Handbuilding with Flexi Bats

on hey hey everybody welcome on into the clay share studio i am jessica putnam phillips tonight we have a fun hand building tutorial using flexi bats you know the flexi bats were developed to be used on wheel thrown pottery but did you know you can use them for hand building what did you well now you do know because i just told you and we are going to use them tonight to hand build i do will throw and i hand build currently i'm mostly hand building and right now i'm going to do the hand building i will show you how to use them on wheel wheel throwing as well so on your wheel but i want to tell you if you want to know more about them check out flexi bats go check them out they're on instagram they also have a youtube channel where they have all kinds of tutorials on how to use their flexi bats and they do have some videos up on their instagram page so find out more about flexi bats they're out of massachusetts and they are a woman-owned company one woman-owned operation so you should check these guys out and it's gonna be fun because i'm excited i already i did a little playing with them as you can see got a little little clay on there so what are these what are flexi bats well they are bats you can put on your wheel or hand build with that makes the bottom of your pots so you're making your bottom but the bottom can have an embossed design so this is my clay share logo you can see i got two one that's negative one that's positive right so i can have both options so you can get these custom made with your logo or with a design or your name or whatever you want so instead of having to sign the bottoms you put these on the bottoms and they're pretty fabulous so i see a bunch of people tuning in canada texas netherlands hi everybody hi hi welcome all in debbie you've been anxious to try these i have been too so they're made they're mad of a phone they smell like the flooring mat foam that you get for your studio the cushy mat to stand on they smell kind of like that and that's not a bad thing and yes i smell everything that's that's part of the pottery studio life you can't help but smell stuff so we're gonna hand build um it'll be a fun little informal tutorial feel free to ask questions if you want more formal tutorials then check out our over 300 classes full length pottery classes over 4 000 videos on clayshare.com you know we have our own ott streaming network yep that's just like netflix basically for pottery we also have the clay share app which you can download from any of the app stores and you can watch clay share anywhere anytime you want so check that out you can even watch the live broadcasts oh and our workshops which leads me to the awesome workshop we're in the middle of right now which is adam fields workshop part one was last saturday part two is coming up this saturday full six hours of making pots and carving pots with adam field and it has been amazing so if you've ever wanted to take a workshop with adam well you missed some of part one but you can get in for part two live and of course when you sign up for any of our workshops you get them forever so i had to do that little plug had to give you all a little information new zealand and australia george is in the house quebec is here hi everybody molly linda and maja and peggy oh hi you guys evelyn and sheila and sue and deborah everybody's here so i rolled out a slab of clay about 30 minutes ago and i rolled it out pretty thick because i know i'm going to be thinning it down i would say this is about a half inch thick it's really thick because i knew i was going to be making it thinner i just went really thick also we're going to be pressing this clay into these recessed areas so we wanted it kind of thick to begin with and i was going to grab my tape measure which i was using the other day and it didn't get put back in but i do have a ruler so we can use that and belgium's here too i know i love it that we have people watching from all over the world hungry is in the house hi so actually this isn't quite this is one two three so i would say that's 3 8 of an inch right here that's what it looks like to me so it's not it's not a half inch it's 3 8. that's close all right so i rolled out this slab we're gonna go ahead and roll to the overhead camera for everybody except you folks on instagram you folks just get this view you get the full length view everybody else gets the overhead view for the tutorial part of this demo you get a little picture oh a little picture picture so you guys get to see little me and then the big me so we rolled this clay out now this is this is a really great thing for making bottoms and what i do is i'm going to roll my clay into it and then i'm going to use a circle cookie cutter and cut out my bottom but then we got to make a side so here i've already rolled a couple out here's my bottom never mind the black that's just a little bit of coloration coming off these foam bats that'll burn away that's not a big deal but you can see it's got the clay share logo which is the clay share logo which is a vase with two hands holding they're making it together because it symbolizes community we have in the color version blue and coral as our colors for clay share so this is going to be probably colored in those colors once it's done because it has to be right all right so what are we going to do with it after we make a bottom that we got to make a pot right well i am going to make a mug or planter i haven't decided which but for this one we need a i'm gonna go with a ten three and a half by ten would make a little planter so let's do something bigger let's do a four by ten so this can be our side so i'm just making sure i have enough space for that and we will add texture to our sides that's gonna happen so we're good we have what we need now i rolled this out on canvas on my slab roller and you'll see there's a canvas texture on it so we're just going to take that canvas texture off i'm going to use this yellow rib and smooth it out now if you want to see a free tutorial on how to roll out a slab just go to clayshare.com and type in the search bar roll out of slab and you can access that and i show you how to roll a slab out without a slab roller you don't need a slab roller to make pottery if you make a lot of powder you might want one but if not you don't need one and i show you how easy it is to work with just a slab roller a rolling pin and a board if you don't have a slab roller so check that video out that'll help you get started people always ask where should i start that's a good place to start that would be that would be a great place to start i think and kevin just shared it thanks kevin so he shared it uh on facebook and on clayshare and all the glacier apps instagram folks like i can't share it for you but it's on youtube it's on youtube too but you heard it's just go look first how to roll out slab all right so i have got my clay rolled on both sides you saw me flip it over kind of did it fast didn't really say much about it but i did it nonetheless so we're gonna go ahead and i've got these really great cookie cutters this set here i believe i put in the clay share amazon shop amazon.com shop clayshare and it's a double-sided one that has a scalloped side and one that's just plain circles i love these so handy for hand building do you like that handy for hand building i know crack myself up all the time so we're just going to cut out a four inch circle to start with because we're going to work with this and the flexi back so we're going to make our bottoms first then we'll make the sides so we're going to take the bottom and i'm going to move my board off to the side and for those of you who wonder what that board is it's three-quarter inch birch plywood that i have applied two coats of a water-based satin polyurethane sand in between coats or your clay will stick sand at the end too or your clay will stick so here here we have our little our little little hunk of clay right there now the difficult part which one we gonna use well i already used this one so maybe we'll use this one right and then i also have these little guys that i can press clay in to make a little clay stamp or sticker that i can put on something so it's a really great way if you have a logo and you've been trying to figure out how to get your logo on this onto things this is a good way to do it so we're just going to put our little circle don't worry if it's not centered we're going to fix that later we're just going to go ahead and roll it gently from the center but you definitely want it to move so you want to be pressing it down because what we're doing is we're forcing the clay down into those grooves that's how we're gonna get our our little clay share logo to transfer and you can go over it multiple times you see how i am i'm not worried you can go back and forth side to side whatever you want to do so now now we're going to see the moment of truth let's take it off i'm going to turn it over and i'm going to just gently peel it out there it is the black will go away over time as you use this right here it'll burn out in the kiln for now but that's just because these are new and it's a little bit of the coloration of the material but it won't hurt your pottery it'll go away okay so we have this really great shape glacier logo right but i don't want it to be four inches i actually want to be three and a half inches because that's how big the bottom is going to be for our pot that we're going to make so i'm going to go ahead and i wrote on my cookie cutters the sizes so that i know what i've got going on and we're just going to line this up hopefully i won't lean over into the camera line it up approximately in center and then i'm going to cut it out and then gently remove the cookie cutter and there we have well it could be a really cool magnet right or coaster or whatever but it's going to be the bottom of the pot yes and so someone's asking can they be used for wheel throwing yes they were developed for wheel throwing if you look there are holes in the bats here in the corners for your bat pins so what you would do is if you're going to throw with them is you center your clay right on it right and then you make your piece and then this is your bottom you don't have to trim the bottoms anymore if you're wheel throwing you don't have to sign it anymore because it's in it it's already there so this is my logo for my company so that's my pot any nobody else is going to use this symbol because this is my official logo or at least they shouldn't be i mean they they can but they're not me right so you can get them made with whatever you want on them and she does custom orders which is really great and her name is chelsea companies called flexibats so you should check them out and i do think chelsea i don't know if she's watching but we do need to get a clay share discount so uh if she's on and she wants to do a clay share discount go ahead and shout it out and i'll share it but we definitely need to do a discount so here we have what will be the bottom right there and it would make a great mug topper yes it would sherry and i made it i so i cut this three and a half inches because i'm gonna use it as the bottom of a specific size piece i could have made it bigger completely yeah could have been bigger there's no there you didn't have to make it that size i just wanted to maybe we'll make a mug topper before we're done we'll see so i'm gonna set this to the side and we're gonna make a pot we're gonna make a pot and uh you can make whatever you want i have a bunch of hand building tutorials on mugs succulent planters would be a good one i think i think that would be a really nice one to do um i'm thinking let's see which one we do i'm gonna do this one here yeah we're gonna do this this is a four inch by 12 inch actually this one is a little this is four and a half this is four so i'm using a four i know i said three i i know i said ten but i'm changing my mind it i decided i'm going to change my mind we're going to use a four inch by 12 inch and we're going to go ahead and smooth it out again now i want texture in this because it's the side of a piece it's a side of a pot i want some texture you don't have to put texture in it's a little thick too so i'm gonna roll my rolling pin across it a few times release roll again you'll see the clay stretch i'm going to roll sideways because you always want to change direction but i don't want to mess up and move my whole slab there so i've thinned that down a little bit because it was a it was really thick it was 3 8 of an inch to start it was really thick because you have to really force it you have to force this slab into those little grooves but for the sides they don't need to be that thick we can thin it down closer to a quarter of an inch so you can take it which would be two eighths of an inch for those of you who want to stick with the same measurement but you know if you got fractions two eighths of an inch is a quarter i know that much so i'm going to use my my jess's town rolling pin for the side and you can get this from sharonhoppydesigns.com i design them i don't sell them i have nothing to do with selling all i do is design and then use it and show you how to do cool things with it right so we're going to go ahead and i'm going to roll it but i don't like rolling sideways i don't roll i don't roll that way normally it's just not great for your body so we're gonna go ahead and adjust the clay a bit i know it's hanging off the end but it'll be all right and we're gonna roll this in the clay and like i said this clay i should be on a step stool so that i can get better even pressure downwards but that works this clay was just rolled out so it's still pretty soft and that's what you want for getting good texture i'm going to put this away we don't need it right now now i'm going to peel it up i'm just going to adjust this and we're going to cut out a section actually i should have left it the other way would have been easier check here i will i'll check it there we go how's that did it did it write itself cool i like it when things fix themselves it it makes my life so much easier okay now i've got a slab rolled out smoothed out has some texture on it can be any texture it doesn't need to be any texture at all you don't have to put texture on your piece uh but why wouldn't you right you have that opportunity so now you have a big decision where to line up your little rectangle i picked here so i'm just going to cut straight across this is craft foam that i have made a little template out of it is four inches high by 12 inches long which normally would give us a four inch diameter bottom right but we're going to do a little different technique for our bottom tonight so we're gonna go with this and it's gonna work for the three and a half inch i mix it up just a little bit so we're gonna take this this will get recycled i'll probably just roll out some magnets with that in a little bit and make some little trinket dishes or something um or pendants you know there's so many things you can do with little scraps of clay like that so let's go ahead and slip and score so we can make our cylinder the cookie cutters are unavailable right now oh no oh no i know that happens from time to time so i know i usually smooth this out but we're not going to do that yet because we're going to do some stuff with it upside down and i i don't want to smooth it there's no point i'll have to smooth it again so now we're going to lift up our cylinder and we're going to seal our join we're going to create an overlap and we're overlapping this front piece halfway with the back piece so we have this really nice join here and this is a beveled overlapping join that's why i cut that lovely bevel cut and that gives me a really good area to have a seam there's lots of material so if i did want to add volume i don't have to worry about that seam bursting or popping as i'm adding that volume we're going to use our little red rib here and i don't know if you all can see in here there's a seam so we're just going to smooth that seam out by using this red rib nancy's so excited her rolling pin pins being delivered saturday with the cloud template lucky girl you're gonna have a good time with that i do have a couple finished pieces with this template with the cloud template and with this rolling pin and i it just looks so good with texture so we have a sealed seam right that looks pretty good i'm pretty happy with that let me grab my banding wheel and then i've got just a little board to work on here i'm going to put this up now i do have my succulent planter class this is basically a take off of that also my sweetheart mug class and i should have grabbed one to show you all because if you haven't started making things for valentine's day start it it's going to be on the right hand side of the gallery um bottom shelf all the way all the way to the left you'll see the sweet heart mugs they have the little hearts on them kevin's going to grab one so we're going to make the bottoms of this mug like we did in that class which is where we take a bottom and we roll it in because we have this that's three and a half inches and it's not going to fit so we need to do a little adjustment to make it fit so here is the bottom this is the sweetheart mug right here and you can't really tell that's happened except we have this really lovely cut bevel that's that gives that angle to it so we're just going to roll this in just like this i'm just using my thumbs and forefinger fingers so i'm using both and you see how we're creating this little little like shape happening here turn it upside down so you can see we've got this like rounding over and i do this in my teapot class too so if you've been afraid to make teapots because it looks tricky no it's easy and i show you step by step how to do it i break everything down always to the simplest steps because i want everybody to succeed and have fun well making pottery and so now i'm putting my fingers on the inside and i'm just using my thumb to roll this over you see this technique is very simple but it's a great way to get that shape how else would you get that lovely rounded shape and you can use this on the top as well so you can do this for lidded jars too now let's see if we look at that that's awesome it is awesome so you see what we've done is now we have this lovely shape that it's gonna join to i'm gonna slip and score the edge of this here and i'm just using a standard serrated rib that comes in the basic pottery tool kit nothing fancy and we're gonna slip and score our little bottom piece now the flexi bat we used it has a little raised edge so we have a lovely little i don't know if you can see this little raised foot so it raises it up just a little bit line this up and then with clean hands you really want to keep cleaning your hands we're just going to go ahead and go around and see i'm using this rolling motion we're just attaching it and i'm really not trying to touch that foot ring i'm actually touching the tiny bit of clay around it and i'll show you a little bit more in a minute and so i see a comment you get bits of clay stuck in your rolling pin i tell you what i do if i'm done using the rolling pin i let it dry and then i use a needle tool and i just go in and i quickly just take that little piece of clay that's stuck in a rolling pin out and so i am just using my finger on that extra bit of clay around the foot ring that way i'm not disturbing the foot ring at all making sure it's flat let me check that out that looks pretty good now take a damp finger and i'm just going to smooth this bit here i know it's it's not centered on the banding wheel but that's all right and then i want to seal that join that we just made so it looks nice so sherry's adding vinegar um to the to her slip to make it stronger i've been using magic water on my pieces and it's made a huge difference and i will give you the magic water recipe although kevin could probably link it you know i have my little studio cards my little cards that i keep in the studio and in it i have things like my bisque and glaze firing schedule i have slip recipes i have wax recipes but i also have my magic water which is one gallon of water three tablespoons of sodium silicate and one and a half teaspoons of soda ash you mix that all up and use that to join your pieces and it really helps prevent cracking so if you haven't tried magic water make yourself some and try it and you can get all of those ingredients at your local clay supplier soda ash and sodium silicate are very common clay pottery materials so you'll be able to get them wherever those are sold find that clayscape's pottery so you could check clayscape's pottery out so let's use this color shaper to seal that seam it just gives it a more finished and refined look i have found the magic water has been amazing i was using vinegar before gosh that looks great if i say so myself it's good to have uh a career where you can 20 years of making still look at your pieces and enjoy what you're doing right and and pottery is that kind of thing i'll probably be you know 50 years making pottery and super excited about it so here i want to pull this up close so you guys can see that foot for everybody is that focus it's a little soft a little soft i can't hold this and focus looks at instagram you can see it give it a roll for the name long enough for you to show i mean no no no no it's okay because we're going to let this dry so here's the thing we just made this i'll show you guys close up before we're done because we still got another almost 30 minutes so right now this is very soft we have to let it set a bit stiffen up a bit before we turn it over we do have a little cleanup work on the inside here i don't know if you can see down in folks instagram see that line that line that's clay we need to smooth out into the rest of the cup but we don't want to do that yet we could crush our design so we need to let this sit up this part here needs to stiffen the outside so we're gonna let that do that and while that's happening uh we're gonna do something else we're gonna make another piece that would be cool with the logo on the inside of the cup so you get to see it at the end i mean you can if you wanted to double side them but the idea is it's your signature right yeah but the thing is huh oh yeah you know you say that and i i never discount anything kevin says right how'd you sign the cup on the inside it's magic i i can't tell you it's a secret so uh my flexi bat has this little mini guy up here right which i'm just going to roll out a bit of clay just a thin little strip line it up on that and i'm going to press it in and then we'll peel it out so i'm going to be making basically a clay sticker look at that my logo as a little clay sticker could be a pendant be a perfect pen it could be a pin i would i would not leave it this shape i would cut it out with um well how about with a cookie cutter how about with a circle cookie cutter i need a smaller one assistant i need a smaller cookie cutter sorry no no it's okay i didn't ask it's in the like second i think or third drawer down in my cookie cutter bin down uh from the bottom sorry second third drawer from the bottom but you could cut around and make a more organic shape with this right how am i liking the flexi batch jenny i'm smaller than this smaller than two and a half inches i need a two inch i'm enjoying the flexi bats but i'm mostly hand building right now i'm really excited about trying them they just give me that whole stack i'm really excited about trying them on wheel pieces but that'll be that'd be a little while all right so i needed something more like a that one's perfect a two inch one that should work thanks diana for sharing that potterymill.com is her website now i need a 3d printed cookie cutter to match the shape of my logo well maybe i do right what is this matte exactly it's a type of foamy material i don't know what it's made out of but it's flexibat is the company i'm sure it's a material like a foamy but it might be proprietary so i'm not gonna really give too much away because i don't want to be like oh she uses this and then she's like oh but that was copyrighted you can't say that stuff right it's a type of closing it's a type of closed foam yeah i know that much other than that i don't know so i just made the super cutest little thing i mean that could be magnets oh does anybody want clay share magnets yes we do you want to made by me yeah okay i can do that for you so now i can make clay share magnets or a pendant right or a pin handmade clay pins fabulous cool stuff can be done or if you want to stick it on your pot this would be a great little logo on the pot i might do that i think i'm going to do that so when this this is ready and i flip it over i am going to stick the clay share logo on the front of it how about that folks we'll do that but we gotta wait for that to dry so let's do something else now so i do know a lot of people will think the flexi bats have limited use and if you're throwing on the pottery wheel you do have to wait longer to remove your piece and use them again if you're hand building you don't wait hand builders we we just go we are we don't have to wait nope no holding us back we're just gonna make so i thought we would do a plate and i'm not exactly sure how this will work because i haven't tested it with a plate yet but i thought it could be fun or maybe we'll make a bowl maybe we'll use my cloud template and make a bowl with it diana says make a pendant yes i can i'll make some more we'll make lots of stuff with those there oh i just saw a question victoria there's not in in sika this year no the the clay conference well i should back up there's not a in person in ceca this year they did say they were going to do something online but i haven't heard anything yet but what there is in only about five weeks from now is clay share con which is a free five day online conference and we will have giveaways and demos and an after party and studio and factory tours and all kinds of awesomeness and you will get to know more as we go forward because i have more info it's our second annual i'll be sharing in next week's broadcast all about clay share con so i'm not going to give it all away but you can check out the website claysharecons.com but that's last year's you can watch last year's all for free check it out if you want but we'll be talking about this year's clay share con next week all right so now i am going to go ahead and roll this big slab into the logo i'm going to do that first and i do want to share this really cool resource for everybody it's called findakiln.org if you are living in an area and you need to find a place to fire your pottery check out findakiln.org they have an online listing where you can find pottery studios that will let you go there and fire your pieces all right look what happens look at that how cool is that they even have the flexi the little fat pins um i need to get together with chelsea and make some hand builder versions of these because i don't want the bat pin in there we're going to take care of that so this will be the outside of a bowl or i mean you can make a little plate i think we're gonna make a little i think we're gonna make a little piece let's do this with that line up so this is all trial and error for me because i haven't done this yet now i did see she had a tutorial on her instagram page where she did a square plate and you could see this would work perfectly for a square because we already have that square um i already have that square there yeah april the logo would go great on a mug topper we can make mug toppers we'll make a mug topper after we do this so i'm just gonna best guess and everybody out there whoever wants to know how do you cut a circle with gr pottery forms to make perfectly round pieces what i will do is i will take the piece the next larger piece so these are stackable gr pottery forms i will use the next larger pottery form for this the other option that you can do is you can just drape it and then free cut it but it gets a little it can get a little dicey when you do that so we're going to do it this way we're going to cut you also could have a cookie cutter large enough or you could use rim templates which i do have my avalon one i should have used my avalon one maybe we'll do another maybe we'll see if we have time it's hard to get so much into an hour i have lots of ideas i want to share with you guys flexibat is making some for jr pottery form so it forms the foot ah i love that yeah i love that idea i'm excited for that that'll be awesome all right we're going to put this guy over here just drape that clay there now here we have what will be the bottom right so we want to get this lined up in the center so what i'm going to do i'm going to grab that'll work i just need something so i can turn this over and then the center we're just going to line this up like that then we're going to flip it back onto another board let me grab another i'm going to flip the whole thing over you have five flexi bats and have only used them on the wheel now michelle you need to use them you need to use them for hand building because i'm showing you how so we're gonna leave this bottom because that that's our bottom now i'm gonna grab my banding wheel here these banding wheels are very heavy if you've ever tried to move them with one hand you know what i'm talking about so we're going to go ahead and we're just going to really work on the side and smooth it down and i've never used the flexi bats for this but i am excited to hear that they're going to be working with gr pottery farms and making some cool new things that's really exciting you know how much i love gr pottery forms oh you don't know well i love gr pottery forms so i'm just gonna smooth this this is a mud tool red rib this one is the i believe number one the number one red rib out there that's this one and i'm just using it as i spin this around to smooth the sides and use my finger on the inside just to press it in a bit but i don't want to disturb this great logo that i have i love that it looks really good now i'm just going to press it into the board normally what we do is after we make a piece like this we will let it set for oh you can let it sit overnight something this small you don't have to let set that long i want to make sure i have a really nice transition where that side and the rim come together so i'm just going to use my finger to highlight that so normally i would let this set but because we want to see what it looks like as a as a plate and you see the logo is in the bottom so that's good we're going to quickly flip it over and take a look at the bowl itself and then i'll put it back to dry but just for just for you tonight can i do this it's very classy looking i know we're getting classy here at clayshare keep it classy that's right so we can pop this out i just dug it with my fingernail let me ah my water that happens we just smooth it out with a fingertip and take care of that so we have this really great little plate that we just made and i mean you can go and you can scallop the rim with a finger you know you can make this really great ruffled rim um now that i said that i want to make a really great ruffled room so i i know when i do my full-length classes on clay share they always have a title of one thing like it's a you know how how to make a french press right but none of my classes are ever ever one thing there's always techniques you're going to be learning that will lead you to the next thing and sometimes i actually do show you other things in those classes so it really um it's just a jumping off point right it's how all of them are so let's smooth our rim nicely with this rib and then i'm gonna do a ruffled rim so that's what i'm talking about we just did this little dish now i'm going to show you how to do a ruffled rim a ruffled rim could be a class by itself but it never is there's always other things right so let's just do a ruffle like that just lifting up and so i'm gonna do it across from each other and four points but you know we're gonna have to do more than four look how cool that is already let's do eight so we get a really lovely ruffle plate and yeah the clay is soft but it's not too soft it's just soft enough look at that and so we will go in and we will smooth our edges any rough edges after this is set up to leather hard so we have to do anything right now except let that sit look at that can you see the ruffles it's just like those potato chips the ruffles it's cute though right it's a really cute way to make a little dish now it's super cute super cute just like i like my pottery super cute let's make a mug topper we we make those we make those mug toppers from time to time don't we so we're gonna do one now careful which direction you ruffle in or you can't turn it over again i'm not gonna turn that one i'm gonna just let it be it's a small enough piece so normally i wouldn't ruffle it until it's set up enough that it can come out of the form but that one it's small we ruffle it let's roll this in oh i got i've got the squeaky rolling pin listen gotta gotta oil my rolling pin here this the squeaky rolling pin gets the grease oh let's do something fun you wanna do something fun wait and hear you yes i wanna do something fun all right fine let's do something fun how about we make a mug topper that will have my logo on one side and mushroom texture on the other side sorry it's it's wednesday what can i say you know how wednesdays go look at that mushrooms awesome all right let's peel this up and out here we go so we're just gonna gently coax it looky there glacier logo mushrooms all right mug topper we need to use a four and a half inch for the outside so just line it up approximately in the center uh ruffles or no ruffles let's do ruffles i'm gonna flip it over you don't have to do the ruffled side if you can't find these cookie cutters you can you can use whatever you want right i need to grab some more clay too let me grab this piece because uh mug toppers need something on the inside to keep it from sliding all over the place right so i did the four and a half on the inside i will do a three and a half on the inside which gives me math folks what does that give me on each side in a half inch of wiggle room and you could do it smaller and we're gonna we're gonna roll the what the squeaky sound made your squirrel jump not sure what it said to him it's speaking squirrel my rolling pin speaks squirrel that's awesome all right i'm going with the mushroom again because we want that mushroom texture right so let's roll some mushrooms ah three and a half inch gives you that half inch on each side if you feel like you need a bigger gap you can go with a three inch right and let me just look at it do you feel like that's big enough um let's go with the three we're gonna do the three lisa wants to know how much caffeine you had before the broadcast uh so and did you get into the seas again wow there's been no caffeine but the seas chocolate were left in the studio after monday thank you kathy um for this so kathy sent us sea's chocolate to test and i tested them and i didn't test them all and i felt like today i should test some more before the broadcast so i may have had a few pieces of chocolate but no caffeine all i need is a little like two or three or five pieces of chocolate yeah i know so slipping and scoring our three inch disc and then we're just gonna line this up like this now i'm just going to let it set for a second it transferred some of the slip so now i know where to slip and score and then we're going to lay this on but we're going to do something a little different because we have the great clay share logo i don't want to mess that up i'm going to press it lightly but i'm going to flip it over you know i'm going to flip it over let me get a little board gently let's see how that there look at that for a mug topper how perfect is that now what i do like to do and i didn't do it yet is this seam right here where the two pieces come together i like to just use that color shaper i don't hold this in my hand normally when i do it i sit on a board and do it because your hand can cup and then it can affect the shape but i wanted to show you all so look at that how's that if you have a logo and you want to put it out there in the world this might be a great way to do it it it's it's it's actually awesome plus we got mushrooms on the backside i can see your comments michelle what the bat is for and what it does so this little guy is a flexi bat um you can throw with it check out flexibats on instagram check her website out it's pottery mill is it claystudio.com but she makes these bats mostly for wheel throwing but i hand build with them and you get your potterymill.com and i use them for hand building so my logo is on the bottom so now i don't have to sign and i think michelle you're just coming in so watch the replay so you get all the info because here's the mug we made we're gonna flip this mug over now and we got a few minutes left we need to fix that bottom you see we have an area that we need to smooth out i'm going to use a wooden clay knife has a nice rounded end sometimes called a potter's thumb and we're just going to go in and we're going to very gently smooth that down so instead of having a drop like this we have a slope and so you just go in and do this normally i will have this sitting on my banding wheel let's grab that and we don't want to crush right we're not trying to crush the logo that's on the bottom of my mug but we definitely want to blend in this side so i'm really not pressing down so much as pulling inward there so i pulled it down could put the logo on the inside of the mug topper too it should stop the liquid right jody it should hold itself on yep i think you're right i think that would work so now i'm going to swipe swipe sideways with this wooden tool to smooth this out and then i'll go in with my finger and smooth it out even more because i want it to be nice down in there and i i might even wait to finish that off all the way until it's set up a little more but let's take a look oh wait do we still have a logo on the bottom um yeah we still do and it looks great so now finishing off the inside i'm just going to take a sponge and smooth it and then i'll use my finger to go in and just get the rest of that nice and smooth i don't want any rough spots i just want it to be nice to be a nice experience when someone's washing this because whatever this becomes cup or mug someone's gonna have to wash it unless they put in the dishwasher and then well the machine i guess doesn't care all right let's do our our rim so i'm just going to use a sponge i do a little taco sponge right and then i'm just going to pinch it so i think my slab is a tiny bit thick for a mug but it works i could have gone a little thinner if you it just depends you know that whole thing is personal preference if you like a really like chunky mug make it a chunky mug if you like thin mugs make it thin just keep in mind that when you do hand built items and they're they're too thin they tend to warp that's one of the things that happens first they just warp they do best when they're thicker not crazy thick just a little thicker did i say taco i know tacos would be good wouldn't they so i don't need to use cornstarch on the flexi bat or at least i didn't need to so i couldn't help myself i had to add a little volume and now i'm gonna go ahead and use my thumbs and fingers again to make a little slight inward curve right just a little bit let's see if i have my secret my secret mug rounding tip terra cotta pot this is the smallest one that i could find i think it's a four inch one but you put that in and then you press your clay against it and guess what it's gonna be round perfectly round as a matter of fact so that's that's my little tip now i do have a class on making your very own hand built clay rounder but um you know these are commercially available you can easily grab them and wait ta-da it's nice and perfectly round and so you just let that set up and what i will do is i'm probably going to put a handle on it oh i was gonna put this on it too i'm gonna put that on the front so we have to roll to the to the front camera i think because i don't i don't i don't know if they can see it though let's see if i can pull this back of it i think we should roll to the front because i don't think you can see it from the side now my handle is going to go here so my little clay sticker that's what we're calling this is a clay sticker when you stick a piece of clay on it's a clay sticker slip and score so if you're going to put the logo on you could do the the bottom with the logo on the inside if you wanted and then do something like this on the outside but if you're going to make mugs for somebody what if you get a commission from somebody like a coffee shop or something and they want you to make them a bunch of mugs um this could be a fabulous way to make the logo that you need to make for that company like i am just making the very first ever official clay share mug that's this one no it doesn't have a handle yet you'll get one in a minute it can wait though so let me get down here so i get this on lined up where i want it so look there and now clean clean dry hands we're just gonna roll this on right just use your finger to roll it out we're not trying to crush it but we want to make sure it's attached all the way around dude that's the key you know and then color shaper smooth out i think the logo that i just did this clay sticker is worth the price of admission for a flexi bat for me yeah that alone that alone would be worth me buying a flexi bat i'm just gonna say yeah it's cool it's cool is it focusing on it i hope it is yes look at how cool that is and check out that bottom remember how i was telling you look at that that's the bottom so you get this nice raised bottom effect so um gotta make a handle gotta get a handle on it let's see if i can quickly quickly pull a handle i have to tell you it won't be as good as a doug peltzman handle because that man he is the king of handles if you want to learn how to make amazing handles you should check out doug peltzman's workshop on clayshare.com if you're a premium member you get 20 off all our workshops and anybody who purchase a workshop gets them forever don't need to be a member to sign up for a workshop anybody can take one anybody out there at all all right so i quickly very very quickly my old college ceramics professor would chide me for not wedging my clay long enough but i very quickly wedged my clay and now we're gonna pull a handle my way so we're just gonna go ahead get the clay coil i made like a carrot and then we're gonna pull and i have this really great class on how to pull a handle it's a three-step process you have a thumb pull a u or side pull and then scissor pull and those are the three motions that i use to pull a perfect handle so if you struggle with pulling handles take my class you will not struggle anymore i i can say that because i've gotten so many messages and emails from folks who have hated making handles struggled for years took my class and now make great handles so what season is oh you mean lee in the great pottery throwdown lee lee pollard is in the great pottery throwdown and that's season four it's currently airing in the uk there's been two episodes but you can access that my understanding is from an app called dot expat.com uh it's going to be on expat prime sorry.com nothing with nothing to do with clay share not affiliated with glacier except lee pollard lee is one of my early clay share members lee started taking classes for me before i started clayshare lee found me first on youtube followed me on periscope i believe he said and learned how to make pottery from me so i gotta tell you i am a pretty proud clay mama here for him on the great pottery throwdown over there so we're all rooting for lee and if you know what's going on don't share because i haven't seen any haven't seen any of it none so that's that's a nice sized handle that's good you want plenty of handle to work with i don't like these teeny tiny little handles i like a handle that you know you're holding something little handles are uncomfortable skinny little handles are hard to hold sally says my handle technique is excellent and works for me works for her works for me too so once i make a handle i will shape it and i'll let it dry right and if we have the luxury of time we let it set up a bit but i want to get this handle on i want to get a handle on it if you put your handle on too soon it can warp your mug those of you who have commented that you know you did everything right you thought it was going to be great and then you put your handle on and then you have this weird warp pulling back where the handle is attached the mug needed to sit up a little bit longer before you put the handle on so what i'm going to do now probably maybe not a hundred percent but maybe we'll warp my mug i'm gonna find out hey studio assistant top drawer i think is my little flower cookie cutter you wanna grab me that another doggy paw cookie cutter i'm just going to take a second and smooth the bottom two dirty ones i don't care i'll use a dirty one well the dirty ones just mean they're the ones you use yep flour cookie cutter i believe it's an inch and a half in diameter so i'm gonna flare out my let's let's check size i just cut it about six inches is what i do and it's pretty much always fine for the size mugs i make make a little mermaid tail and we're gonna use this cookie cutter make a little dog paw see how cute and then we're also gonna tamp that down expat prime app she won't share but he's still in and sunday's the third episode ah go lego all right i want lee to win it all i want him to win it all so we can say one of our own wanted i don't even care though he's made it this far just getting in makes me happy if you saw the broadcast a few weeks ago i was barely able to hold it together i was so excited for him when i found out i mean think about it i've been teaching pottery a long time and so to have one of my students go on a international show that's quite a bit of a thing i'm pretty excited about that all right so we got our handle got our little dog paws cut slip and score i'm putting my hand on the seam you can put your handle on your pieces anywhere you want but that's where i like to put mine and i might i might i'm not going to do it on camera because the little a little trick from doug those of you who took his workshop know what i'm going to do after i attach my handle but i'm not going to do it here because that's his thing but i'm probably going to do it after so i'm not going to share it it's a secret but if you took the workshop you know so i'm just compressing this and attaching just get the bottom on there you always want to check and make sure they line up top to bottom because if not you could end up with a mug that yeah that would have been crooked i mean sometimes handles warp anyways in the firing that's just part of it if you are a wheel thrower you know handles unwind did you know they do handles actually unwind because when you're throwing the clay is being forced in um this centrifugal motion and it actually unwinds during the firing sometimes and some potters it will unwind so noticeably they actually offset their handles so that as it unwinds they're lined up again i i don't do that i just let it be take it as part of the process okay mug done we made a mug how cute so that's basically a version of the sweetheart mug straight on right so if you want to make this mug that i just showed you in the full length class you want to get the whole thing check out the sweetheart mug class instead of using the clay share logo we make a super cute little heart using lace doilies for our texture but you can use anything you want for texture so there we have it turned out pretty good all right so let's see what's going down you ordered it last week and you love it woohoo so you do not need to be a prime member to order our workshops nope no to take doug peltzman's workshop or to take adam fields or drew seymour or any future artists that we have scheduled which i won't announce but i do have a couple other people coming on yes they'll be hand building yes they'll be surface design and decoration coming up so um put it out there and then we'll also have more wheel throwing at the end of summer so be another wheel throwing workshop for those of you who are wheel throwers but you no commitment if you want to take a workshop on clay share you do not have to be a member of glacier you can just sign up and take it that's fine but if you are a premium member you save so you know it's just a little incentive but you don't have to be a member to take the workshop yeah i'd seen a few questions about that but no you don't have to not at all no so there we have it flexibats forehand building we made mug we made a ruffled plate a little ruffled dish to go with our mug maybe fancy fancy and we made this mug topper right so we've got a mug with a topper and a little dish we got a breakfast set right here so that's what we made tonight thank you folks for joining me you know have a fabulous week my prime members i will see you in the private broadcast at 6 15 so that's in about a little less than 15 minutes from now everybody else see you next wednesday take care bye everybody check out clayshare.com

Channel: Jessica Putnam-Phillips

Views: 2,580

Rating: 4.7777777 out of 5

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Id: Bzm9kAWFSAg

Length: 62min 30sec (3750 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 20 2021