123. How to Make Dinner Plates - from Start to Finish

foreign if you want to learn how to make beautiful ceramic plates like this then this video is right for you I have made several videos about making plates in the past but this video is sort of like a new edit where I take you through all the different steps the tools the clay the firing the glazing until the final plates and evaluating the results so let's get on with it [Music] I always throw my plates on bets this is a wooden bed and there's a hole in it so it attached itself over the pins that I have on my wheel that's an easy way to use beds I use the beds because especially with a plate where you have a very wide surface it's almost impossible to remove it when it's still wet without distorting it having it on the bed you can just remove the whole bed and let it dry and that makes it much more easier to deal with if you don't have a wheel with pins then of course you can't use beds with pinholes but you can still use beds instead you can put a layer of Clay on your on your wheel head and then glue the bed onto that more tricky but a lot of powders are using that um so in any case I will suggest to use that in addition to the bat that I'm throwing on I'm using what is it for five tools some of them are homemade and some of them are industrial I use my preferred sponge the mod tool sponge and I have this little rip that I use it's specially made because the splash pan is so close to um to the wheel head that a normal rip wouldn't fit and also I wanted the specific um angle here so I made this one this is my favorite ruler it's from a used company called MK nkm tools and they have lots of different designs this is one of my favorite uh sort of a Celtic Design and then this tube it's not particularly homemade but a home cut very useful and the way I make plates my latest invention is this tool it doesn't look so good but it's very helpful I put it over the edge of the splash pan and then I have this nail that I put in to cut the size of the of the plate that way they become exactly the same size every time and it's just so much faster than having to measure it I love that you can use any kind of clay you want to make plates I've been making plates in porcelain and in store where in my own Workshop I primarily work in storeware and I like how it looks unlike bigger pieces where you do need or at least it's easier when you have some Grog in the clay you don't actually need to have Grog in the clay for plates because it's not that big and if you want a very smooth surface maybe you want to pick some clay without that and there is a question of the collar with the porcelain of course you get that super wide surface that's really nice in itself with the clear glaze and some places look really beautiful on person then but with a stoneware you can get all kinds of colors in my initial testing of the designs I wanted to make for my plates I tried out three different store that I use a lot a gray one and a red one high iron stoneware and a black one and then I tested lots of different glazes on these plates and what I found out is that the black clay actually comes out the best the one that I'm using is called 371 and it's from ethereum company Johnson Snyder and I really really like that it does have some Croc but I can still make it super super smooth the great thing about the black Clay is not only does it look good but also it doesn't really matter what color I glaze in uh it match the clay with the gray clay that was sort of the same thing but less people actually like that clay um and the red clay I like personally but it's a little more tricky because some colors doesn't work with the red clay anyway that's just what I found out so I will be focusing in this video on plates made with the black clay but because this is sort of like an edited video I took some pieces from different videos I did in the past with the tools and the plates and the glazing you will occasionally in this video see me talking about something using a plate in a different color than black don't be confused about that it's just because this video is sort of like a summary mix of the different aspects of making plates so let's throw some plates just like when I'm making any other kind of pot I start out by centering the clay I cone it up and down a few times usually to align the particles and to get rid of any air bubbles there might be but then I do something different when I make the plates because usually you would then open up the clay Ball but instead I push it down into a sort of a puck shape I don't like too flat just flat enough for me to extend it with the PVC tube and this is a trick that I got from other powders but actually a really cool way to make it completely smooth and flat and I compress it at the same time I make it a little bit bigger than what I need because I'm gonna cut off the flange flange because the edge of it because that's how I make them exactly the same size and for that I use this new tool it makes it super easy to cut off at exactly the same size [Laughter] I usually throw the plates about one centimeter bigger than what I need enough to cut off a nice clean cut but not too much then I clean the edge and get ready to add the texture you don't need to add that Tick Tock but I like it I think it looks good on my plates you have to turn the wheel really slowly when you do that and it can be a little bit tricky to align the two ends perfectly time to raise the flange to make the flesh off the plate and this is where I use my little rip special grip tool I push it under the side sometimes you get a little bit of clay scraped off but that's okay try not to get too much because then you're gonna thin it out and then slowly move it another sometimes you need to add a little bit of water there to make it smooth enough but try not to add too much water because that's just gonna smudge everything too much now it's just time to um finish the edge and make it smooth and nice but of course you can't touch the area where you had the depends on whether or not you have texture and finally I'm gonna add this spiral texture in the middle and I like on my plate it took a little bit of time to get used to how much you need to pressure to get some texture but not too much that the plate gets well too bumpy um but you know it just takes very little experimentation and then you'll get it after I do the texture I do take a sponge and just knock down the the text a little bit so so it doesn't become too strong because that's gonna distort the the way of using the plate so I like it just to be a little bit subtle noticed I don't wire off my plates and why is it because most often you would see powders wire off the plates I don't do it for two reasons the main reason is that if you're using wooden pads or you're using a casting pads um they release themselves because it soaks some of the water out of it and then in a couple of days it release itself and therefore I don't need to cut it off and also when you cut it off with a wire like this the problem is that when you have such a white button it tends to go up a little bit like that not so much but something like this and that can lead to areas where it actually almost cut through you've probably seen that with some products as well so for those two reasons I don't do it it's also much fun now the plates have dried for almost 24 hours maybe close to 220 and there is well now it is summer as I said I dressed up a little bit more today but it is warm and so they do dry quickly which is a quick reminder because I'm doing almost everything the wrong way I'm doing things differently in what most products would tell you to do so I don't cut off I don't wire off the plates and I don't cover them when I'm dry so leave them uncut and I dry them super fast and still out of the first 25 or so plates that I did not one single one of them cracked and not one single one of them warped they all came out technically perfect so maybe I'm just lucky maybe it's a combination of the clay in the room I'm drying in I can't be here but it works for me so in case you are thinking about doing plates don't worry too much don't listen too much to what your teachers and more experience probably say just try it out if it works for you it's great not cutting them off it is important that it sucks out some of the water from the plate and then that I can take it off so let's just see yeah they're just getting off perfect now if you look at this button this is one of the main reasons I like not to cut them off it's just super smooth and plain so now I want to do some trimming and I really just need to trim the corner a little bit and then I'll just um I will burn burnish the button with a Shiny Stone I'll show you in a second but this one definitely turned out great when you want to trim a plate like this when you turn it around the problem is that you have this white uh free-floating area and when you trim on that you very easily push it down and when you do that of course you get the plate out of shape and we get that internal shape we don't want so in the past what I've done is I put some bubble plastic or something underneath it to to kind of support it but then I'm left with another problem and that is for this design with the flanges that are being this small I'm going to trim it all the way down so what you would usually do is when you put it on your wheel head you would put some lumps of clay to keep it in place but that's not gonna work so well with these plates also they're so big that they're actually touching the the pins that I have on my um my wheel head so they don't fit and of course I could put a bed on but it won't really glue onto the bed so instead what I'm going to do is I'm Gonna Make A specialized foam Chuck you could say so I'm gonna glue some of this I already cut them but I'll get back to you on that onto a bed and that way I can put it underneath it and it will I will of course make it round so support the plate completely um where it's most sensitive it'll be very easy to adjust it and because the foam have this friction to it it will actually hold the plate in place the first card here doesn't have to be very precise because we're not actually using the full size I'm just cutting out some of it to be able to fit it to my bed and put it on my wheel head I'll just use a scissor this is a very easy material to work with so now we have a better fit to glue something like this this material this foam you need a glue that is strong enough to hold it that's not too bad because you're you're applying a downward pressure so it doesn't really hide that much around but you need to be careful because some glue will actually eat the foam so it drips through and so you need a glue that is especially made for for phone you can probably get that if you build this Market I already have one that that I used to put up these installation panels in my recording studio so um I'm going to put some of that on foreign there we go I actually got a little bit too much on it so I'm just gonna distribute it like this and then turn it around and put it here yeah that actually sits quite well so now we have the middle and now it will probably be best to let it dry a little bit but we can try it with this um already and thrown and and fired a plate and yeah I think this one is great great so that's my foam Chuck for um for plates I'm just going to let this dry a little bit and then I'll get back to you um with the plates now of course these plates are a little bit bigger but I think that will still work or maybe in the end I will have to make another one see already now you can see some advances because you can keep your fingers under it that means you don't dump it on your bed and sometimes you crack the size of it and it's easy to move around I'm gonna do very little trimming on these plates I'm just gonna round off the corner and then I will burnish uh the whole plate I'm also going to go down the side a little bit because sometimes when you use this um my rib tool um you can leave a little bit of crumbles and I want to make sure that it's none of that [Music] I'm very happy with how they turned out I mean first of all they all survived and some people are very afraid of how to um to fire the plates because they think they're very fragile and I don't know maybe they are to some but these Clays are very um solid they work really well I even stacked um I think up to six or seven of the of the plates on top of each other and none of them correct they all have nice bands um and one of the things that I'm really happy about is the time that I spent not that much actually but I you may remember I punished um the button first with a soft rib and then with the shiny stone and because of the the foamy uh bed that I made for my plates it was quite easy I could apply the right pressure and now they feel like well baby skin we try to say they use the same level maybe a little bit awkward but you know what I mean it's just super smooth and nice and that's good because I'm not gonna have glaze on um on the outside of the rim and the bottom of course I'm just gonna do glazing on the inside there are many ways that you can glaze plates probably unlimited waste your English and I tried different versions I in the first ones I did I am I waxed the one um and then I tipped it I hold them like this and I dipped them into my pocket that was okay but two things it was quite time consuming and I still had to wash it off because even though it's easy to wash off with the wax I still have to do that work then I tried um using a a some type of tube it could be syringe actually sorry um and I put it on the wheel and I use that and a brush and it was okay I mean it's just not all glazes that will work for that um so today I'm gonna do what I think is actually the the easiest and best ways for the glasses I'm using where I'm actually just gonna pour a little bit of glaze into it swirl it around and take it out for most of the of the rim it's gonna be fine of course where I pull it out it's going to be a little bit of overflow that's easy to remove and then I will take a sponge all the way around and make sure it looks really nice place on the inside raw Clay on the outside foreign so I'm optimistic as always it's sort of a puzzle to figure out how to stack the curl the best way and it's amazing I have these wonderful plate shelves that I can use to to stack a plate and I think this way I can actually have two stacks in each layer and I think I can have maybe four or five in each so that means template in each layer that's very good and as you see there's still some space around it so I can place some um some faces I have some stuff I can put there and uh depending on what I will put next to it I can I can then decide how high I'm going to stack this it's gonna be very efficient I'm only gonna stack I found out four plates times two in this layer and that's because the vase I have over here is not higher than this so it doesn't make any sense to make it in a higher I can see now that it would make good sense to have some cups to fill up the spaces around these plates unfortunately I don't have any cups that need to get fired or some tall vases slim bases but still you know I have eight plates in just one layer and I can probably have two or three layers more also I'm hoping I can have all 25 plates let's see now I'm done at least on my plates and a few extra things some bolts and some bases so um now I'm going to start the fire and in about two days it should be ready one and a half day maybe I will of course show you the results foreign it's Sunday morning had my first cup of coffee it's a little bit cold it is early Springtime in Denmark so that's how it is now the Kiln have cooled down it's uh below 100 degrees and I know I said this many times before but please wait I'm not personally the most patient person but um it pays off to wait first of all if you open it too early especially with the glaze fire you could crack it up the glaze and destroy your pots um but also the heating elements you put stress on your heating elements if you almost killed too early and then they won't last this long and they're very expensive to change but also I mean what's the point in opening it when it's super hot because you can't touch the pots anyway and you can't put them anywhere so in my case it's usually about one and a half day so 36 hours and then it's below 100 degrees when I get up so um let's go and take a look it's so exciting ah that looks really good even though it's below 100 degrees it's still pretty warm um I wouldn't like to touch them with my bare hands but they're it looks very good so far now the plates are done they've been misfired and I glazed them and I hate to crack but I am so happy I finally got to the plate that I want at least the dinner plate size evaluating a function Ware or kitchenware like this they're really two sides of it one is the visual part of it because I want it to be beautiful you know otherwise I could just buy some cheap in Ikea but I want this to stand out and be beautiful so from an aesthetic point of view that's one thing and of course that's very subjective but there's also a functional part of it this is a part with with functional wear and kitchenware dinner plates like this but they came out technically perfect in my mind first of all they stack really well this is 11 plates and it only takes up what is it like 15 centimeter so they take up the value of space in my cabinets that's one thing the other thing is that they fit very well into my dish module that was another problem I had with big plates because of a big big flange they become so big that they don't fit my kid and my dishwasher these ones too and the most tricky part is probably two glaze it in a way that they don't leave cuddly remarks and this is tricky because you probably had some kitchenware like cups or plates or something and then when you use a Cutlery metal Cutlery they over time leave marks and it comes makes them look a bit dirty it doesn't look so good but what is it that makes a glaze as responsive to to cutlery it's a little bit tricky it's basically a question of the glaze being too hot and not medically it can get too hard but for a plate or cup it can um sometimes it's because there's a lot of circle packs in it it can be other materials that makes it hard but the good thing is with these plates I now use them a few times also these places I I used in the first batch of my plates and then and I use them every day for like a couple months and there's no marks also I'll wash them in the washing machine for I don't know 20 30 times and they come out perfect so that was all the technical part of it and I really love how that came out now to the more aesthetic part of it I look at this I just love this plate the flange came out perfect so strong and the swirly and and I mean it comes out really strong with this glaze this is uh a sort of a yellow glaze but on the dark uh black Clay comes out more like a orange ogre type of food and this is the other one that I tested and that everybody seemed to like um a green one this is the one that was supposed to be gray remember I added a little bit of black stain and very very little bit of cupboard but I forgot that there's a lot of titanium in the rutile and titanium and Cobalt creates green I didn't know that I don't know so it was a mistake but I love it it's just a beautiful place so I'm gonna continue at least with these two colors on my plate then I tried to make the gray one I made it with a a black stain that was originally used by another powder to create this gray um and I mean it's still beautiful but it's not I mean it's difficult to see your video it's not completely gray it's got a little bit of a yellow greenish tint to it um so I'm probably not going to continue with this because it's too close to this one but it's definitely beautiful I used it also on a on a couple of these cups and I used it on a picture and I think it comes out it looks like some old stoneware um and and so the glaze is definitely good I'm definitely going to keep it I just don't think this is gonna be the third color I'm going to use for my place anyway that was a whole lot of talking I'm just so excited for my plates anyway I hope you like this video and please subscribe if you like it uh right comment share whatever you like and um I will have a new video coming up next Sunday usually at 5 00 PM Central European Time so um let's hope to see you there and enjoy the summer [Music]

Channel: Mikkel deMib - Pottery Tips

Views: 15,388

Keywords: dinner plates, making dinner plates, wheel throwing, wheel throwing dinner plates, stoneware dinner plates, how to, ceramics plates, wheel throwing tips, wheel throwing video, easy dinner plates, glazing dinner plates, fire dinner plates

Id: gaIbQZ_Q6Pk

Length: 28min 11sec (1691 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 13 2023