Hand Built Clay Textured Square Footed Tray or Plate Hand Building Project #1

hello everyone this is Laura Hanley here inside my muddy paws pottery shop in Summit New Jersey today I'm going to show you my first hand building project hello this is me but you'll just see the clay from now on and the first project that I will be showing you is a textured square footed tray it can also be used for tapas it could be used for soap it could be used for just about anything so I've created a nice workspace for myself I'm gonna put this chili on top of my legs to keep the dust away I have my large work board probably back so that the water doesn't go through and work the board that it's attached to the supplies we'll need today to make our square tray is some sort of Bowl can be paper plastic ceramic anything you want it to be a little bit of saran wrap a roller this large side of this double-sided roller will work our needle tool a sponge some water nearby texture it can be leaves it can be stamped it can be the back of a rug pad I love to use lace so we're using lace today and our clay I also have a little bit of slip here slip is just some gushy clay mixed with white vinegar or water to help pieces stick so here we go so the first thing we're gonna do is roll out some quite slab work is my favorite way to make a hand building project so most of my projects will be made with slabs but we'll add in some coil and pinch pops in my upcoming hand building videos as well so if you have a wire tool you can cut some clay about a pound and a half with your wire tool a nice a pound and a half I'm using a pound and a half to make a quarter inch thick side by five inch square you can use more if you want to make a bigger square of tray or less if you want to make a smaller square tray with my unused Clyde what I want to do is take this and wrap it very very tightly so it stays nice and moist for the next time I use it if you don't have a wire tool just grab some clay with your hands let's just pretend I grab this cut here okay put it down take it on your tray [Music] get it as flat as you can with your fist making uniform thickness then we're gonna start to roll when we roll we want to roll up at the end instead of down so our clay slab is a uniform thickness we can flip it roll some more flip it roll some more if you have a large rolling pin same idea roll up at the end rollro we want to see how thick our slab is we can do a little cut off the side with our needle tool set this aside for later use so this is our about a quarter inch thick so I think I'll stop right here add your texture down I don't want my lace to cover my entire square so I'm putting it off to the side a little bit I'll take my roller again roll it in flush when it's tee all of this lace patternn so this is flush against the clay I'll peel it off and then take my square template that I've just cut from random paper I have in the house you know cut the square out you notice I'm taking these little bits of clay off the needle tool every time I cut it just makes a nice cleaner cut can take your extra scraps aside put them in a pile or put them back in that tightly packed clap dip bag that your clay is all staying moist in peel off my template then I'll take my sponge or just my finger just a little bit of water whenever you're working with clay you need to use your water very sparingly just want to clean up these edges a little nice and smooth because I want my finished piece to be nice and smooth and by taking those little bits of clay off your needle tool while you're cutting it makes a nice cleaner cut so this is much easier I'm gonna do the backside too so I'm going to gently lift this up and just gently smooth out these sides a little bit I want to avoid some smoothing the top of this slab because this will be the bottom and I also don't want to smooth it too hard here I don't want to do this because I don't want to smash out that beautiful lace pattern on the other side so we'll flip this again this aside we'll get our paper bowl and I've determined the five by five inch square to use with this bowl because I knew ahead of time that this would fit in quite nicely and the saran wrap will prevent my clay from sticking to the bowl and also look at this I can move it around just in case I didn't put it right in the middle and I want I want this to be right in the middle okay so I'll take this I'll set it aside until tomorrow or I can put it in a sunny window I could put it outside in the Sun I can put it in front of the fan just to firm this up till it gets to the leather hard stage which means it's not bendable anymore but it's also not completely dry let's set this aside what do you know handy dandy I have this here because I made this one yesterday and it's already dried to what I call the leather hard stage now gently take it out set this aside I'll turn this upside down I'll gently put over here for a little bit I'm gonna take some of those clay straps saw scraps and roll a coil coils can be hard to roll they sort of get a little flat so you kinda have to get a hang of it just do this coils can be make to any thickness so I want to add four feet to the bottom of this tray and I want the feet to be the same size so I'm going to measure as I cut these set the scraps aside or put them wrapped in my bag you can spend a lot of time making this look perfect okay then decide where I'll place these feet so let me see I needed to be a circle about the size of a dime or so so I can put these here measure measure where I want them before I make my scratch marks just tracing around this to get a little bit of a guide removing them then what I'll do is I'll scratch not too deep so I'm going all the way through that wouldn't be good and then also not so shallow that it's like chicken scratch I just want enough for my slip to stick with two okay but I'll do is open up my slip here which is just gushy clay mixed with vinegar vinegar and water add some on here had some add some you want to have enough so that it has a good stick I'll place these on it spent a lot of time getting these to look real perfect it's on here it's not done yet almost so I can take my finger or my sponge try and get that excess slop out a little bit now a little bit later then what I want to do is flip this over very gently give it a little push just a little push for the gushy clay smashes down and the bottom of my feet are nice and level see that look it again so they're on there now no I can just work with this make sure that's nice and even get the excess excess clay out bada bing bada boom you can do this with any size square you can do it with circles any shape you want then I like to let my trays dry and I will clean this up a little bit more anyways you can spend a lot of time cleaning this up if you want to couldn't sign your name on it I'll put a little about H for Laura Hanley and then you can let it dry like this nice and level another finished piece another finished piece you can find your work boards and a lot of equipment at my website made with clay net or on my Etsy shop called muddy paws pottery shop thank you and have fun with clay I look forward to seeing on my next hand building video

Channel: MuddyPawsPotteryShop

Views: 21,944

Rating: 4.9150944 out of 5

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Id: G9-zvjawgrM

Length: 9min 59sec (599 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 01 2020