Hand built slab trays and bowls.

[Laughter] [Music] good morning it's born at Westfield pottery.ca in Nova Scotia Canada um I'm actually going to make some slab built trays today because I've made a lot of frames recently and I've still got some to Fire and then I used to fill up the Shelf because the frames take off the whole shelf but there's always a gap in the middle and maybe a little bit around the edges so I want to make a bunch of tiny little trays which I call Kiln fillers and you know I sell them for 15 to 25 so it's a good source of income as well um it just totally makes sense to fill that Kiln when you fire it so I'm going to show you two ways I'm going to slab slab roll out by hand and I've got a slab roller which I'm going to do the other one and a quick thing I just wanted to show you uh somebody asked a question about the studio in the house kind of thing I bought this filter machine here I got this on Amazon um and it gives me a readout parts per million 2.5 um so it counts the dust particles do I trust this I don't know but it does say that so um but it's a filter inside a HEPA filter there's like double layers and inside the thing here where it sucks the air in and you have to clean that every so often but but this is you know inexpensive it was like 240 I think and it gives you different speed things so now you can hear it so if you've got a Dusty environment turn this on for a while especially if your studio is in the house it makes total sense good sense then to have that slow it down a bit now I'm not doing anything Dusty at the moment so you need two sticks these are quarter inch um and you I had a log of clay which I cut down to make it a bit easier to roll rather than this is pug clay obviously and then put your sticks just far enough apart so the roller can go over them and then just start rolling I'll try and get out of your way I suppose going a bit too wide so I'm placing it to White as long as you can get the roller onto the actual thing so if you get it a bit too wide you can just bang it in a bit so quarter inch I kind of considered the thickest you should do for a little tray like this otherwise the tray gets heavy just barely on the sticks at the moment so those who are chefs will recognize this is how you make pastry okay so that's how you do it with that and there's a piece of plastic obviously you've got to roll it on a piece of plastic there on a smooth wooden board but that's pretty straightforward uh who made this slab roller I don't even remember where I got this one somebody will recognize it anyway but I actually make a little wrap out of the clay and if you want the slab to be a square slab thicken up the edges like this same on the other side because I've noticed that when you use a slab roller like in that piece I just rolled it it always seems to make an oval rather than a square Okay so we've got a piece of clay which is very irregular along but it's thicker here and thicker here to compensate for the thicknesses in the center so we should end up with a more of a square shape and it'll be very irregular square of course so piece of plastic underneath the clay different slab rollers have different things and then pull the clay up to make sure you've got the blanket through properly a lot of times blankets can get trapped off in the roller and then you just roll through I push it back and go back I don't know I think it just evens up the pressure in the slab itself the stress and the tension there we go it's a pretty close Square slab rather than a big oval see here's the one I roll by hand it is definitely an oval and that's because I didn't do that with that and this one it's much more of a square so we've got our slabs okay before I get going on the slab texturing and stuff people are all constantly asking me for glazed recipes and stuff and I post I I will email them to a few a photograph in my glaze page uh book Blaze book page but these are the books I get everything from so that one most of them out of this one a few of them including the purple are out of this one or is yeah this is this one I think yeah in fact the purple is right there but anyways I recommend getting these books but they're really well laid out with the recipes and the color and everything purple passion plug there you go and that that's maybe not the one I'm using though but but there's one but there's another one right there as well so that book you should get that one and then this one is really useful as well uh so some of my recipes come out of there and this one is really good so that's another one and even one of these books will give you a lifetime supply of glaze recipes so so that's what I recommend if you're looking for glaze recipes is just get these books or one of them texturing clay um you can basically just buy commercial textured rollers and things and there are lots of these around um I have a few of these because every so often I just feel like oh that looks interesting I might try that one so you can actually spend a lot of money buying all these uh I think they're made by mkm some of them and some of them I just found on Amazon that was just a little thing on Amazon but anyway there's a whole bunch of those available you can then decide if you want to have fun and just make stamps I mean I have masses of little clay stamps that you know from figurative looking stamps of houses and flowers to actual abstract type things so these are much more fun and much more personal so your Pottery will start to look like your Pottery not like everybody else is so that's the the recommended way of doing it and you can also go shopping and find fabric textured Fabrics that you can roll into your clay this is a piece of gutter Leaf keeps the leaves out of gutters and all that so that one there burlap oops burlap here uh shelf liners this one's very useful I use that quite a bit um but just go to your local thrift store and just look what they have I mean there's just so many choices this is what you you they get oranges and apples wrapped in sometimes and that would work too I don't want to have things too deep if you're doing textures because food tries it gets trapped into the texture but there are these These are from a wallpaper shop I think um or a paint shop and you just press this into the the plaster or something when you're putting plaster on and these give you really nice textures as well so that is a reason to go and spend an hour in a hardware store or a craft store whatever and just look for texture things so that's the um you know it's fun to do that basically but the reason of course is you want your Pottery to start looking like your pottery and not somebody else's so you get your own selection of uh textures what I'm gonna do I've got all these I've got five of these like rolled out I think now uh yep five of these is I'm gonna texture the entire slabs of all five randomly without any plan um and I'm going to cut them into shapes that I'll then put over little slump molds so I will put you on some fast motion uh stop motion so you can see me doing this and then we'll talk about the textures thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay here's a picture of my stamps a little bit more close up um so there's a whole bunch of those and then I have those commercial ones that I bought from mkm I think they are I know and actually some were found on Amazon here's some of this textured rolled clay slabs that I've been doing a bit more close up on those so there was no plan here just playing there's nothing wrong in playing some of the best things happen by surprises unplanned mistakes happy accidents so uh so we have to leave room in our life to make some happy accidents so basically I was using some commercial rollers there but I'm trying to mix them up so that they're not as is the next thing that I want to show you is I have made over the years lots of tiny little styrofoam slunt molds and all sorts of sizes and I cut it it's a it's a one inch or two inch piece of Styrofoam eight by four feet when you buy it and you can cut it up into little sizes squares rectangles or whatever you want um and then I have a bandsaw so that's tricky if you don't have access to a little bandsaw it's just a hobby band solder I bought for like 150 bucks um but it cuts you know at different angles so I can bevel the edges of these which I would suggest you do you can actually sand this stuff very easily so if you don't have a bandsaw take the stuff outside and sand it don't sand it where you're breathing this the dust um and you can just make a lot of these you can cut this stuff with a regular saw in like 10 seconds so um just you know because it's a tenant what we used to call a Tenon saw um so it's easy enough to cut any kind of soil will cut it um but I would suggest you make all sorts of sizes because I have a lot of choice when I do this um I can actually just find one that fits a piece of clay um because I've cut them all sorts of sizes so I don't waste much clay when I'm doing it but I would suggest you do that um and then all I'm going to do is I'm going to place these on here to see what my layout Focus sizing is going to be and I simply put them down um so that I can kind of Judge how many I'm gonna get from each um one of these shapes and then I might take some off because I'm using up too much clay or I'm going to waste some see here I could probably if not don't use that I can get more of those in what I like to do with sorted sizes so I think what I'll do is I'll place oh I've already got one square there but so I've placed these pieces of Styrofoam down over the actual slabs and cut in between um this one for this one here I'm going to refine my cutting a little bit now because the edges I don't want to let it naturally you know don't be totally um the way I rolled it out although it could save your scraps don't let them dry out I like to do a cut that has a sort of curve to it rather than a straight cut because if you try cutting straight it will look like you could you didn't cut it very straight so I like to prefer make it look like I intended it not to be straight foreign okay so that one is like that and then [Music] I don't like the edges to be really thick the way the edges are on that piece there so then even though it's textured I take a roller and I just basically bevel the way I position the roller to thin the edge there you go okay so I rolled down the edge oh yeah just a centimeter all the way around and then I can place that in the center and look at it fairly closely it's a bit further over this side uh maybe a little bit on that side trying to get it just fairly centered it doesn't have to be ideal you know completely Center and then lift it up carefully so you don't move it it's stuck to the paper again so you've got to release it so then turn it over before you press it down just judge the size and maybe move it over just as touch try not to move too much because it will actually damage your texture a little bit and then I put it on a wheel just because it's easy to move around press gently now you don't have to make it touch the mold the styrofoam itself is just there to support it you can actually have it totally touch if you want to but I just like to have it Loosely draped over it if you want it to be a bit more accurately paddle paddle it just tap it down and that will make it take the form of the mold a little bit more but I always find those a little bit too tight so I just like them loose like this and then the very bottom without pressing too hard to smooth out your bottom a little bit it's not that nasty anyway okay so now we've smoothed out the bottom a little bit I just gently rub a damp sponge over the edge just to kind of clean it up a little bit you can do this when it's a bit more dry as well because at the moment it's fairly soft I only rolled the slabs out like less than an hour ago clean up anything else you feel like might need nasty on there and even though it's soft it will hold its shape a little bit um let me get this on here a second and then carefully pull out your mold and this was heavily textured so I'm gonna have to fill the piece up quite a bit with glaze because with food of course you don't want too heavy a texture see how that goes down you could leave it if you want to but you can actually just straighten it up a little bit and that is what I call a kiln filler so it will hold glaze in all those crevices and fill them up so it won't be quite as textural as it looks but that all depends on how you glaze it so um give you a closer look it's on a piece of paper so all I can do I don't have to lift it up again I'll just slide it over onto a wooden board and that's one I want to make 25 of these today so we'll see how I get along I'll just do one of these smaller ones now I've got this piece of clay there so I'm just cutting between those two little tiny ones and mold off a second so it's separated from and I'm just going to cut I just don't like the corners being too sharp on these so that's why I'm saying cut with a you know you can just cut the corners off a little bit to sort of Round Up The Edge a little bit if you want to do it that way if you cut you end up with a sharp corner it's no big deal anyway I'm sure some people would actually think that's nicer but I just like to feel like it's slightly round edges so that's the same I'm going to take my little roller I don't know where I got this roller from it might just be a kitchen store and then it's probably sticking to the paper again now because of that pressure place that on try and get it eyeball so it's fairly even looks pretty good flip it over either do this and I'm sort of gently pushing the clay towards the corners a little bit from this from the middle of the wall to the corner and that kind of helps it form a nicer shape a little bit when you do it like this you don't have to paddle them and so you don't want the the wall of the piece to be too wide otherwise it touches the bat and that's another thing you might want to do that so it has a flat Rim too but I don't do that because I'm looking for small Kiln fillers but if you decide after you've done it for a while you just want to tap it with the paddle you can and then you let's read it off and then put it in your hands and just take your wet damp sponge drag it backwards or forwards a little bit just to smooth off your rim I don't know I think a lot of people buy a little thing like this sometimes because it's easy to carry and they just want a nice little gift they're traveling this is a tourist area remember so I have to think about how people are going to get my work to their homes this is so small I can probably fit it on the other one over there we go safe space in my card I got two of them together [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] I got all my little trays done and I thought just for the fun of it I'm going to try a piece I haven't made for a long time I mostly did this with my pottery classes so I've rolled the slab a little thicker than three quarters sorry a little thicker than a quarter and I'm now just thinning the edges a little bit not too much just to make it a touch bigger and make so it's thicker in the center than it is at the outer edge and then using my knife I'm going to randomly in about in about I don't know a centimeter or two I'm just cutting with a wavy line [Music] so I rolled this slab really well it ended up being a very nice Square [Music] pull off all this clay this is the Pug clay it's really doing well well I should have probably it's not pulling off as fast as I'd hoped maybe I should peel it up later but I thought it would just lift right up isn't it gonna be awkward there sometimes the clay even there we go [Music] I just wanted to be awkward so that pug mill is basically do I'm just gonna put that right in the front wheel I can't tell you how much I'm so happy about this new pug wheel because it means that all the scraps don't have to be soaked down and then dried out before you put them in you just build it in like that store it for a few days till you build it up scraps up anyway Let's uh I'm gonna use this little roller just round off the edge of the top so it's a little thinner there you go and then when I sponge it it'll be nicer of course um this is going to be the inside of a ball so I'm just going to smooth it a little bit I've got a couple of textural things that I'm going to do this is where the foot of the inside of the football will be and so I've got these stamps of flowers my wife made these and I am going to use them as much as I can before they get too wet [Music] foreign [Music] work on the top here yeah my able to be seen here all right so it gives the impression of leaves it's the first time I've done this so I'm guessing too I could probably go in retouching some of these some of them have faded out just to touch although I might as well it's got a few more in anywhere thank God I'm good the clay is not too so sticky I guess a few more of these two there we go the bottom of the bowl I think I'm just going to leave it's like it's going to be weather at the bottom part is basically so but that's my texture what do you think looks nice um it could be nice for anything yeah but um but anyway next is the big big lift okay what I've got now is one of my bisque balls uh it's just a bowl I threw on the wheel and I disc bite it and and so it still pours a little bit because I can do these where I just leave it uh right on the biscuit Bowl but I've put a piece of plastic around it this time um it dries faster if you don't use that piece of cling film Saran Wrap and I have to flip this upside down um and then I have here some a you know a Tower made of some colors that I threw for my trimming wheel uh which I'm going to put I measured them this fits right inside there and then we'll drape this over the top of there so let's set you up a little further away so you can see I'm not sure if it's even click this or not okay okay so we got that I'm gonna flip it upside down and then I'm going to put the bowl over the tower to get it level so we've got this ball with a slab and I'm going to try now gently peel this off because the plastic is holding [Music] thank you [Music] it's all so this is draped over the top so I'm now going to make some Folds I'll have to sponge the back of this quite a bit so I'm making folds here without denting the inside I don't want to Dent the inside and I have a box full of old sponges here which I'm going to stick lightly underneath where I'm folding I haven't made one of these in a very long time I used to do it with my evening class foreign [Music] thank you [Music] so now I've got it with a lot of Falls I'm going to without wetting it down I do not want to get this wetter because the clay is actually quite soft which is why it's been causing quite a lot of problems but um but I'm just trying to get rid of the creases so I've got a fairly stiff bristle brush not natural hair it's actually of so when I put handles on actually I'm just rushing over the surface so this is a long job of rushing now just to get rid of all the textures that these textures probably wouldn't have happened if I'd use thinner uh you know the rip the creases and everything because I was using thick plastic paper plastic sheet so maybe you should use a thinner plastic sheet that's my lesson I haven't done these in three four years okay I just threw a small um wide ball as you can see it's upside down on the top of that um form now um so um so that is going to be the foot that this ball sits on um so I threw it put it right on top of here so it's very soft and I just cut through it that's why these hops are so useful and then all I have to do is just brush it it's kind of a shame that I would have to destroy that nice neat little thing there but this one I have to press down and I won't be able to turn this the right way up till tomorrow because obviously the walls are very soft and that's why I use the sponges because they will compress while this is shrinking overnight and they won't hopefully crack the piece of the pressure we used to use toilet rolls to stuff underneath these but they do leave a little bit of a mark where the edge of the toilet roll would perhaps um dig into the clay on the inside so I've lit I'm trying to leave the top ring so it's nice and neat there you go I'll give my brush a little bit of a rinse there with anything you can be careful not to catch the edge of the ball foreign and then I can do the same on the inside but I will use a different tool for that maybe this will work so the inside there has to be joined as well on the inside part [Music] thank you [Music] and then I just use a sponge to smooth off it's very soft I just threw it I left it fairly thick and that's it [Music] so here we go I made 27 by three o'clock and [Music] and I made that big floppy ball and now I'm going to throw a few mugs let's get you over here so you can see these ones they're all basically individual because of the way I decorated the slabs but um and they will just be called Kiln fillers to put around the large frames so some of them have some figurative elements there's a few fish floating around in some of the textures okay when they've got the glaze on them they they kind of look fossil like okay uh this is the following morning and I allowed it to dry out a bit in my damp cupboard so not naturally drying but slowed down so it wouldn't get too dry and when I lifted it out the sponges have just been falling out because um it actually um isn't flopping over them anymore and it shank a bit I'm surprised but anyway all you've got to do at this point if it's not squeezable it must be firm so you can't actually bend it you just lift it and then don't put too much pressure on your base sort of lift it the right way up oh and then place it down move this out of the way let's get that shiny on it a bit and that's what I call a floppy Bowl and all that so and it hasn't cracked yet but quite often if you're not careful and you have your texture right up to the rim and I got really close to the rim uh you can have cracks creeping down the actual lines of the texture see the texture went right up to the edge I made two more um and that those ones I tried not to do that no that was good actually so I then I'm now just going to get a sponge and I'm going to sponge the rim all the way around but you can see if you can break this right you see the texture when the glaze hits all that texture in there that'll be very attractive especially if I do it in Greens and blue so it's like a natural landscape but these are pretty easy to do for somebody who wants to have a big piece and isn't capable of throwing a big piece you can hand build it you need to be able to throw the base but you could coil the base too so you know that's not essential you can even throw the base so so good luck trying it of course you can make small ones to start this was a giant one this is the second one that I'm going to try today so I'm going to repeat the exact process but this is with brand new clay not recycled so I'm going to see whether there's a little easier and I took it off the plastic first because that was harder to peel off a form vertical so while it was flat I just peeled the plastic off and I've put it onto a piece of newspaper and then textured it so now I'm going to put the bowl in the middle like this do I need a piece of plastic yeah probably put the plastic over to this is just a precaution I don't think it needs it because the best piece would just release anyway and this clay should have stiffened up a little bit overnight so so let's see what happens uh do I need this inside there I think inside there first so now the paper could feel up a lot easier [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] so I didn't have to face that issue with the plastic being difficult to peel off is I put it on paper be careful it doesn't pull but then when you see the plastic is free all along the edges peel it off I have to flip it back onto another piece of paper and I'm just going to smooth off the back which will help and I have to smooth it later on easy to do it now then when I've actually got it on the hump I gotta find some these are the bubble wrap to support you because I don't have any more big sponges from the other one so I'll use some rolls of bubble wrap [Music] okay make sure you get rid of anything that could encourage a crack and this drawing where's my knife this one hasn't been cut into a round yet another round but it's a weekly round [Music] thank you [Music] so there's the thickness and I didn't do that on the other piece I didn't thin The Edge but I'm just going to roll this lightly so I don't have it too thick and looking too square at the end because I don't if it's thin it encourages cracks if it was really thick it would look too clone so it's a balance there you go so that's just a little bit it's all texture is Bumpy because of the texture that's on the other side so then I put a piece of paper over it again and then flip it the pottery could never have too many boards so there we have our texture again all right now we've got to find all the parts [Music] foreign [Music] so I've got it supported with gentle curves all the way around so there's nothing that's like a right angle type curve and then I'm just going to go up and try and encourage my valleys to go a bit deeper [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] to do something different with this video hand build because I don't do very much hand building myself but I like to have some handheld pieces in my gallery because it just looked something different to look at and people always wonder like who makes all this stuff how many people work here but I listen I try everything I like to do a lot of things um and I've been doing it for 50 years so it's like you know I've got to keep myself interested writing things yeah I'm actually uh gonna glaze those big floppy balls that I did the other day so uh I'm gonna sponge stamp them um with apple green bright blue uh my Matt turquoise and I may touch up a little bit with oatmeal or some yellow but um but basically it's uh it's a sponge stance it's stamping so I'm gonna put you on the stop motion so you can see it done but it's just the glazes in I'll show you got little vases in jugs let's get you down there they just got out of the bisque fire basically so all my glazes are in pots like this with a little sponge that I'm gonna be sponging them with so um so and then you know just put them in the glaze firing okay now I've got all inside done I'm gonna pour the glaze this is quite a thick blade too big piece to glaze turn it on as far as I can [Music] just buying pork on the piece instead of on the floor wow you'll trust your base is attached really well to the top foreign okay this is the last one it was the smallest of the three so I'm going to make this one a little different and I'm going to add some folk art White in where the flower heads are and that will be sponged over a little bit in places but this should give it a little extra glow [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] I think that turned out pretty nice and you've got the texture showing through where the blue is and you've got the folk art white where it has that sort of orange yellow look and I rubbed the glaze back over those areas and then glazed the folk art white over so that um it's over the regular clay rather than over the green and the blue I'm glad I did because it turned out really nice so what it's like an explosion isn't it the Galaxy Supernova oh wow yeah very nice yeah I haven't made these in a very long time I used to teach my class how to do it when I used to teach classes um so and I always loved doing this project feels like it didn't stick to the Kiln shelf good and this is at a pug to play too um one of them was out of pug clay and the other two were new clay so I think this was the first one I made but once again the texture is supposed to be the garden it's a Cottage Garden and uh and then you have because I live on the ocean that's where I did the sort of wavy look for the blue a garden on the ocean it turned out very nice so this project is really a nice project to do but you'll have to get used to the floppy clay and judging just how soft it should be I usually roll the clay out right from the slab roller and then turn it over upside down um give it a a couple of hours to stiffen up a little bit from being rolled out and then it should be fine but bright blue on the outside and then I've got matte turquoise apple green so and bright blue and then rubbed off the tops areas a little bit and just outside so you can breathe that dust in and and then this glaze focart white by stamping over the top really pretty it's an explosion of color [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Vaughan Smith

Views: 49,449

Keywords:

Id: yFOn2FqtCEg

Length: 62min 37sec (3757 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 22 2023