(classical music) (yelling) (upbeat music) - Pottery! Today we're making bowls and pot. No, not like that, you crazy people. Bowls and pots. - Eugene is not here today,
because he's actually preparing for a drag performance, so while he's doing that, we're gonna drag our hands on some clay. (funky music) - My name is Mel, I'm
one of the owners here at Still Life Ceramics. Today we're gonna make
something on the pottery wheel. We're gonna attempt a bowl. So we opened in April of last year. Yeah.
(gasps) - We started our company
in April last year. - Stop!
- Twins! - Twins!
- Twins! - Happy birthday to you! - Thank you.
- Your birthday's coming up. - [Mel] Thank you guys. - Yeah!
- Wow, thank you! - Ceramics is kinda the umbrella. Pottery is making lots
of functional things, it's less of the artistic stuff, I'm sure there's going
to be some pottery people watching that are like,
she's totally wrong. (laughs) - They don't get to talk. - Exactly, I'm the expert here. - This video is really a challenge. A challenge to see if we
can come up with jokes other than the Ghost jokes. (romantic music)
- You all know it, it's our favorite movie scene. We've made that joke a lot
in videos, but never here, in a pottery class. - I do feel a lot like Demi Moore. She's my Patrick Swayze. ♪ Oh, my love ♪ - I'm guessing we're gonna
do it at least four times. - My goal today is to try and sneak up on one of the other guys and have my own Ghost moment. They won't see it coming. - Yeah.
- Whoa. (laughter) (cheering) - It's beautiful! - Thank you.
- Look what we made! - You guys ready to make
something on the pottery wheel? - Yeah! - Alright! So the first thing we have to do is choose what kinda clay you wanna use. - Oh.
- So this would be the white clay bodies, you can see it's pretty clear, white, and this is how it comes out with a speckled clay. The speckles come through
the glaze a little, you can see it on the outside. - I would like to lean a
little more speckled today. - [Mel] Alright! - I'm gonna go speckled please. - Speck-tacular. - Here's your clay. - Thanks.
- Here's your clay. - Oh wow! Can I play with this all I want? I love mushy, gushy stuff. I'm just excited to play with the clay. Oh yeah! This is fuckin' awesome! Yo, give this a squeeze. - Okay, give me yours to see. - Let me try. - Oh! - Yeah! - Alright, the first thing we're gonna do is turn our wheel on. So you're gonna press the
pedal on with your toes, and off with your heels. - Ooh! - If you push it all the
way forward, you'll see that it turns faster.
- That's fast. - This is very special for me because my wife, Ariel, loves pottery. Today I'm hoping to make something that maybe she'll use on a monthly basis. - So the first thing that I'm gonna do is to clean my wheel
before I put the clay down. And your wheel should be
going counterclockwise, if it's going clockwise,
you're doing it wrong. - Since I moved in with Maggie, she's really opened my eyes
to the world of ceramics. My goal today is to
make a decorative piece that my girlfriend will be proud of. - Okay, SpongeBob, do your thing. - [Ned] Oh, that's nice. - I love letting things
do the work for me. - [Ned] This is great. - Becky and I, we're married now. We're trying to cute up our place, I wanna make something nice for Becky, something nice for us. - Today we're gonna do
basically the first step, which is throwing it, so
we're putting it on the wheel, and actually yeah, we're actually
not gonna throw anything. - Wait, literally the only
thing we know about this is that you throw clay, and you're telling us
we're not throwing clay? - I don't personally throw it 'cause I find if I throw it, I'll get it way off-center,
and it's a lot harder, so I kinda just put it down in the center. You're welcome to throw it. (grunt) - [Keith] Oh, a little off-center. - [Zach] Pretty good. - Get it nice and stuck down. I wanna make so that
as I'm working with it, I'm throwing lots of water on it, and I don't want any to
get underneath the clay, 'cause it'll make it slide off. - And I wish we can eat
our pots at the end. - Have our pots and eat 'em too. - So we're gonna throw
a bunch of water on it, and I'm gonna squeeze
everything towards the center, because it's spinning, I'm just applying pressure in two spots. - [Keith] Ooh, it's growing! (cheering) Now it looks like a weird nipple. - As someone who works in pottery-- - [Mel] Uh huh? - --are you, at this point,
sick of the Ghost jokes? - [Mel] No! - No?
- We encourage the Ghost joke. I haven't seen the movie, so. - You haven't seen the movie? - What?
- No, I know! - Oh, come on. I have heard that, to be a great artist, you must have your lover
shot down in the streets, that's part of Ghost. - Alright, oh, okay, good.
(ding) I was like, oh god. (laughter) You got this.
- Oh God. - [Keith] Oh my Gosh, look at you. You look ridiculous. - I'm having my Ghost moment! (ding)
(romantic music) Whoa, wow! - [Mel] Nice! - Okay, little boy, let's give you a bath. Sprinkle dinkle, I love my lump. I'm gonna name him Boris. - [Mel] Counterpressure,
so move them around a little more to the sides, yeah. - Whoa.
- Yes or no? - [Mel] That's great, perfect. You can pause there. - Bro. - That's a knob. So in terms of design, I
feel like classic ceramics is very clean and neat and precise. It seems like the more artisanal pottery is kind of about ridges and imperfections, and is that something
that we should strive for? - Sure, I like it as a part of the design, and I think that moving back
to buying handmade stuff, you know, they can see where it came from. So we're gonna do the damp one now, and then to go down, so
I'm pushing it toward, (laughter) I'm pushing it down toward my bucket, return kind of to the shape that we started with, a little lower. - This is so satisfying. - It's like watching a plant grow in fast motion or something. - Right, yeah.
- It's so amazing. (soft classical music) Oh, this is so satisfying. - I know, right?
- It's real nice. - Look at that beautiful, beautiful clay. (screaming) - Is it 'cause at one point
I made him go real fast? - I think so. - Oh no.
- We might have gone a little tall. Little faster. - [Keith] There you go,
there you go, little lumpy. - Yeah, there you go. - There you go, little mound. - We're ready to move
on to the next stage, which is creating the
shape that we're gonna use. We're gonna make some nice
fart sounds with our clay. (squelching) - Wait, wait, it's a symphony. Here, Keith, you make some. (squelching) Alright, you make some. (chuckling) - So now we have what is
the beginning of our pot, so the first thing I wanna do is find the center of the spinning mound, and just rest my thumb
on top to create a divot. - My left--
- Yeah. - [Keith] My left hand's so stupid. - I mean, my left hand is stupid too. (romantic music) (dings) - There's gotta be another joke. - It needs more water. - He didn't see it coming. - I didn't, and I love how it feels now. - So now we're gonna actually plunge straight down into the clay.
- Oh, here we go! - So you're gonna use the
tip of your left thumb, and you're gonna press down. - What are some of the
most common mistakes that we could make as first-timers? - You really have to have kind
of a gentle and steady hand, and the tendency is to over correct and squeeze the clay a little more, and that'll usually make it go haywire. - [Keith] Oh! - Oh, this is so fun! This feels awesome. Oh yeah, I like this. - Don't make it gross. - Why is it gross? It's just a hobby that I'm enjoying. There's literally nothing
sexual about this. There's no feeling where a hole is spinning rapidly around
your thumb, there's nothing-- - There's nothing like it? - No. - [Keith] Wow, nice hole! - [Mel] It's a great hole. So next we're gonna open the bowl out. - Man, we should have called this video Try Guys Try Bowling! (laughter) - Yeah, so we're gonna
use our left thumb again, we're gonna apply pressure
in a straight line out towards nine o'clock,
and I use my right hand, both to kind of to stabilize
my left, I'm just pressing out. - [Zach] Oh, there it goes. - [Keith] It's a bowl, It's bowling! (gasps) - So you wanna be careful
not to go too wide, or it'll kinda collapse over the base. - Thumb-- - Entered. - --entered the pot, and-- - We're just so afraid to overdo it. - Ooh! - Oh yeah!
- Yeah! - Great, so then you'll
pull your thumb out while it's still spinning, beautiful! - Wow, look at that! It was like watching my bowl go, wow! It was pretty amazing. - We're gonna stretch the
walls a little taller. So this is the part where if something's gonna go pretty haywire-- - It's now. - --it's gonna be this step. - Oh God. So do you ever pull it too
high and it flops over? - Yeah, because we're
working with the clay, we're kind of stretching
it out, adding water, kinda breaking it down a little, if you stretch it too thin or too wide, it can kind of just break apart. I'm just gonna pinch from the base, and really slowly-- - [Keith] Oh yeah. - --move my hand up the wall. - [Keith] Oh, damn! That's a cylinder! - [Mel] Squeeze on top of the wall, yeah. - [Keith] Yes, Ned. - Good job, Ned.
- Oh yeah. - Your wife is watching. - Oh, I'll do her proud. ♪ Squeeze that wall ♪ ♪ Make it grow ♪ ♪ Squeeze that wall ♪ ♪ Make it grow ♪ ♪ Squeeze that bowl ♪ ♪ Make it whole ♪ ♪ Squeeze that wall ♪ ♪ Make it grow ♪ - Woo! Hah, look at that! - [Keith] Wow, wow! - [Mel] There you go! ♪ Squeeze that wall ♪ - Oh whoa, I like that yours
is like, you're shapely. - I'm obviously doing this on
purpose, and it looks awesome. - It does look awesome.
(laughter) - A little less pressure. - A little less.
- A little less pressure, yeah, keep going all
the way up to the top! - Oh no! (screaming) - What have you done? - You fucked it up! - So what happened was
you kinda hit that snag, and then pinched all the way up. - It just slipped right out. - Yeah.
- I had to, it was so wet. - You're just having too much fun. - What if this is just a
part of my design though? What if I just embrace it? - Embrace it. - Yeah, I'm not gonna let you fix it. - Okay, that's totally fine. - This is me. - Great! - Accept me or don't,
that's your prerogative. - Wow.
- This is my bowl. - So this tool is going
to go inside the bowl at three o'clock, and
as you apply pressure in one spot, you can see-- - [Keith] Oh my god. - [Zach] Whoa, wow! - [Mel] Ta-da! - Whoa, it's a bowl! - Yeah! Man, Eugene must be having such a shitty time not doing this. (upbeat electronic music) - Probably, actually.
- Yeah. Just be careful about
where you don't go too-- - Flat, you don't wanna make a plate. That's like an expensive soup bowl. - Yeah. - It looks like a saucer. This isn't quite what I intended, but I think I'm just gonna... This is exactly what I meant. - What would you change
about it if you wanted to? - I wanted it to be kind of
more tall and then flop over. - I think I can do that. You want me to give it a quick try? - Yeah.
- Okay. ♪ Feed the bowls ♪ - Oh, wow. This is where the magic happens. A little faster? - [Mel] A little faster. - Grow! Yeah, now it's wacky looking. - [Ned] Wow, Zach. - Thank you.
- You're doing so well. Zach, you're doing amazing! - Wow. - Zach, this is such a cool bowl you made. - Whoa, Zach! - Yeah! - It definitely gained a wobble, you know? - It gained a wobble?
- It started so smooth, and centered, and then
it gained a nice wobble. - Whoa, whoa, look at it wobble bobble! - [Mel] Oh God. - What are we doing, what's happening? We're getting real nervous on this bowl. What do you think, is it gonna collapse? - It's not gonna collapse, but it might just be a wobble bowl? - [Keith] Wobble bobble? - Yeah. - Fuck, huh? (laughter) - I don't wanna make a functional bowl, Maggie's all about these decorative bowls that don't do anything but just look cute. - But what do you want, Zach? - That's what I want. - [Keith] Oh, okay. - To make Maggie happy.
- I wanna make her happy. - [Keith] Oh, okay, great. - [Mel] You can put anything
in it, olives, popcorn. - Ooh.
- Olives? - Olives is the first
thing your mind goes to? - Olive would delicious in a bowl. - [Mel] I really like olives. - There's gonna be a no
olive sign on my bowl. - Are you gonna write no olives? - You don't like olives?
- You can put anything else. I think I'm good. - Great! - I'm also good. - I think I'm okay with mine.
- Great job, everyone. Muddy high fives. I like it, it's unique.
- Yeah, it is unique. - No one else will be able
to say that they made it. - That's true. - So they'll come off the wheel kinda looking a little rough, not like the bowl that
you really envisioned. - That looks better than what I planned on making today. I just wanna make that clear. - And it gets fired in the kiln, and the first firing goes to
about 1,900 degrees Fahrenheit. It's kind of a three day process. So now we're gonna let them
dry for a couple of days. And then you're gonna come back and glaze after it's been fired. - See you next time! In a few moments. - It is one week later,
we're back at the pottery. (chuckles) - We're back at the pottery! - We're back at the pottery. - We're back at it. - We are ready to see
our bowls as they are after they have been in the kiln, and now it is time to glaze. And to help us glaze-- - Hi, I'm Ana. Thanks for coming to glaze with us. - Yeah, we love to glaze. - So I heard your bowls survived the kiln. Sometimes they crack-- - Oh.
- --or they explode. - Oh no.
- Explode? - Wow, thank you. Whoa, it looks even better! I can see how it was close
to exploding but it didn't. - Whoa, look at my goofy bowl. I love it! - Hm, that is an olive
bowl, through and through. - I'm not putting any olives in here. - I've never seen a better
olive dish than that. - There's mo olives allowed. - Let's see my perfect bowl. Okay, okay, alright. We got some thing going on. - [Ned] Ooh, I like it. It's very unique. - It kinda looks like a goofy hat. - It has a lot of expression, this bowl. - I'm gonna tell you right now, there is no food going on in this ever. This is decorative. - Imma come over to your house
and just fill it with olives. - So there's a couple of ways to glaze, but I think one of the important things to know about glazing is
that glaze isn't paint, glaze is actually glass. - Oh. - And this is what makes
your bowl food-safe. So this is a little
example of the test glaze. If you feel it, you can
kinda hear the glass surface. - Wait, ASMR Darling taught
us how to do this, you ready? (clicking) - Glaze is a chemical
process that happens, and we mix silica, Alumina,
clay and different colorants, metals and earths, they get heated to 2,200 degrees
Fahrenheit, and that's what makes it melt into glass. This looks pretty solid. But then, as you shake it-- - [Keith] Oh, it's flattening out. Oh my Gosh, it's so runny! - It turns into liquid. - Whoa! - And that's a little bit
about how mixing glazes works. The colors you see here
is this color right here. - What?
- No it isn't. - This looks green,
but it turns out black. - Shut up. - What? - So we have a bunch of different colors for you guys to choose from, and there's different techniques to glaze, and we'll go over three
options for you today. One is to paint your glaze on. You can brush in different ways, it's part of your own
personal creative expression. This is a great way to
brush on your glaze. Grab your brush to get as
much glaze on it as you can, and then just spin, and
then keep painting it on You can use one of these green brushes, and then grab what is wax,
we call it wax resist, 'cause what it does is
it resists the glaze, so wherever you paint
green, you dip it in, that area won't get glazed, 'cause the wax resisting the glaze. - So with mine, I'm waxing the rim so that it will remain that
beautiful, natural color. - And I'm waxing my bottom. - Well I'm waxing my bottom,
and taping part of my rim, so that I get two tones. My bottom has been fully waxed. - The other technique is dipping the bowl into the bucket of glaze. What can happen sometimes
is people press really hard, and then they break their bowl, so you have to be careful when dipping. - Fuck. - Ariel really likes these
kind of light green colors, I just want a glaze that's
really beautiful and simple. - With that shape, the dipping
method is gonna be great. It's a contemporary, simple shape. The sea foam green color
will stand out on your shelf. (bright music) - Wow, you went all the way, that's great! - Did I do it?
- You did it! - Does it look nice? - Yeah, he went all the way. So this area, what you're gonna do, is you're gonna dip your finger in again, and then just touch up, and then we'll smooth it out with your fingers again. - Wow, that's really cool. You just dipped it in and
that's just super smooth. - You did it! So the third option is pouring. This is a really good technique
for a really modern look, where you just have the
inside of the bowl glazed, you just pour it in, roll it around a bit. - [Zach] Bring it around town! - And then--
- Whoa! - --you dump it out. - All the decorations that Maggie has, she loves like, I think,
the antique white and gray. I like these two colors together. - And I think you have such
a prominent rim on your bowl, that accentuating that rim might be a really good accent to that piece. So I would fill maybe
this much glaze, yeah, and pour it right in the middle. - Whoa, to here? - Yep.
- Okay. Now I'm going to--
- Swirl. And don't worry if the drips out, we can wipe that off. - Oh, okay, cool. Oh, this is definitely more than a second. - It definitely is. - Oh no!
(laughter) - Get out of there! Oh, it's all over the place. - It's not a problem, you
can just sponge that off. - It feels like a problem! - We'll get you a sponge
and we'll sponge that off. - Should I just add more? - No.
- Should I just keep adding more?
- Don't add more. This is what you're gonna
do to wipe off the rest. So you're good now, you can turn it over. - Get off! You were so perfect once upon a time. I love this pot so much. I really care a lot about it. I've never put so much care and tender love into a
thing that I've made. So let's say you wanna do the inside and then the outside a different color. - You could do that. - Oh, wow.
- What? - [Ned] You're just hand-dipping it? - [Ana] I'm hand-dipping it. - Whoa, she's crazy. - So for Valentine's
day, I bought some bowls from here for my wife, and I want to try to match the bowls that I bought. - So that's the glaze
you had on the bowl-- - Yeah.
- overlayed with the white glaze. You're gonna do a double dip. - I'm doing a double dip! - Woo!
- Woo! - Double dip! - So I taped off where
I want it to be white, and I'm just gonna pour
a little bit in this. I'm really learning with the shape of the inside of my bowl is not even. - But you're doing a really good job! - Thanks. I'm just gonna pour it and do
the same thing on the outside. - Do the same. (humming) (choral music) - You're done with glaze one. (sigh) (choral music)
- Oh my. (gasp) Wow. - Excellent.
- Oh God. - You guys, that's perfect!
- That was so... Oh, but I didn't get it-- - Ah! - I didn't get it on the inside! - We can do it.
- Oh God, what an embarrassment! - Or you can leave that
exposed edge right there. - You'll think it'll be hot? - I think so. I actually think that's a
really beautiful design. - I did it!
(clapping) Wow, that was scary. 'Cause if you fuck it up, that's it. - So they're gonna fire these away, and then we're gonna pick
them up and see how we did. But in video time, it's
gonna be right now! - Here we are. It's been baked and
glazed and baked again, like a superior donut, a baked donut. I guess donut are fried. - It could be anything. It could be broken. It could have exploded and
this is just a plastic bowl that says, sorry, you tried. - I hope it's cool, I hope I like it. But also I hope I made
something that Maggie will like. - In three, two, one. - Bowl! Oh my god, it's beautiful! Oh my god, look at the bowl! This looks like my bowls that I bought. - Whoa, look at that! Oh my God, that looks amazing! Oh my goodness! - Whoa, fuck yeah! Oh shit, whoa! That is not what I expected at all. - Look at that part, huh? So I'll just always eat
out of the bowl like this. You're buying art when you're
buying stuff like this, you're not just buying a dish. - Look, it's shiny! Tastes good. - I love this, but more importantly, I think Maggie is gonna love this. This is getting prime
placement in my house. - You made this? I thought you were gonna
make a lumpy old thing. This is really nice. - [Zach] He looks professional. - Professional! I like it. - Hey, that looks good! - [Keith] It looks okay, right? - That looks kinda like the bowl! Hey, it looks good! - [Keith] Looks pretty good,
it's a little different. - Look at it, it's like the same! No it's not! Look at it, good job! - Oh, Ned! That's beautiful! - Aw, thanks! (gasp) Oh my god, I did it! I'm on the wall. (upbeat music) - It's basically good for
nothing except for looking at. I'm not putting olives
in this fuckin' bowl!
