with a generator running outside the snow was just super heavy in fact my back has been pulled out I haven't had a bad back for ages when I was shoveling so much snow and it was super heavy and the limbs on the trees just came down and that's what knocked some power lines out go much further than that because I don't usually trim these very much but for some reason I am I love narrow bases on teapots of course it's the age-old function versus aesthetic idea where I've taken quite a bit off there which is a bit and then just hollow out the center just a touch you don't need to take much off I won't be still firing these ones so I will probably just leave the bottom unglazed on teapots they're too they can just overbalance on a still because you can see me with a tiny still so I take out a little bit that way put a little bit of glaze over the but I carved two tiles in two days for those murals so that wasn't wasted time at all okay so let's see shall I chatter or not I like fluting on these usually it's a little soft but let's see what happens I feel the vibration the force be with you what did we get oh we got a nice little that there I didn't want to press too hard because the piece is a little soft I didn't want to dent it on either side yeah my damp covered I put new sides on it front and back to seal up with little like little clasps that stop it the plastic could be held really tight now I used to use duct tape always messy looking and we'll give it a little finish in okay so let's show you what we got this is the gritty clay so that's the chattering effect which since it's at the bottom of the piece most people won't see it and this is two days with the cling film on um and it's leather hard up the top there but I'm gonna leave that on just a bit longer I'm just nervous since it's gritty clay that it could still crack but it seems like it's behaving really well at the moment and I may do a little carving on the lid there too