Throwing A Faceted And Altered Tea Bowl On The Potter’s Wheel, My Favorite Form To Make.

Alright, so I'm going to make a faceted and altered T-Bowl on the wheel here. I'm going to use this wooden wire I made inside of a cheese cutter and I stretched out a spring on it. So, I've got my clay here, I wedged it, but I did wedge it the other day and usually if I let it sit for a little while I'm going to want to wedge it again, so I try and keep wedging it the same direction. You can wedge on the wheel head if it's nice and dry, it can be a little squirrely because it does want to spin, especially on these shimpos, the back of the bending wheel, but if you line it up right in the center, then it's not so bad, so I'm just giving this a little wedge. This is a kind of soft, plastic, porcelain-y stoneware, I'm getting this from Tacoma Clay Art Center, it's called MAC-10, I really like the way it blushes in the soda kiln, so this is it. It's been gas-sodafied, so you can kind of see this with the celadon glaze, and that's the raw clay body that was in contact with the soda ash in the kiln, that's the protected clay. Alright, so, I'll start by wheel wedging, or coning, in my mind that's the same thing, so, I'm still aligning the clay particles, I am working the air bubbles out of the clay, and I'm making this piece of clay a little more homogenous, if there's a dry spot or a wet spot somewhere. So it's redundant, but I do it a couple times anyways because it helps me go towards center. Okay, I call this scraping the foothills, I use my thumb to scrape a little bit of clay where the clay ball meets the wheel, sometimes you get ridges that bump up and down, and so I scrape those off, I call that scraping the foothills. And now I'm going to center it, even though it's pretty much centered, that was coning, this is centering, for centering, pressing with the pad of my hand, usually this pad and this pad, pressing away from myself, pressing towards about 2 o'clock, if you imagine the wheel as a clock, I'm pressing towards 2 o'clock, and with my right fist, I'm pressing down on the radius, and so I've got the center of the clay here, and the edge of the clay here, and so the radius is from the center to the edge. If you press right in the middle, and you're not pressing on the edge, you'll create a concave shape, concave is like a bowl, convex is like the earth, it's round, and so I'm pressing down on the radius, which keeps it flat, because if I miss the center, it'll pop up like a little nipple, and if I press in the center, it'll become a bowl. So I want to press on the radius, I've got it centered now, I put a little more water and I'm now opening, I use my thumb and my index combined to open, so I'm pressing down, and for these, I like to be able to put a foot on these, so I'm leaving a generous amount of clay, about an inch at the bottom. I'm going to use a technique I call the Hungarian Claw, and for that, I'm using my right middle finger and my right thumb on the outside, towards the bottom, my right index on the inside, and with my left hand, for a larger piece of clay like this, sometimes I'll use my middle finger and thumb on the outside, sometimes I'll press just as if I was still coning the clay, and so that's what I'm going to do, I'm going to reach underneath here, my right middle finger is really pulling on the clay, my left hand is closing it in, collaring, I'm going to compress, my mantra is usually collar and compress when I'm throwing pots, and I'm going to collar once more, I'm getting a lot of height out of the clay by collaring, and I'm going to compress once more. Okay, so now I've got my cylinder, and we'll do six vertical facets, you can change the gauge on this, I like to be able to control the depth of the cut, this is a pretty deep cut, so we'll see how it goes, I'm going to cut quite a bit of clay off right now, okay, so that's one, two, three, four, and six vertical facets, with the wiggly wire cheese cutter, something that I like to do, it's more of a superstition than anything, is I cut the top off, just to make sure I'm starting with it nice and flat, in case there was a wobble going up, and at this point, you can slow your wheel down, and close any cracks that might be forming already on the rim, compressing just a little bit, and I've turned the speed up, and I'm going to start opening, little by little, at this point I can check on it, look to see if it looks like it might tear anywhere, I could go back, and try and compress a little more, to stop it from tearing if it seems like it wants to, if you did make one cut deeper than the rest, it's likely to become kind of exponentially thinner there, and eventually tear there, so, got to be careful about that, but we're getting somewhere, it's holding on, this is why it's nice to have clay that's real plastic, so now I'm bellying it out from the inside, trying not to open the rim too much further, because it was just about where I wanted it, I definitely have a thin spot, but personally I like the way that looks, if it doesn't break, I like to see that differential in thickness, and it adds a little bit more of a ethereal and delicate nature to the pot, okay so I'm pretty happy with that, and take a little bit of this clay, not too much, because something I do like to do is trim the inside of these pots later, so that's something that we'll have to show you another day.