Burnishing Your Pinch Pot

all right so we're going to start burnishing our pot so it's totally bone dry you want to have your smooth um stone either those little glass ones that i sent you home with or if you have a polished rock that works out great your surface has to be the surface of your polishing rock or stone or whatever has to be as smooth and glossy as what you want it to be um you won't get any smoother or glossier than what you're polishing with so i'm gonna have some water nearby um there's a couple of different ways that you can go about actually burnishing a piece and what the process of burnishing is is actually taking all of these little clay platelets and lining them up so that they create a mirror finish over the surface so it'll look like our piece is glazed with a nice satin or even high gloss finish but it won't have it won't actually have any glaze on it um and it is actually a great way to start to seal the surface and make it a little bit more so this is always going to be a burnished piece is always going to be an earthenware piece something that is not fully vitrified it will allow water to kind of seep through however you get a high enough burnish and that actually starts to increase the water tightness of it all um but if you take a burnished piece up to its um point of vitrification in terms of our like because we have uh stoneware here we have like i'm using um sold 860 for this which isn't honestly like the best clay to do this because it does have a lot of sand in it but it'll be fine um but if we took it past basically like um maybe cone four or a little bit higher actually i think really cone zero like oh ten is like where we want to stop did i say cone four i meant cone04 um which is typically our bisque temperature um but even that can be a little bit hot like you do lose a little bit of your burnish at um cone oh four it would actually be better to biscuit a little bit lower um but you can still go back and kind of re-buff it up um at that higher um if we go to that higher temperature in the burnishing i mean in the firing of our piece okay so anyways so um we need um some form of lubricant so there's a couple of ways that we can put some lubricant on here um so we either want that to be so i'm i'm just going to use water because that's nice and easy but you could also where i learned um how to burnish from uh she always use it her name's uh marsha dead um and she would always use um crisco just the tiniest little bit of crisco um i think it just dried out a little bit slower um but you know basically we just need some sort of lubricant uh the other thing that one could use is teresa gelata um turtus enchilada is a very fine slip um it's kind of like what's sitting down at the bottom of this like my bucket it's actually the stuff like the really fine stuff that floats just between the solid and the like water at the top it's that little like cloudy layer um so that could be put on the top and that is just a whole bunch of really fine clay platelets that are already kind of lined up and coating it so that you already have a layer of them to smooth out so it's just a little bit easier to smooth out um but i don't have enough pterosaur to do that right now so we're doing it with this with water so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to start off by putting a little bit of water down and the whole idea here is to make it so that i don't have um like dust or dirt flowing around on here and then i'm gonna take my stone i don't wanna rub and i'm gonna try to keep in that same little area i don't want to go outside of that area because outside of that area is kind of free and loose little clay particles and you can already see that i'm starting to get um a little bit of a gloss going on okay so it doesn't take a lot of pressure it doesn't even really take a super long time um if you can get into a really good groove it'll work out fine but sometimes you know sometimes it goes great and other times you're just frustrated this is a great thing to um sit around and watch uh some netflix this is like netflix and chill but netflix and rub on a pot i don't know now i want to be careful about this sort of stuff right here where i started to make like a little slip i need to make sure that my rock stays really clean if it gets dirty i will start that means that there's going to be little clay rocks floating around on here and that'll scratch up my burnish so i want you to listen to this versus this okay if we're hearing this noise then we're gonna have a hard time we want to be hearing a little bit more of this noise so it's a little bit softer a little less a grinding action okay and where i'm wetting my piece i'm just going to lightly overlap where i was before i don't want to have like a big puddle or a pool of water there i just want it to have been like lightly absorbed in and you do want to be careful as you're doing this because i mean that your bisque bisquare i'm sorry you're not this isn't biscuit this is green wear your bone dry green wear is fragile like you can press um too hard especially right around the rim of your piece or if you have any little spindly bits or that sort of stuff now the other thing that you're going to start to find is like right around like the edges and stuff there's going to be areas that your little stone or whatever isn't going to be able to get into and there's not a lot that we can do about it at this point like you can't really reshape your piece um and then trying to carve into this or something like that is not really going to do you a lot of good okay so you know that you are doing it right if you can actually start to count the number of lights in your ceiling so look we can actually like see our ring light in there yeah look at that you can totally see my ring light um and it feels so nice okay so we're gonna do this over the whole surface but like i said so here's the part that i was kind of looking at before and i can already see that there's gonna be areas that i won't be able to get up there so we're gonna do our best i'm gonna try to get this is like shiny as we can be but we're not gonna panic um if you are lucky enough to have a couple of different like um polished stones and stuff that are different shapes then that's gonna help you out but you know don't worry if your piece is like really rough and you're not able to get it to get to a gloss at all because um it's too lumpy then i would say now is a good time to pivot and make yourself another um another pot that's a little bit more smoother so that you don't have to battle it i guarantee that you will go faster making a pot that works well as opposed to fighting a pot that doesn't want to be burnished yeah so that's what we're looking for guys um do your best be gentle around your um rims um and cover everything that you can touch so i'm gonna try to burnish as much of the inside of this cup as i can because i can see it um but there are definitely it's not going to be as awesome on that front ah feels so smooth it'll feel lovely guys there might be some areas where you do go over and you start to lose that burnish add a little bit more water to it and really give it a nice little like rub and you might be able to bring it back because sometimes like weird stuff happens so you know go team go yay

Channel: Laura Haight

Views: 4,763

Rating: 4.9130435 out of 5

Keywords: iMovie

Id: ZmVpWwAp4-I

Length: 10min 33sec (633 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 16 2020