Home Pottery School Video 11 - Lockdown Learning - Making a coil pot

good morning hello um today we are going to make a coil pot I just wanted to show you something though my mom hi mom if you're watching this I'm gave me this this this is literally the largest garment known to mankind it's French she lives in France and um thanks mum I don't I don't wear it very often but I positive um whatever it it's so big it is so voluminous sleeves it's like being inside a marquee actually anyway because it's so funny anyway we probably all need a good laugh now don't we after being locked down for so long um I just want to show you something if it always starts showing you how to do the coiling some of you might like to know how to make a turntable because a lot of Potter's have you know turned house I'm really expensive to buy a metal turntable I can't understand why there are 40 or 50 quid but and what I sometimes done is can you see this this is um I think they call it like a lazy susan mechanism it's just like one two yes two screws two screws look and you just buy this metal thing on eBay or something and they're quite cheap I think you get them in packs of three or something have a look and then kind of basically any old bit of wood plywood's good on top it's got a little non-slip rubber feet as well yeah and you've got yourself a turntable I'm actually these are really good because if you've got bare worth it doesn't really doesn't have to be and it just could be a square top of whatever you've got you know and they're just really handy when you're cutting alright so get yourself some lazy susan mechanisms so I just like to show you that little hot tip saving money don't need to buy expensive pottery kit okay okay so and coiling I've been into a lot of primary schools in the past doing workshops and I think like they might have coiling on their curriculum is something that you you have to learn how to do but um yeah which is very good but god I have seen I've seen some stuff edged into my memory and I'm not saying it was great so I'm gonna show you how to do it properly okay you can coil the base of your pot you can just coil it round around like a snail and then you I'll show you how to do the coin bit in a minute but I quite like speeding things up and just getting things going quickly so you can also just roll out a slab and have a slab base for your pot so again I've got my kitchen knife I'm just gonna cut out glasses Jane that's better so I'm going to cut out a shape and again doesn't have to be round I'm gonna cut out a sort of I don't know oval any sort of shape like that for starters okay so get rid of that and and if you have got a turntable or you want to make something great otherwise you're just gonna have to shift your board around you know or kind of find a way of doing that so the next thing we need to do is sausages okay so here's one I made earlier also it doesn't actually matter how long they are like you can work with light loads of short sausages or a big long sausage it doesn't matter but I'll just go through how to do a sausage I'm you won't see my head as a blessed relief isn't it right let's switching our clay round around we showed this the other day using that sort of fleshy bit of your hand there you just want to kind of get something that's a little bit round to start with cuz I really help you son to my eyes again so you're going to use top tight fingertips give yourself plenty of room you want your sausage to rotate fully really rotate and rotate oh god I'm getting a bit hot in this great big thing now in my marque and so here we go taut tight fingertips do sort of stretching out your sausage or your coil we call it what you like really it doesn't matter does it I'm just looking for the thick bits and I'm sort of getting rid of the thick bits right if you don't let your sausage rotate fully and you'll just listen if I can actually make it go wrong and you're just sort of going like that can you see it's not really rotating fully well that feels horrible but look it's just gone all kind of lumpy and also it's not going round so don't do that so depending on how large the thing is that you want to actually make will depend really on the thickness to some extent of your of your coil yeah so I guess you know if you're gonna make something huge then you might want to use a thicker sausage but I'm just going for something quite small but let's get to the business of actually actually coiling so once you've got your sausage you're just going to sort I like to just pinch the end to flatten the end off okay and you're just going to place it and you want to use nice soft clay because when we're joining and using the coiling method we're not really scoring and slipping unless the clay is a bit on the dry side but this place nice and soft so I'm just going to lay it down on round the edge of my base and them but this is the most important bit of coiling actually I wreck if as you place your coil down you want to give it some downward pressure okay it's very important to get that initial contact between your coil you know your top bit in the bottom bit you know it's not a case of just lying it on there and letting it rest on there you've got to give it downward pressure and I mean downward pressure every single centimeter of the way so we're coming around now and we're up to the the bit there where we've made the little ramp on the first sausage so we're just going to go up and over that ramp okay and I'm just I'm just gonna sort of speed this up a little bit if I stand up downward pressure all the way okay so that actually what's happening is the top the top of your the top of your little pot that's emerging should look quite so flat that's why I like to do it because if it doesn't look flat flattened and it means that you haven't it done that very important downward pressure I've seen a lot of people naming no names laying their coils sort of just she's not really focusing that much or more their work and when I look like this I'm like oh my god you can literally see daylight between the gaps you don't want to do that you want the downward pressure so here we go so you can see it doesn't matter was I going to say it doesn't matter God lost it it does something doesn't matter I don't know what but anyway keep coiling keep giving it downward pressure so let's just get round to there so and basically the the shape of your pot is going to be determined by where you're placing your coils so if you're placing your coils directly on top of each other like that your walls will be vertical hopefully but if you are putting your coils sort of slightly um you know if you want your pot to come out you need to place your coil each one slightly further and further and further out so that you can start to shape your pot to the shape that you want the thing with coin you can only do a little bit at a time and that is basically because your work you'll go up a little bit and then it's gonna start to feel a bit floppy if it starts to feel a little bit floppy and like it just could collapse you need to stop you really really do need to stop and just leave it alone for a couple of hours until it firms up and it feels as if you know it can it can have a little bit more pressure press down from the top and it's not just gonna flop and collapse okay so once you do a little bit like that you're not going to leave it like that you're going to actually kind of plaster those coils together I use this technique that's really comfy for me I support my pot on the outside and I use my thumb like this on the inside so I'll just get a bit closer and show you let's see can you see can you see that oh it's I'm trying but it's sort of weird trying to do it you so actually grabbing hold of a bit of the top of the corner and plastering it see there I'm actually pressing that all the way down let's see if I do you not okay can you see I'm actually really smearing it together oh maybe if I do it in the light that's better so I'm actually I'm not just smoothing the cracks I'm not just smoothing the cracks have a look can you see it's actually plastering the crack plastering it so you know that's another mistake a common mistake is that people don't kind of shift that quantity of clay to smear it down enough and then you get cracks where they're not joined together properly so we got to do the same on the outside yeah let me try it like this look so I'm actually smearing them I'm taking a chunk off the top okay and smearing it down can you see so we're getting a bit of a repeat pattern but yours might not look like that to start with that around just kind of cuz I do it and do it and do it and do it don't worry about the outside being all lumpy and bumpy that doesn't matter because later on when it's firmed up we'll be scraping that back the inside is really what you want to concentrate on making nice and smooth okay and you can just I mean I'm just using my finger you don't really need to so I've already plastid the cracks with my coiling technique so now I'm just smoothing off in the reason you want to focus on getting the inside of your pot nice and I'm smooth it's because it's quite hard to kind of scrape the inside of a pot later so you want to kind of get that get that done now while you have sort of access you know so I'm using my lollipop stick to just make sure that internal base joint is nice and smooth okay so I just quickly smooth that off a little bit inside okay so you want to just focus on getting the inside smooth not the outside because what will happen is later on as we progress all of this stuff you will be scraping back using your cut credit card so I'm just even though this really needs to try out a little bit before I do my scraping I mean you can't smooth it with your fingers on the outside that's fine but if you're really cracking on and building you know and you just want to focus on the inside just leave the outside till later it's absolutely fine and then when it's a little bit dry you will be this isn't gonna work brilliantly because it's not dry and also like I probably just chop that little excess bit off there and then what you'll be doing is this so it's not work everywhere because it is too wet but I just wanted to show you that you're going to smooth the outside with your credit card when it's a little bit tire that is coiling basics okay it's hard to show you this stuff in less than 15 minutes but there you go give it a go you can do any shape you like you can really run with this they're really hot now so I'm gonna go have a go show me your results let me know what you think bye for now

Channel: Jane Scott Ceramics

Views: 1,292

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: -YS8uNJzP18

Length: 13min 36sec (816 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 11 2020