How to Make Simple, Small Pottery Jars — Narrated Version

in this week's video i'll be showing you how i make these small little storage jars these pots may not be my favorite to make but once fired they become very small precious objects that i really love and this video should give you a good idea about how i make them along with all the little intricacies along the way as these are certainly quite fiddly things to make the bodies of these jars are fundamentally quite simple they're thrown from 200 grams of clay into a very straight simple cylinder the top of which i then gently fold in or push in really but you'll see that later otherwise the start here is pretty much like any other pot the clay is centered thoroughly and then i use my index finger and my thumb open up the inside these push down until there's about four to five millimeters in the base i then compress the walls in a tiny bit before beginning my first pull and i think one important thing about this moment is when i reach my fingers and my thumb inside the pot to begin the pull when they hit the base i don't push down any further as that could make the base actually too thin so whenever i reach inside to begin my next pull my fingers don't push down any further than the initial depth when i first formed the base the walls of these pots usually come up in about three poles and by the third the rim of the pot is meeting my throwing gauges rubber pointer which measures both height and width thereafter i just do one more pull and this isn't really a pull really it's more of a shaping movement i'm pushing the clay outward as it was a bit too narrow before once i'm happy with the rough shape i use a sponge on a stick to carefully remove the water from the inside and then i use an old blunted trimming tool just to level off the top slightly and remove a skirt of clay from around the base of the vessel and then use my metal throwing kidney just to compress the walls and really what i'm doing is pushing the clay out against the metal rather than digging the metal into the clay and at this point i'm not really worried about making the surface completely smooth and even as i'll be trimming these so that's a task i can do later then to form the gallery on these i use a wetted index finger to push in the top section of the rim there's a certain knack to this movement it can be difficult to explain but it relies on the bit of clay you're working on staying very wet as if it dries up at all it will just stick to your finger you'll sort of destroy the rim but once the gallery is set i measure it with a pair of calipers to make sure it's the right diameter and then i clean up that area again with my metal kidney lastly i soften the edge with a shammy leather before wiring the pot off and lifting it away it really helps when you're lifting away pots like this to have dry hands and that the walls of the pot itself are dry too i should also note that most of the pressure that i'm applying is near the base of the vessel as that's where the bottom of the pot braces the walls so it tends to be much stronger as compared to say if you were to lift the pot with most of your pressure on the walls themselves that's when you might very easily squash the pot so usually i throw all of the jar sections and then i throw all of the lids which makes the process of making just much more straightforward and seamless the first thing i do is inverse my calipers this is the internal diameter of the jar and i always add about a millimeter or so just so i have a little bit of extra material to work with the lids themselves are made from balls of clay that weigh about 45 grams each and as such small lumps of clay can be difficult to center i much prefer using soft clay for this process i'd say it only takes me about 40 seconds to a minute to make each one of these and you can see as i'm centering that really it's my palm doing most of the work not my fingers then once they've been centered it's entirely fingertip throwing the lamp is opened up slightly before i separate the rim into two distinct portions there's the inner vertical flange which will be the locating part of the lid which helps it sit in the jar and then there's the lower horizontal part of the lid which once inverted and sitting atop the pot will actually be the outer portion of the lid itself once i've checked the corner that those two planes create with my calipers i can then begin to clean them off which again i do with the sharp edge of my metal kidney truthfully i don't mind so much if these lids are a little bit rough at this stage as i'll be trimming them so much later on and i personally find it much easier to neaten things up at the trimming stage than at this stage so as long as the measurement is correct that's all i really care about i then wire them off and carefully lift them away with just my fingertips and if you replay the moment that i lift them away you'll notice that i spin the wheel at the exact same moment that i lift the lid off this breaks the seal between the sticky pot and the pad of clay that's left on the wheel and it makes lifting away the clay much easier here's another view that shows how i separate the rim into the two portions once the inside wall is formed i then compress the lower section like so and then using my calipers i just check the diameter again i remove the water from the inside and then i use the sharp edge of my metal kidney to clean these areas by scraping away the wet slip which not only neatens up the form but it leaves the clay dryer and it means it'll dry out to leather hard more quickly then it's back to my blunted trimming tool just remove any excess clay around the edge and that's it now that all the components have been thrown i'll let them dry out slowly until they're leather hard which usually takes a day or so at the moment all these components are far too soft to touch doing so would just deform them so by leaving them out to dry the excess moisture leaves the vessels and they take on this state we call leather hard and it's at this point i can trim them and make them fit together nicely i start by centering the lid and the good thing about my jars is that each component sort of works as a chuck for the other which definitely makes trimming a lot easier remember that extra millimeter or so of clay i left on the lid i do this so that the lid is too tight rather than being not tight enough and it means i can trim back that clay this little bit here just until that it fits perfectly as it's much easier to remove material when you're trimming pottery compared to adding it back especially this leather hard stage once the body of the jar fits nicely i'll spend a few moments just neatening up these edges and burnish them with my fingertips just to make sure they're nice and smooth then once the lid's finished i remove it from the wheel and in its place i put the body of the jar i wipe the base of the jar with a bit of water then get it roughly in the middle and rub it firmly into place this holds it down very well and all i do thereafter is squash a tiny amount of the jar into the wheel head creating a seal and then i start to trim the outside form of the jar the gallery and the rim it's at this point that i can easily trim away the throwing rings and generally i think in my own work at least i prefer the marks left by these metal tools as compared to those left by my hands as one of my old pottery teachers used to say it gives your pots the kiss of steel but really i'm not removing too much just a thin outer layer i like my pots to be thin and light and the glazes i use themselves have to go on quite thickly too which can add a lot of weight back to the vessel so i prefer that they're much thinner and lighter just so they don't end up being really heavy once glazed fired i then carefully trimmed the rim section of the jar and then like i mentioned previously i can use the jar itself as a chuck to trim the lid in i just drop it into place and as it fits very snugly it's easy just to trim away the excess with it in situ like so the trimming of these can be a little bit fiddly at times as it can be on any piece of small handmade pottery but i really enjoy this process nonetheless as i trim my left hand sits on top of the vessel and applies downward pressure just to keep the lid in place there's always a chance that my trimming tool will snag and often when it does this it causes the lid to jump out of place so keeping my left hand there just prevents this from happening otherwise all i'm trying to do here is to match the lid to the wall of the jar underneath it so the two flow pretty seamlessly between each other next i can begin to trim a slight concave hollow into the top of the lid this creates an area that i'll easily be able to fill with glaze later on like i'll show in a moment i do this because the crackle glazes that i use look far more interesting when they're layered thickly and by having a hollow it means that it's very easy just to fill that hollow up with glaze this last step for the lid is perhaps the trickiest during the previous process as i was trimming the sides of the lid there are some burrs and some scraps that get stuck on the underside so i simply place the lid atop the jar and without any supports i very carefully just trim away the little scraps of excess clay the only thing really holding it in place is the tackiness of the clay and my middle finger here which is pushing down on the underside of the lid and i can only get away with this really because i'm not trimming away that much clay then like before i just use my fingertips to burnish over those sharp edges and i check to see if the lid fits before sliding a sharp knife underneath to remove the pot and i then scrape clean the metal just to remove any excess clay as i'll be placing the jar upside down back onto the same spot had there been any little crumbs of clay left on the wheel they can very easily indent themselves into the clay that you've been carefully finishing so i always make sure that my work surfaces are very clean before i move freshly turned pots onto them and this goes for my wheel head or wear boards or my workbench anything really and all i'm doing at this final stage is beveling this bottom edge and cleaning up the underside of the jar and once again the lid acts as a simple chuck for the jar itself which makes trimming and finishing the base really straightforward i trim away the wiring marks left from when i took the piece off the wheel as it was thrown and then i used a flat metal kidney just to burnish these bottom areas to smooth them off and to make them nice and flat i guess what i'm trying to avoid are any obvious sharp edges on this bottom section as they'll easily chip just with use if they were but this stoneware clay is quite robust although any high iron clay body this reduction fired always does end up a little bit brittle if finished in sharp and fine edges after using the metal i use the soft pads of my fingertips just to do one last burnish and then i stamp the pot with my maker's mark which is a little runic f i'll include a still here that shows it nicely once fired will be it on a different vessel you can really see just how much the iron from within the clay body comes out during the reduction firing and that's it this one little jar is finished although there are still many more steps ahead before this thing is finally glazed and fired and then properly finished and while these jars might be quick to throw trimming them can take a while as i really do take my time to ensure that they're as neat as they can possibly be we're going to skip a few steps here these have been misfired and the rooms have been waxed and the base is too at this stage the clay is much harder and it's also much more absorbent too which it needs to be so they can absorb the glaze well not absorb the glaze itself but when they're submerged into the bucket of glaze the absorbent clay body draws in the water present in the glaze and leaves a powdery layer on the outside of the pot the thinner the walls of your pot the less water they can absorb and therefore the layer of glaze that'll eventually be left on the outside will be thinner so to get around that i actually use a glaze that's quite thick in the bucket i grasp each component with a pair of tongs and submerge them inside the liquid and i'll keep them submerged for about four to five seconds don't worry about the marks left by the tongs themselves they're easily cleaned up during the next stage once the body of the jar has been glazed it's the lids turn and remember i'm trying to fill the hollow concave top of these lids with much more glaze so when i do pull them out of the glaze i make sure that none of the excess actually runs off the top of the lid instead i sort of swirl it in place like so letting it dry in one thick layer which can take some time and i think it's also worth noting that not every glaze will work well when applied as thickly as this it's definitely something that requires some testing and all i do for a few moments is swirl the glaze around on the lid so that the thick glaze covers quite a large area then finally i'll set it atop the jar and i'll leave both components to dry out for a number of days which is where we are now you can see the difference in the color of the glaze immediately it's much much drier and in becoming so the layer of glaze is also much more powdery too and fragile so it's at this stage that i rub away the tongue marks and i clean away any stray drips and it's also when i use a wet sponge to remove the droplets of glaze that have settled on the wax there can't be any glaze on the bottoms of my pots as when they fire if there was some they would stick and to the kiln shelves so really i spend an awful lot of time checking the bottoms to make sure they're totally clean then as i'm even packing the kiln i'll always double check just to make sure i then clean up the lid in the same way and then carefully use a sponge just to go over the inner flange the hardest area to get right is where clay meets glaze on the inside of the lid as you can very easily clean away too much glaze for the rims of the jars i clean those on the wheel i center the glaze piece and then use a very wet sponge just to go over those lines and to make them as pristine and perfect as i possibly can i do this carefully and slowly so what i really don't want to happen is for the sponge to catch and pull the pot off center as it's really easy to damage the glaze at this point the last thing to do before these little jars are fired is to wad up the lids this is a clay like mixture made from 50 shiny clay and 50 coarse alumina hydrate i simply roll them into small balls and then press them into little discs and then i carefully position those five per pot around the gallery this means that i can fire the lids in situ on the jars which saves space in the kiln and it also ensures that they match perfectly as in reduction fired kilns there can be small atmospheric differences and for this white glaze for instance if they are in different parts of the kiln they could take on very slightly different hues of white some might be more grey than others some might be more white some might have a yellow tinge and so on anyhow once the kiln is packed it's ready to be fired which i covered extensively in a recent video so i won't go much into depth about it here as simply put the pots are fired up to 1290 degrees centigrade in a reduction atmosphere the gas firing itself lasts for about nine hours and thereafter once the kiln is finished firing it takes about 48 hours to cool down to the point when i can open the door the soft tinkling noise you can hear is caused by the glazed contractile of the clay body underneath a cacophony of pinging glass that only lasts for about 15 to 20 minutes or so i crack open the kiln when it's at about 150 degrees centigrade the plots are still very hot to the touch but slowly i can unpack them it's also a nice moment in the winter at least the basque and the hot air that floods out of the kiln and there's one of the jars reduction fired as hard as stone and covered in glass they still aren't quite finished yet though all the jars need to have the waddings removed the little white discs that i was placing earlier i also smear in some valve grinding paste in between the lid and the body before rubbing the two together quite vigorously which makes the join between lid and body glassy smooth and here are some finished pieces i'll also include some better photographs of the pots on mass towards the end of the video i was really happy with this last patch and i think there'll be 24 or so of these on my next shop update on my website in a couple of weeks due to their small size they may not be the most functional objects but there's something about them that's so satisfying the thick lids the glassy tops and their almost monolithic form they feel like something that's quite ancient and i don't know why i can't quite put my finger on it anyhow that's all for this week thanks so much for watching and thanks too to everybody who's subscribed as we've just passed 50 000 followers which is crazy i never thought i'd enjoy making these youtube videos as much as i do so thanks for sticking around and i'll see you next week you

Channel: Florian Gadsby

Views: 427,043

Rating: 4.9478827 out of 5

Keywords: pottery, ceramics, how to turn pottery, how to trim pottery, Florian Gadsby, floriangadsby, how to make pottery, trimming pottery, turning pottery, Asmr pottery, handmade pottery, stoneware pottery, pottery for beginners, Asmr, handmade ceramics, pottery wheel, how to make a pottery jar, how to throw lids, how to make lids, ceramics lids, ceramic jars, pottery jars, how to make jars, stoneware jars, how to throw lidded jars, how to throw containers, how to make containers

Id: EnNNApayhBM

Length: 17min 21sec (1041 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 18 2021