Centering and Trimming with an Uneven Rim

all right so this piece here has an uneven rim how do I know that this piece is uneven when I sit it on the wheel head well I I can use my needle tool a minute rather than centering from here and you can see it's not quite centered yet I'm going to draw a line on the top I'm holding my needle tool steady and just letting it draw this line and you can see it's cut it's touching the clay on this side and not touching the clay on that side and that just means that this side is lower I had a watery rim when I was working on it and I didn't get that fixed so one of the ways that you can adjust this after you've already thrown it obviously when you're throwing it you can cut off some of that rim but at this point I can still deal with this I can get a little bit of clay underneath that side I'm going to wipe away my line here so I don't get confused about which line is which and then I'm gonna draw that line again I'm gonna draw from above now you see I've gone a little too far in the other direction this side is now higher where I've got this wad of clay so I'm gonna adjust that piece of clay down a little bit I'm just gonna squish it a little bit more and I'm gonna set this piece back on here again wipe away my line so this is tedious I'm not fun exactly but you can see that it allows you to deal with a piece that otherwise you really struggle with trimming all right let's see if that's any closer you can also after you've done this once or twice you can see why it's important to cut off that RIM so things are nice and even so that you don't have to spend your time doing this then add I'm getting my my higher point kind of to the side over here so I'm gonna add a little bit of clay over on this side and see if that helps me with this another way you can trim something like this is you can actually put it on to a chuck you can throw yourself a Chuck and trim it on there and that that's fine as well so now I'm a lot closer to even looks like I'm still just a hair over here and then of course you can see that I'm not quite centered and sawed besides getting it level I'm also going to to Center it and so I'm gonna start to do some of that as well so this is the circles happening here which means the circle needs to move this way in order to do that I've got to move the whole pot this way and I know I'm going fast here if you're if you're trying to do this in the in the yvc studio I recommend you come get some help it's a little tricky to kind of figure out the first time you're doing it now you see that line I just drew went all the way around the edge I've also got about the same thickness on either side of the line now this of course isn't the most even mark that you know edge that I've got here but it looks like I'm pretty close to centered I could check that down here although things aren't quite even on this piece as well looks like this piece when I was throwing it got a little off and that'll be you know that'll happen to you when you're beginning my recommendation on something like this is that you get it fairly close and then you go ahead and start it's never gonna be quite perfect cuz the pot itself isn't quite perfect and so I'm gonna go ahead and use my wads to secure this down and then I'm gonna go ahead and trim so the first thing I'm going to do is clean up this bottom edge with my large loop tool next thing I'm going to do is clean up this side with my large loop tool remember that your wrist turns you can get around here and cut some of that clay away now after I basically got things cleaned up and nice looking I can go ahead and draw my foot ring in about two-thirds of the way out so I'm gonna draw the outside there and the inside there doesn't have to be exact doesn't have to be completely perfect but you don't want it way on the outside you don't want it super skinny so I'm going to start with my large loop tool though this is a relatively small bowl and so I may not use my large loop tool much remember you are trying to create a curve and in most cases you want to have this foot this ring of the foot distinct from the ball now I tend to trim feet in one way but my feet all tend to be very similar and so if you'd like to find out other ways that those feet can look I'd recommend you watch other videos look at other people making stuff try out some other things because there are some people who make the foot almost invisible on the side of the path but they still trim it in place so they still get some of the thickness away so that's about all I can do with a large loop tool I'm gonna switch to the small loop tool and I'm going to use the corner here in the middle because the corner allows me to cut more clay away a little bit more quickly now I must I need to know what my inside looks like and I can't really check that at this point so I should have already checked it and of course I've I've done that I just didn't discuss it as I was getting this piece ready I want to make it look like this curve in the inside continues into the exterior curve and right now this looks like a little uh a little more of an angle I want it to be a little bit more of a curve so I'm gonna get in there and start to create that curve get your eyes down on the side of this because the top view is different than that side view and sometimes you miss a kind of thick part or a corner kind of looking thing by keeping your eyes and only one in place if you if it's uncomfortable for you to get your eyes down there stand up walk away look at this thing from a distance it's easier to do it right in the first place than it is to recenter it because you have to use the line and mark it again and then put the wads back in so I've got this edge coming up here that's gonna be sharp later on scratch up the table scratch up my hand when it's fired and so I'm gonna get in at a 45 degree angle with this loop and just kind of cut that scroogie stuff off so with a small bowl like this it's reasonable to to make a narrower foot as long as you're not as long as you are comfortable in knowing that you're not going to go past that edge so you can come in from the inside or the outside edge on that knowing the thickness that you've got in the rest of your bowl is important so that as you trim you're not trimming too much away but equally that you're not leaving it real thick through the whole time you can leave those lines visible if you'd like you can use a rib or a wooden knife to get rid of them you can also use a rib or a wooden knife to help clean up this edge some people also use to let get just a little bit of water on their finger and then compress that way I'm gonna pull this off of here and hopefully I'm in good shape otherwise I'll check either way I'll check my wall thickness my wall thickness is pretty even throughout my exterior matches my interior doesn't look like I've particularly I've squished the edge just a little bit on that side but it's in fairly good shape and now I want to get my maker's mark on there before it dries up use a finger on the inside to support that maker's mark check that this sits flat and I'm done and I'm ready to fire this guy dry it and fire it

Channel: Rachel Dorn

Views: 13,030

Rating: 4.7647057 out of 5

Keywords: ceramics, pottery, wheel, throwing, bowl, trimming, altered, uneven, uneven rim

Id: zMVDVYfXFzU

Length: 7min 24sec (444 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 06 2016