Burnishing your pottery

hey everybody today I'm going to talk about how to burnish your pottery do high gloss finish not finished forming this little egg and it has a relatively smooth surface but I want to go ahead and use a burnishing stone to to polish it up to a high gloss finish to get ready for a pit fire sagger afire horsehair firing or sometimes ferric chloride it's just a mostly for a low fire application technique I'm to be successful with this you're going to need some type of high-gloss burnishing stones just gone through some type of rock tumbler and some people also use like a spoon for starters and to make sure that your your pot or whatever your burnishing has gone through the majority of its shrieking remember most clay shrink three to seven percent between plastic wet to bow and drying so you want something that is really stiff leather hard that you can't make any dents or marks easily and this is when we're gonna start polishing so I'm going to go ahead and move the camera over and get it close up and start burnishing okay here we are I have my piece that's been formed and I want to go ahead and polish the surface through burnishing you can see this area here is quite matte it's no no reflective qualities whatsoever as opposed to this egg I finished burnishing yesterday this little rattle and you can see how reflective it is it's actually amazing that this sort of rough stoneware clay can be that smooth that's amazingly smooth so I'm going to go ahead and start with my burnishing Rock remember you can only get the surface of the object your burnishing as shiny as the stone you're using and so you want to pick a nice shiny one and you know rocks have different densities as well so you want to figure out which rocks has the highest density so I'm going to go ahead and just push I'm pushing this much harder than you think you need to you can start with a little circle or I can go back and forth and really compress this surface into itself now this clay is almost all a bit shrinking and so it's actually the perfect time to to burnish people can't get really disappointed and they burnish early when it's still more a wetter leather hard and they're very disappointed the next day when it does that last percentage or two of shrinkage and and it's not shiny anymore now you can see this little area it's really getting pretty reflective it's looking pretty good so I just like to turn my piece see this area on top is dull and just work this area until it's shiny again you're just compressing the surface into itself so you're pushing really really hard to get this whole thing to shine up make sure your rock doesn't have any any burrs or imperfections in it you just want a nice smooth glossy surface and she'll be able to transfer right over to a nice smooth burnished Burness stone again this is gonna be used for pit firing horsehair firing sagar firing and sometimes ferric chloride so there's all kinds of uses to burnish and it can be a really really beautiful surface just in its own right look how shiny is beautiful okay happy burnishing everybody

Channel: Andy Ruble

Views: 5,909

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: burnishing, burnishing your pottery, how to burnish, ceramics, clay, polishing, polishing you clay, pinch pots, pinch, pinch pot rattles, andy ruble, andy ruble ceramics, foothill college, beginning handbuilding

Id: cNjE7vfzhIo

Length: 3min 17sec (197 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 23 2020