How to make pinch pot vases - easy, fun, and versatile handbuilding project

alright here we are a fashion your sweet late thanks to everybody for tuning in um my name is Gina for those of you that don't know me I'm a Potter in Los Angeles and I'm a teacher at still like ceramics and this is the first of what will hopefully be many instructional videos for you guys to see a lot of you are working at home and we want to help you out come and make some cool stuff and still be part of the community even though we're stuck at home what we're doing today is pinch pot faces like this so I'll show you how to make pinch pots and then we'll turn these into cute little vessels here's another example slight variation and on the technique you can also use these to make little boxes this requires a few extra steps so maybe if you guys are interested in seeing a full tutorial on this leave a comment below for those of you that are joining us live there is a chat feature you can chat with us live on the right and if you have any questions Mel from the studio will be there to answer those if you're on a phone or other mobile device just leave us a comment below and we'll answer your questions I'm gonna do this sort of as a demo style um you guys are welcome to join me and follow along but I'm gonna be working fairly quickly just to keep this video you know under five hours long um so let's get started I'm gonna flip this down so you can see my hands in my work area so here's what I have first we want to start with two pieces of clay I've already rolled this one into a ball but you want to equal size pieces of clay maybe start with like between six and twelve ounces or so probably don't have like a little scale at home so just eyeball it and um oh I'm getting text now hope to the texture if you can see this okay because I can hear you alright so yeah two pieces of clay about the same size so this is like about the size of like a peach or something like that if you want to I ball it um and a little bit of extra clay you won't need this much extra but have that on and as far as tools go you really don't need a whole lot a needle tool is good or a bamboo skewer will do the job something for smoothing I really like these metal ribs you might have a wooden one in your kit or a rubber ones are great or even a credit card you can use that for smoothing few kind of random tools I don't always use these I have a couple trimming tools I have one of these like rubber tips sculpting tools that's handy little paint brush I do have a little cup of water and a small sponge but we actually don't use very much water in hand-building and I might not reach for this at all during my session but it's good to have that ready if you need it another thing that's optional but not essential is some sort of a wooden spoon that we can use as a paddle but we don't need it we can just use our hands okay so let's get started so first you want to take your two pieces of clay and shape them into balls and I do this by just tapping with the palm of my hand and if your starts to get like weird up here you can just smooth that stuff over with your finger and then keep going [Music] and any little weird surface irregularities yeah just smooth those out this doesn't have to be the most amazing sphere that ever existed but just as long as it's like kind of circular as much as you can get it so again we want these to be about the same size because what we're going to do is make two pinch pots and put them together so we want them to match so here's how you make a pinch pot take your ball of clay you put your thumb right down in the middle and you want to go down not all the way but maybe like 2/3 to 3/4 of the way down and then you just start pinching it just a little bit and rotating the ball and then I'll move my hand up a little bit to work on the thickness that's higher up just little pinches you're not going to get it all in one cast just a little bit at a time now if you're just making a pinch pot as you know it's own thing you can make this really thin if you want to but since we're gonna put these two together um I want a little bit of surface area to work with along the rim so don't pinch don't pinch it like super thin leave it maybe like an eighth of an inch or so so look at the rim here you can see like there's little teeny tiny cracks those are fine those always happen we'll deal with those later but anything bigger like this that you notice starting to form just smooth that away with your finger because those only got worse the more you pay so here's this one I'm happy with it I'm going to set it aside and make my second one I'm trying to peek it what you guys are saying in the chat you guys having fun so as you make your second one just keep an eye on the circumference of that rim because we want these to match up I can see oh they're actually pretty much the same already but I'm just gonna pinch this a little bit more another thing that remember when you make really anything in pottery you want the walls to be even thickness so if you feel like the base is like still really thick you know pinch that a little bit if you feel like you have a thin spot somewhere kind of skip over that as you go along we want to try to make these more or less even thickness all the way around so I've got my second one and I'm just gonna check them and if they don't match perfectly that's fine as long as you know they're kind of like ninety percent of the way there and this looks pretty good if you kind of notice like oh my second one got a little too big you can go back to your first one and just gently pinch the room a little bit and I'll flare it out hi Michelle all right so I see that mine are ready to go so before I put them together just real quick sometimes I like to take whatever kind of smoothing tool or rib I have and just once go along the rim just to flatten it and smooth it out a little bit and and I am just gonna line them up and put them together and I'm gonna look at it all the way around it just make little adjustments if I need to looks pretty good so now I just want to make sure I don't have any little gaps I want the clay to be touching all the way around so I just kind of hold it like this and I put a little pressure and rotate it just to make sure everything's touching all the way around and now I'm gonna start smoothing these halves together and I'm not gonna try at this stage to like completely blend it and make it totally smooth I'm just gonna take a finger and just kind of do it a little bit if you have you know kind of overhang of clay up here you can blend it this way if you have overhang of clay below you can blend it upward it doesn't really matter we just want to sort of start to fuse these together and again I'm just doing like a quick one you know first pass so sometimes like if I make this a little thicker I have enough clay to just blend it and it's fine but usually what I do is now I add a little piece of clay along this middle part to reinforce it so here's how we do that now I'm gonna grab some of my extra clay and I'll just pinch off a little piece like this and then I roll it into a coil like a small coil can either do this on your hands or on the table it doesn't need to be crazy thick that's really kind of fat worm then I take this and I just squish it a little bit to flatten it then I across that middle part Alix sometimes I like kind of start at one end and just put pressure and move along there and that didn't go all the way around so I need to make another one so I've got my coil I squish it okay and then I'm gonna start to blend this in so I sort of take you know half of that coil and with my thumb blend it upward and the bottom part you can blend it downward and if you have some extra in the middle can you see like trying to have my hair be the background so you can see see how like there's extra clay don't work you can blend it all in but sometimes I'll sort of leave that bump and I'm going to scrape it away in a second and I'm also not thinking at this point like about it looking pretty we're gonna fix all of the bumps and stuff a little later so right now I'm not really concerned about the shape or the lumpiness or any of that I just want to get the form made so here's what I have now and I'm gonna take this Ridge and remove it so I like my rib this credit card actually works really really well so let's try this I just scrape it scrape that little extra clay away just like that all this extra clay reuse it I recommend you guys as you work maybe have a little plastic container a plastic bag that you can protect your scraps wits that way they won't dry out they're a lot easier to reclaim and reuse if you keep them moist so I'm gonna sort of put that back with my clay cover that in plastic okay so here's what I've got now we can start to smooth and I'm just I'm almost holding this parallel to the surface of the clay and gliding it like that and you can do this as much or as little as you want to um if you want your piece to have that character of you know still having some of your finger marks in it you don't really have to do this at all if you want it to be nice and smooth then then you can sit here for a while and do it and it looks like we have a question so I'm just gonna read it do you have to put this piece in the middle if you were no so you're so the question was um that piece I put here to reinforce that's not an essential step some if you have enough clay to smooth it without adding that extra piece to reinforce you don't have to do that it's not about if your rim was like really thick you're probably good to go if you had a thin rim it's not a bad idea to add that little extra piece I'm just gonna keep smoothing one thing I like to do is to keep track so here are my two pinch pots I like to keep track of where the tops or the bottoms were so this is when I'll reach for my needle tool and I'm just gonna just lightly put a little X at each point here's why I do this most of the time when I make pinch pots even when I think I've made them really evenly I have more clay at the bottoms and in order if I'm gonna turn this into a vase I want it I want the weight to be evenly distributed so if I orient it this way if I keep track of where those stick spots were then I can orient it the right way to have the weight sort of evenly distributed instead of like if I lose track of where that extra weight is and then I turn it into a vase it's like this it's gonna be sort of weird and off balance and again you know sometimes I forget to do this it's not the end of the world but it's a good habit to get into I found so I'll just smooth this more sometimes when you smooth with the rib you get like these little situations you can kind of ignore those and then later rub them out with your finger they're gonna be plenty of opportunity is for us to do fine-tuning but I do like to kind of get these smooth ish at this point so I'm about happy with this sometimes you'll get like these little I don't know how well you can see this like a little dimple I'll put a fake one and how about that sometimes as you smooth you might end up with just like a little part that um like a little divot you can take like that wet clay that kind of comes off on your rib and just spackle it and fill it in or if you don't have any clay on your rib just a little extra from your scrap clay okay so here's the basis of our piece so this is sort of like mr. Potato Head at this point you can do you know you can add a neck to it you can add a foot to it handles I even here's like a sculpture that I'm working on that you know I used one of these pinched platforms to make the base of so there's all kinds of stuff you can do with just this basic shape if you are going to do some sculptural thing that doesn't have a natural opening in it like a face would always remember to you need to poke a hole somewhere in the piece you can do it on the bottom if you don't want the hole to be visible and here's why clay will shrink as it dries and it shrinks and more in the kiln so if I took this that doesn't have any holes in it and I put it into the kiln and had it fired the clay would shrink and the air inside doesn't shrink so this at some point would explode inside the kiln it obviously would break and then all those shards would would destroy a lot of other people's pieces so you really don't want to ever fire anything that is a closed form like this that's full of air so don't forget to poke a hole if you're gonna make a sculpture out of this but if you're gonna make a vase when we put a top on we're gonna cut a hole so you don't need to about that okay so next thing is maybe like you know this is kind of a fun shape but maybe I want to change the shape a little bit so if you don't hope this is where the wooden spoon comes in maybe I want a flat on this top you can also just tap with your finger power with your hands so you don't need that spoon this one is kind of fun so you can do that flat on the top a little bit you can also use your table you know maybe I want to flatten that besides a bit ready I have a slightly different form if you really so since this is full of air you know it's gonna resist a lot of change so if you really want to alter the shape then maybe you can poke a hole in it unlike really you know cuz now that some of that air can escape and then if you decide you know what I'm not ready to have a hole there guess what you can just close it back up so I kind of like to absent-mindedly play with this for a little while so again you can do this a whole lot you can do it a little bit you don't have to do it at all if you like the shape that you started out with so let's say this is what I want my face to look like more or less now maybe we want to add a top to it so like here's the simplest way to do a little top like I did on this one take your needle tool and you're just gonna cut out a little circle make it a little bit smaller than you want the funnel opening to be just as long as it's big enough for your finger to get inside so yeah this again can be used so I'm gonna put that with my scrap clay try to keep it with index finger and there and you start pinching it so I've got like my inside finger kind of around the clay and then my thumb and I'm just gonna sort of pinch and turn it upward and rotate the pieces I go so already it's looking really cute when you go around the first time you end up with this really kind of organic looking opening which is perfectly lovely but maybe you want to clean it up a little bit um this clay is really nice and wet so sometimes all you need to do to get started is to just take your finger but you can also take your rib and here's a little tip I have my cleanup sponge here on the table it's a little bit damp you know when you use the ripper smoothing you'll end up with like little bits of dried clay on the edge right there so if you have a damp sponge on the table you can just quickly wipe those off because if you take this with the crusty clay on it and then start to smooth those bits of dried clay will make scratches in your piece but yeah you can use the rib to get that smooth that made the rim a little ragged so I'll kind of smooth out those sharp edges with my finger right now the neck has this nice curve to it but maybe I want to make that more geometric and more angular you can use like the corner kind of part of your finger right here to get that started so you can see that's a lot more angular and you can again like all this stuff you can sit here for as long as you want to and futz with it and get it exactly right it's nice to have a variety of ribs because they'll all like this credit card even has like these corners which actually might make a really good profile so if you want to take a look a rib or whatever you have lying around and sort of run that across there you can have that help you achieve the look that you want and you know it dug in a little bit so you just take you sometimes your fingers are the best tool so I'm just taking my thumb so there's a little bit more cleanup that I would probably want to do on you try to fix one thing and like something else gets squished so often times I will set these aside and let them get leather hard or at least a little bit more firm before I continue but let's talk about like other stuff that you can do here's another one that I made a little earlier here's another way to make a little bit longer of a top um so I'll take a piece of clay and I will make kind of like a little tube so first you start with this is probably more than I wanted you can make this all different sizes but oh I forgot I'm wearing long sleeves and I usually use my forearm to roll okay so yeah if you want to roll out a coil a lot of people do that with their palms and for some reason like I can't make a nice coil that way I use my my forearm and I find I can make a really nice coil that way okay so what I just do just put a little bit of pressure and if you roll with your forearm now I've got a nice little coil it's a good idea before you do something like this to check the table for dried bits of clay because you'll kick them up but looks like I only had one little one not really a big deal if it happens so I've got this now I'm just gonna tap it to sort of level up the ends no you want something kind of long and skinny like a paint like the end of a paintbrush you're just gonna secure this like a you know like you're roasting a marshmallow but have it go all the way through so just do it carefully so that your stick stays more or less in the center so here's what I have pull it through so that you have something to grab onto aren't both then yes and now I'm gonna roll it on the table I'm gonna start away from me and put a little bit of pressure and roll it towards myself you can do this a couple of times that's putting hardly any pressure on the top or on my right end and nothing happened up there so after you do this a couple times now I have a little tube so you can make this be like the neck of your vase which is super adorable so let's talk about how to attach this so up until now I've been working with you know kind of big pieces of wet clay and I have been really blending them together so we haven't needed to use slip which some of you know what that is if you've been making pottery slip is just really watery clay that's sort of a brushable consistency and we use it as kind of a glue it sort of acts like clay glue so when you're attaching like a small detail or like something that you want to be really strongly bonded like the handle of a mug or if you're the clay that you're working with is not in the super wet state it's a good idea to score both of the parts that you're going to attach and then add slip which acts like glue I don't have any slip because I kind of have this little home studio and I didn't have this have slip made and I imagine a lot of you don't have slip made so there's a little trick that can get you um some-some slip in a pinch so here's what we're gonna do first decide where on your mug or I'm not making a mug I'm making a vase all right we're on your face you want the top to go and kind of place it and you know make sure it looks right from all sides then you take your needle tool and you just mark off where you want it to go symmetrical and this now I know like this is the way to line them up so just remove that second since the inside since this neck is so long and skinny I can't really get on the inside and Mark you know this little inner dimension to made so I'm gonna cut a hole in here so that you know when you try to put flowers in this that can actually go all the way in and take that out this part right here is really thick sometimes I like to just cut a little bit of that excess clay away so normally yeah if you were going to attach these in an ideal situation you [Music] would score and you can either score with a needle tool like this you basically make a little crosshatch pattern so you just make lines going one way and then back the other way so you would score it like that you want to score both of the pieces that are attaching so I want to score also this guy um so needle tool can score just fine but I really like these serial ribs if you ever want to get one of these for your kit they're pretty handy this makes it go a little faster so here's the part where we would put slip on if you take a paint brush you just paint a little code or slip on both surfaces and then you squish them together but like I said I don't have any slip and you guys probably don't have any slip so here's what you can do in a pinch grab a little bit of water you don't want to get this super wet sometimes I'll just take my finger and dip it in get that wet and then score it some more and then a little bit more water and score again and then it's kind of making its own slip see how it's getting a little gooey and this is gonna be fine I might be a little bit more careful and actually make some slip if this was like a really big sculpture that I cared a lot about or something like that but this is small this clay is both of these pieces of clay are pretty wet which means they're gonna want to accept each other more than like two dryer pieces of clay it would so this is just fine for what we're doing right here so I've got this and I'll do the same thing a little bit of water squirt some more maybe a little more water now okay now I'm ready to attach these so I'm finding here's my little orientation mark and that goes that lines up right there so you kind of place it down and then you like give it a little bit of downward pressure and kind of wiggle it as you go and you'll feel it lock into place cool and then maybe you got a little bit of that goo that came out the sides and this is where I like if you have like a dry paintbrush you can just wipe that away so that looks pretty cute but I'm looking like this is just an aesthetic thing you can decide to be done but I'm looking at like the transition between the body and the neck and it's a little abrupt and I have like a little divot here I want to sort of make that a little prettier so here's something you can do grab a nice fresh piece of clay nice and wet I'm gonna roll a little skinny coil and this is sort of where you want to start thinking about your design if I want to kind of preserve this angle just make it a little nicer you want to do a really skinny coil and we're gonna blend it in if you want more of like an easy transition you're gonna put a thicker coil so let's do this and see what it looks like you just lay it across there and maybe just start put a little bit of pressure and then if you have like extra clang just pinch it off and then because this is a little thicker her I might be able to blend this with my finger you kind of look like when we had the two halves and we reinforced it with the clay sort of blend half of it upward and half of it downward this is where I like these rubber tipped sculpting tools especially this one that sort of round and comes to a point because if specially you have like a little teeny tiny coil and you can't get your fat fingers in there to smoothly helps with that but if you don't have one of these this is where the bamboo skewer really helps and you can even use your needle tool so don't worry if like you don't have you know five thousand tools at home I was actually getting good action for my finger so I might just keep doing this just to start you know one thing the bamboo skewer is going to be helpful for is I might want to go on the inside and just make sure you know there's only so much cleanup you can do in a you know long skinny tube like this which is kind of clean out like any burgers of clay that might block you know your flower stem from going all the way down okay back to this you know what the nice thing about hand-building us two versus wheel is that let's say I do this and now I'm looking at it and I'm like yeah you know I actually don't like this I want to do something else you can just cut this off and then do something else you can do that on the wheel so we'll just take a minute and smooth smooth that out yeah that looks better oh it's kind of it's better but not right and then you can like you know if there's like a bump here you can kind of push it in this is another situation where I might you know there's still like this is looking pretty good but there's still some refining I want to do but I might wait until this is leather hard you know like my top here this little raggedy business I want to cut off that this is like thin and delicate and still very wet um so I'm gonna want to go in with my needle tool and just cut that away but I think I'll leave that until it's a lot of hard because I don't want to you know with the pressure that I need to put with the needle tool like Bend this so I'm just gonna leave that for a little later other details maybe I want to put cute little handles on this you know this is where you can really get creative so I just rolled out a coil and I'm kind of flattening it you can make like a much neater one sometimes I'll do like a little almost like you're sketching I'll just switch out a little piece of clay just to see what it looks like flatten that end what do you think that's kind of cute I'm gonna think about it you don't you couldn't attach this one this is a little dryer so you don't have to do this now but also just to get you thinking about other stuff you can do maybe you want to put a foot on it so it's you know not just a flat bottom but it's something more like this has a little little foot situation down there so you can just roll out a coil don't knock anything over with your own oil sometimes when you get a coil started this happens just do that just very light pressure I find like sometimes these get like rectangular and it's usually because you're putting too much pressure so just like a lightest little bit of pressure and it'll be round so order of operations it might have been smart for me to put the foot on first because if I'm gonna be working on it upside down now I've got this little delicate neck to contend with but you know what I'm gonna deal with it because you know it'll be fine so here's what a foot would look like so here's my coil just make sure sometimes that ends like do that I'll just cut off that part then you bend it into a circle keep an eye on this part here because when you bend it it stretches the clay sometimes it starts to crack and at this stage where it's really wet you can just take your finger and smooth it if you need like the tiniest little bit of water you can like dip the tip of your finger in water and just put a little bit on but with hand-building as opposed to throwing we actually we want friction when I my hands on the clay I don't want it to be so slippery that like if I'm trying to smooth something out I can't put any pressure that my hand just glides across the surface um I also don't want the clay to get really soft you know I want it to hold its shape so that's why we don't like to add too much water when we hand build so anyway back to this so just make these ends meet make sure you don't trap any air I have like this weird texture on the end so just bring these together and smooth it and on the inside if you can get in there so since this is really wet and this is really wet and the way I'm going to put this on is by doing a lot of blending I'm think I can get away with not slipping and scouring so you just put that right on the base give it a little pressure maybe give it a little tap tap and now I'm going to blend that upward all the way around and then if you want to kind of take your finger this way and smooth out some of those finger marks you can do that and then if you can do it on the inside this one's really narrow um sometimes if you have like just something lying around like I have this broken tool there used to be a knife at this end also but now this is sort of like a rounded end maybe if you can get that in there and blend that clay down just the more you blend it and smooth the two sections together the stronger it'll be and the less likely to crack and if you can't get in there it's not the end of the world it'll be fine and then maybe I'll try to get my finger in there and make it a little nicer and then I've still got that seam that I didn't really do a very good job when I attach the ends of the coil together all right how do we look oh it's cute oh I like it um actually that might look with a foot I kind of like it with handles now so yeah you can play around here okay one more thing this is something I like to do um make a little top so just a little piece of clay if you want it to be like perfectly round you could like you've really carefully roll out a coil and then if you have a little cookie cutter or something you know that you can use as a template but since this is hand-built and a little wonky already I'm not gonna make this lick perfect so you kind of start with a little sphere and just I'm sort of pinching it and rotating it so it turns into a flat little disc and this is kind of what I was talking about before as you're pinching something if you notice these larger little cracks or holes developing smooth those out right away because they get bigger if you ignore them they just get bigger than where you pinched so you know what does he look like with a little hat on that's kind of fun but I think I don't want to do that with this one so um anywho I think that's about that's about it for pinch pot bases a couple little finishing notes um I will well here's the thing I mentioned a couple times about you know letting this get a little firmer and doing some more clean-up on it maybe we could do another video and I could show you exactly what my process is there the nice thing about having this here in my home studio is I can really keep an eye on it so I could just leave this out uncovered um and just check on it every you know hour or so and see where the dryness level is and then once it's ready dryness wise I could either go ahead and work on it or if I'm like in the middle of something else I can then cover it up in plastic so it stays at that moisture level when you're working out of a studio you might want to cover it up completely and leave it for a few days and then check on it next time you're back in the studio dryness time unfortunately is hard to pin down you know people always ask like oh well when will this be ready to do the next step and it's kind of impossible to say because it depends on you know how thick your piece was it'll retain more moisture if it's thicker if you're in a humid climate it will retain more moisture or if just you know wherever you are like if you've had rain there will be more moisture in the air so your piece will dry out more slowly if like you know the AC vent is like happening to blow like right where it's sitting and it'll dry out faster so it's hard it's hard to say um if I were to take this and like wrap it up completely it'll lose a little bit of moisture and maybe like after a week or week and a half it'll be a little firmer but since I'm able to check on it here at home I'm just gonna leave this out for a couple hours and it might be ready at that point um you can put stuff outside in the Sun if you want something that's like dry really fast but you have to check on it often because I've seen pieces go from like still too wet to almost too dry in a matter of like 20 minutes so you know that's it's a great way to get things to dry fast but be careful if you do that so I'll just set this aside for a little bit and hope my cat doesn't knock it off of the table and then I'll finish it up okay well here's my face again thanks guys so much for joining me let us know in the comments what other videos you want to see there will be more coming in from us over the next few days thank you for tuning in like and subscribe I don't know what do you two people say

Channel: Still Life Ceramics

Views: 131,010

Rating: 4.9307461 out of 5

Keywords: pottery, ceramics, handbuilding, workingwithclay

Id: 8fwtUoMjB6s

Length: 44min 59sec (2699 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 20 2020