How to Throw and Trim a Shallow Stoneware Bowl — Narrated Version

hey and welcome back to this week's video this time i'm going to be showing you how i throw and trim these simple two pound bowls once the clay has been weighed out i give each lump a quick spiral wedge just to bring together all the little pieces there might be i like to make these with very soft clay it makes the centering and throwing fire easier as these forms are much wider than they are tall and they're thrown from soft clay too i throw them on wooden bats which makes lifting them off once they're finished much easier i attach these wooden bats via a skim of clay underneath this pad of clay is quickly thrown shaped and then dried out leather hard using a heat gun which is just what i've come to call the paint stripper i'll rub some water on the underside of the bat to help it fuse and i'll also give it a few firm knocks just to make sure it's held nicely in place and it's just a matter of coning up the clay a couple of times and making sure it's really well centered when you're throwing larger bowls with overhanging walls it's always best to center the form into a lower wider shape than you might think rather than a more conical narrow shape the wider form will provide you with more support play in the lower half of your walls which is what you need to stop the walls from sagging over and collapsing then i begin to gradually pull the clay upward and outward slightly making sure to retain some thickness and the upper sections of the walls and the rim this is because the rim is constantly pulled outward stretched so if your rim is already too thin at this point by the time you've stretched it out to meet your pointer there's a chance it'll split and you'll ruin the piece you're working on when pulling the walls of these it's a matter of gradually pulling the clay outward i don't rush any of these steps or these movements i just let the clay flow sort of at its own pace this entire time i've made sure to leave enough clay in the base there's about a centimeter and a half in the bottom of these which is enough to trim a nice tall foot ring from like i mentioned in my previous video it's better to have too much material to work from than too little as if there's not enough clay you simply can't trim a foot ring but if there's too much you can simply turn away the excess until it's just right once the bowls diameter is more or less there and begin work on forming the inside an old tutor of mine used to say that if you were to take a marble and roll it from the rim inside the bowl you should be able to roll endlessly until it comes to a rest of its own accord not by any shoulder or lump of clay in the form interrupting it i don't take this quite so literally it is good advice for the overall shape of a bowl but i do leave some subtle throwing rings in the upper sections of the walls my glazes go on so thickly too and tend to fill most of these grooves and marks so i can get away at this stage by leaving things a little bit rough only for them to be corrected and smoothed out later on once fired i then use a piece of chamois leather to smooth over the rim before using a blunted old turning tool to remove the skirt of clay around the base of the piece i do this for two reasons the first is to remove the wet clay from the pot this might make it take longer to dry later on impeding how quickly i can work it also creates a fold and this fold becomes very useful later on when it comes to lifting the pot onto the wheel so i can trim it i then skim over the back with a rubber kidney just remove more of the slip which again i don't want drying out on the bats and keeping them saturated for too long which also means i barely ever have to clean them and there's a potter and i'm sure all the other partners watching this will know cleaning is a big part of our job so as much as that as i can eliminate is possible the better then these are removed from the wheel and boarded up and put out together with the others to dry overnight slowly in the recent colder and wetter months pots have been taking a lot longer to dry so i'm ending up with a lot of work any one time that i have to manage and juggle around to make sure things are in the right consistency to turn and finish next morning these are uncovered and you can see i've put them onto new bats the night before which helps dry out the bases and put all the moisture out they then put onto a new board and that's the one i take over to the wheel to work on you'll have to excuse the faint noise of rain in these later clips that might be a common theme in my videos to be honest trimming is all about catching the clay at just the right consistency of leather hard it needs to be firm enough to hold its shape yet it can't be approaching bone dry at all nor can it be soft soft enough that your tools can alter the shape when you push them in once the bowl has been tap centered into place i simply attach her onto the wheel using three lugs of soft clay i then use a pair of measured calipers and a sharp potter's needle to mark the outer diameter of my foot ring i don't bother marking another line to determine where the interior of my foot ring will be as i can generally do this just with my eye alone it's then just a matter of removing the clay the excess to reveal the foot ring that's somewhere inside i've always thought of trimming as a much more mechanical process my hands are rigid i hold the tool very tightly i spin the wheel much faster than if i were throwing all my motions are strong and confident you don't want to let the clay influence your movements so if there's a wobble in the walls of the bowl i try my best to trim through it to eliminate it i don't let the clay dictate how it is that i'm going to be trimming this bolt once most of the clay on the walls is removed i begin to define the area where the foot will be the basis of pots and the foot rings are very personal features on pieces of pottery every potter has their own individual way of doing it and often they're the first part of the pot i'll go to when inspecting them if it's at a restaurant or a museum or a shop i pick up the pot turn it over and i feel the base to see what they've done differently for my own feet i do what you see here i trim in two facets into the foot this is both for the aesthetics and for function the groove this creates acts as a wonderful glaze catch allowing the glaze to pull as it fires rather than spill over onto the kiln shells all of these trimmings are recyclable for those of you who aren't ceramicists i simply let this waste dry out and then i slake it down in water before putting on plaster baths and then wedging it up again to use to throw into new pots once the outer form has been complete both the walls and the foot ring i can begin working on the middle removing excess clay from the interior of the foot ring this is another process where all my movements are incredibly mechanical one slip is enough to ruin the whole piece if the tool is cool it can tear out a gouge in the foot or you can very easily trim right through the bottom and make a hole to aid in this and to help my control you'll see that i always hold the tool right by the head which means i can apply far more pressure and also i have a lot more finesse with the tool i can stop and start at a moment's notice and with enough pressure i can really remove a lot of mass working quite quickly if your grip on the other hand is loose and you hold the tool on the other end you'll find you have practically zero control so i always recommend holding it as tightly as you can and as close to the metal end as you can here i'm defining the inside of the foot trimming another facet which matches the one on the outside so they angle toward each other and when i'm removing clay from the center of the foot i always start from the middle like you see here and i work slowly outward every now and then i also check the thickness i do this two ways one is just by using a finger or a thumb i poke it and see if there's any movement and if the clay at all goes inward i know it's time to stop the other technique is tapping which i seldom use but it works too once i'm more or less happy with the shape i just go over some of the sharper edges just to make sure everything's nice and smooth before finally using my makers mark the smallest one i have to stamp the lower facet of the foot in this instance on bolts especially the process of pushing in my stamp displaces some of the clay upward so i just go over it with a small trimming tool to tidy those parts up i then remove the lugs and lift it away and this lifting away should give you a good idea of what kind of consistency it's like the clay is firm enough that i can quite gently lift it away without marking any of the foot that i've just trimmed once trimmed as these are quite thin they dry out very quickly so i make sure i place them on very flat boards as so they can dry out as flat as possible in between trimming each bowl i give the wheel a quick skim over with a kidney too just remove any clay burs there could be where the rim will be placed if i were to place the room onto these burs they would embed themselves and they're quite difficult to remove occasionally if i feel the rim is too thick i'll give it a quick trim like you see here before i attach my lugs of clay to secure it in place the clay i'm using is lugs to keep the pots in place dries out very quickly throughout the day as it's spinning around and has dry clay falling in it all the time so periodically i dunk these in water just to keep them nice and soft this way i don't end up using tons of clay throughout the day just as lugs you'll notice again in these clips just how firmly i'm gripping the tool and how much of the handle i'm holding as well i think if you're trying to create pots that are very even and thin spinning fast definitely goes to your advantage if you go too slow i think you risk the clay's own influences and movement getting more and more in your way i don't mind if there are facets even on the lower half of the walls which you can kind of see here faint lines marks anything left by the tools is actually quite nice at the end of the day although they'll only be subtly visible once fired it's nice knowing they're there and it's nice knowing that when you run your fingers and hands over the pot you can just about feel them through the thick glaze i remove lots of clay when trimming these approximately half their weight is lost during this process so they go from a freshly thrown weight of about two pounds being just over one pound once finished which also means i end up with a huge amount of waste so whenever i make bowls and i usually make about 50 or 60 together i end up with a vast amount of reclaim that i've then got to wedge up and recycle and that's about it for these bowls i hope you found this useful and i'll see you next week you

Channel: Florian Gadsby

Views: 87,734

Rating: 4.9227986 out of 5

Keywords: pottery, how to throw on the wheel, how to make pottery, Florian Gadsby, floriangadsby, handmade pottery, wheel throwing, asmr, pottery asmr, ceramics, clay, how to make a bowl, how to throw pottery, pottery for beginners, wheel thrown pottery, making pottery, asmr video, how to throw bowls, making ceramics, handmade ceramics, how to throw bowls on the wheel, pottery wheel, how to turn bowls, how to finish pottery bowls, turning bowls, turning pottery bowls, trimming bowls

Id: pjDYLVd7bEg

Length: 10min 34sec (634 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 01 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/angryfluttershy]

This is the kind of artisan video I really love. No music, a narration that really makes sense, and a job well done. Would really like to see the finished, fired and glazed bowl, though.

[u/fabledclay]

So clean, I wish I could throw like that without making so much mess.

[u/eezyE4free]

You know they are at the top of their craft when the whole video looks effortless from star to finish. All I could think was “ this looks so easy, all I need is some clay and a wheel and I could do this”. Then common sense kicks in and I realize I don’t have 1,000 hours to get this good.

[u/stupifystupify]

I’ve taken a pottery course and it’s way harder than it looks! This guy is amazing :)

[u/1burritoPOprn-hunger]

I've enjoyed this guy's videos on here for a while now. Apparently he trained under some world-renouned pottery...person.

Anybody know why he never shows his firing/glazing process? Is that some sort of potter secret?