Wheel Throwing Series: Trimming Bowls on The Potter's Wheel!

Hey everyone, I am Karen Witham Walsh of Karen's Pots and Glass and this is the follow-up video to last week's throwing video when I threw the three bowls. I promised that I would be showing the process of when I did the trimming and some of the decisions that I made, how I trimmed the feet on all of these bowls, and hopefully it will inspire you a little bit. I also go over a little bit of a kind of a tutorial on the do's and don'ts of trimming of things to watch out for because you can have some pretty big mistakes especially they can kind of come out during your glaze if you do some of the weird things with trimming. So I go over that in this video as well. So hopefully you find it helpful. I will also have one more follow-up video on this after I finish the surface design on these. I still want to do some fun stuff to them and I haven't done that yet. So drop me any questions that you have below. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button. Check out my Etsy shop if you are looking for any unique tools. I have some wooden tools that are up there and I hope you all stay positive, stay healthy, and keep potting if you can. All right, all three bowls have been sitting overnight covered up and they are all uniformly dry. They are leather hard top to bottom. One of your goals is don't allow it to dry unevenly. If you have say a rim that dries out a lot faster, that's going to be more brittle. You want the clay to be in even moisture. So when you start trimming it, it's going to trim evenly. If you have one side that's drier than another side, it's going to trim unevenly because it's going to cut deeper in the soft part and more shallow in the drier parts. Now these were all thrown on the bisque tiles, which means that the tiles are very absorbent. Now they will get to the point where they pop off, but at this point I kind of like the dryness of the top here and I want it to pop off at this point. I could take something metal and kind of scrape it and put it underneath there, but I'm going to try a little trick first. And that is I'm going to dry it from the underneath side of the tile first. And here I am using a heat gun to dry the bottom of the tile. You can use a hair dryer, but I love a heat gun in the studio because it's just a lot faster. All right, now that I've dried the bottom of the tile a little bit, sometimes they just pop right off like that. So by drying the tile a little bit, it helps to release it. There we go. And those are real nice. Now these bisque tiles I'll just wash off with a sponge and motor and let them dry and they'll be good as new. Now all three of these are in just the right stage for trimming. And before I do any cutting, I want to do a little bit of an explanation. So trimming, the purpose of trimming is to even out your walls and your floor so they become the same thickness. Also perhaps aesthetically to give it a slightly different profile, maybe to lift it up off the table a little bit. Now I have here a couple of examples. This is a cross section and I've done a video on this already. So if you've already seen this video, I'm just talking about the placement of a foot. If you are trimming a foot ring and determining the placement, what I tell my students is you look at the internal curve that you threw and where that internal curve creates the angle change. So like right here, the angle change transitions from bottom into side. Directly underneath that is where we place the foot ring. The reason for that is if you place it too far out, it will get too thick down here. If you place it too far in, it might get too narrow and you would have an issue. So this is a good placement of a foot ring. Now let me contrast it with a poor one. So this one, the foot ring is placed too wide. So can you see the difference? That the thickness of the wall gets thicker as it goes down. So it's no longer an even thickness. It gets fatter here and then in turn that also is too shallow so it makes it very fat there on the bottom. Again your goal is same thickness in the walls and the floor and the foot ring. So this one is placed too wide. How about this one? This one is placed too narrow. Now why is this a bad thing? Well even if your walls are approximately the same thickness, if it's too narrow, what I tell my kids is if it comes down and then it starts to have a horizontal angle right here, what that does is it creates all of this. If you have a running glaze, it creates a vertical run and right here at the corner it wants to drip and there's nothing there to help stop it. The foot ring is not in the right spot so it starts to drip right here and it can create kind of a problem. My kids often have trouble with foot placement on a plate. They get it too narrow. Sometimes they get the feet too narrow because they cut, they're cutting away and they whoop, they accidentally cut it off so they just make one a little bit more narrow. But usually aesthetically that's not the best. And also it becomes very tippy if it's too narrow. And the last example that I had to show, this one right here. The foot ring is placed in a fine spot. I just wanted to show this because this one has a major angle change happen on the inside and I want you to understand that the angle change is definitely occurring on the inside. So it's always a reflection of what's going on. So that being said, let's set these aside and I want to talk about the feet on these three. Now, let's start with the more of the regular one, the first one that I threw. So this one is a typical rounded interior, rounded outside. And where I can feel the angle change is happening, I would say right there. I'm just going to suggest that the foot ring probably go right around there. So the angle change is happening right above this point. Now, this would be the exterior of the foot ring. Okay, I'm just marking it there with my nail. Now, with trimming, there are so many different ways that you can trim. You can trim on a chum, on a chuck. You could trim on a foam bat. You could trim on a Giffin grip. You could just trim on a wheel head with a little bit of water. In the case of this one, I'm using what is called a sticky bat. I love these things. This was sent to me years ago by Creative Industries. And I think, I'm not sure, but I think Diamond Core. I don't know if they do sticky bats now or maybe it still is Creative Industries. But this is a really nice... I don't know what this is made out of, but it is a sticky surface. And when you put it on there, it really holds it in place. Now, I don't usually recommend this to my kids for a tall, tall form. Short things, plates, wide bowls. I think it works really great. Also, it's also best if your rim is also level too. Now, I'm going to use the trim tool that I typically use with my students. In my classroom, we have these Kemper double-ended tools. And I'm going to be using the flat end. I use some different trim tools at home. I will do those in a different video. I just wanted to show this one because this is what my kids are most used to. Now, when trimming, there are a couple of essential tips that you want to keep in mind. When it's centered and it's rotating, I always tell my kids, try to keep your left hand... I'm going to stand over here on this side so I'm facing the camera. Try to keep your left hand, the hand not holding the tool, try to keep that on the bottom of the pot. Now, if you have any difficulty, like if your finger is sticking, you can always try a lid trick. So this is just a little lid, a little plastic lid. Okay, so if I do that, I can now push my finger on the lid. That spreads the pressure out a little bit more. And also it helps to prevent my finger from sticking to the clay so much. Okay, so maybe some downward pressure is usually recommended because if you don't have downward pressure and you're only pushing sideways, you can knock it off. Okay, next item is try to lock your hands together whenever you can. Just like when you're throwing, you want your hands to be stable and locked when you're throwing. Well, same thing when you're trimming, try to lock them so they are stable. So not only touch your hands together, stabilize your elbows. If you are at a wheel and you're sitting, you're going to lock both your elbows on your knees. I happen to be standing, so I'm going to lock it against my hips a little bit. And then the third thing that I'm going to say is the hand that I hold the tool with, I also usually brace it with the opposite hand. So as I do this, okay, I'm kind of bracing it with the left hand as I cut with the right. Now, once again, I'm going to emphasize I'm pressing down on the bottom of the pot. My elbows are locked. My hands are locked together. And then the last thing that I need to emphasize is I am cutting straight down from the top. So I cut straight down when I make the exterior of the foot ring. Now, that's the one thing that sometimes throws people off a little bit. They don't think about cutting straight down. But the reason that you cut straight down is if your pot is a little bit off, if you cut straight down, you're going to have a nice straight line. And that way, when I go to do the interior, I'll have a nice straight line that's parallel to it. Now here, I'm just trimming away some of the excess to form the exterior of the foot ring. You can look at all sorts of different types of foot styles. I typically like to be aware of when I am thinking about glazing it, maybe I'm going to want to hold this pot upside down by the foot ring. So if I want to hold it by the foot ring and I don't want it to slip out, I often give my foot just a teensy bit of an angle or an undercut. Okay, then I'm going to tidy this up here on the outside. I try to get rid of any awkward transitional cuts. So I'm doing the exterior first. Honestly, you can do it in whatever order you truly prefer. Okay, and then I'm going to come in here with a small rib. Now again, this is leather hard. If this were dry, if this were dusty, I wouldn't be trimming it when it's dusty. I don't allow my kids to trim bone dry things. Because if they do that, they just generate a whole bunch of dust, which is not safe to breathe. So if ever that's the case, I have my kids just put it in a damp box to get it back to a more appropriate leather hard state. Okay, now that's looking pretty good. I am going to just add just a teensy bit of water because I could feel that I had a little bit of a texture that kind of came up when I did that ribbing. There we go. Now, once the outside is done... Now, I'm not going to pick this up just yet because as soon as you pick it up, you take it off center. And then when you put it back down, it's in a slightly different spot. But I will pick it up in just a minute. I just wanted to show you this with it stopped so you can see the exterior of the foot ring just has ever so slightly an angle in. Now, for the top part of the foot, okay, so the part that was against the back, I typically do not cut that unless there's something distinctly wrong with it and it needs to be smooth. Maybe it has a notch or something. But in the case of this, I'm just taking my finger with a little bit of water and I'm compressing it. So by compressing it, I've now smoothed out the bottom of the foot ring. There was like a little hole down there and I've just smoothed that out. Now, remember how on the first cut, I went straight down on the top? On the second cut, I go straight down and this is the inside of the foot ring. So keep in mind, I want the foot ring width, or I'm sorry, the thickness of the foot ring to be about the same thickness as the walls and the floor. And if you remember, when I threw it, my goal was to try to keep the bottom or the base of the pot somewhere around half an inch to three eighths of an inch in thickness. So again, I have not been trimming this bottom part. I trim the outside, I trim the inside, straight down on both of those cuts, except I then kind of finessed this and angled it in a little bit there. And then I just gently round off that corner. I can smooth it with my finger. And then the last part that I'm going to trim away is this part dead center. Now, I'm not really pushing down hard with my hand in the middle because I do have downward pressure of my tool, but my hands are still locked. I have light pressure pushing down because again, I don't want this to fly up. If you are sitting at a wheel and you're new, you might want to keep your foot on the pedal. That way, if you do kind of accidentally catch the tool in the clay and you gouge it and it kind of grabs, if your foot is on the pedal, you can immediately kind of stop. Okay, now that looks pretty good. I like that thickness there. I'm going to add a little moisture and then compress with my finger and then also on the outside. Okay, so now let's take a look at this one. So I feel like this is done being trimmed. We're going to hold this up, okay? So the foot ring, the depth of the foot ring is a little bit more shallow on the interior than it is on the exterior, quite simply because the wall is starting to angle up on the inside. So it's echoing that curve, okay? It would be a continuous curve if the foot ring were not there. And that looks pretty good, I would say. Now, if I wanted to do anything else to this, if I wanted to like modify it and kind of make a little finger mark or something, I certainly could. I'll just keep this plain for right now. I'll save doing a finger mark for another one so you can see that later. But then this is ready to dry. I do have a funny little nick right here. I just, I noticed, I don't know if I hit it with my bag when I covered it last night. I think I may have not been very careful when I did that. I left a little mark. I just try to hide that and fix it up before it dries too much. Okay, so I'll set this one aside and we can do the next. All right, so for trimming this second one, this is the one that had the really narrow bottom. Like it's really narrow on the inside. The walls are a little bit thicker here on the exterior. So the foot ring on this, I would estimate would be somewhere around here. Okay, so you can see, maybe you can see, let me just point here. So right here's where I'm pointing. That's fairly narrow and it could be tippy. So I'm gonna tell you what I'm gonna do to kind of cheat a little bit on this. I am going to have a foot ring that is narrow, but then I'm gonna have it, the foot ring will start narrow and flare outward. So let's get this centered. Oh, and by the way, on this sticky bat, I put lines on there with like a Sharpie marker. I don't think it came with lines or anything. I just, I like to have lines because I find that it saves me a little bit of time. So I'm looking to make sure that that looks fairly, fairly centered there. Now, if I want the foot ring to kind of be right down there, I can go ahead and think about the inside of the foot ring and then it's gonna angle out. So let me just take a needle tool here and I'll show you. All right, so I'm gonna estimate that I would want the foot ring to be anchored right around there, but I am going to flare this out so I'm going to start a lot wider. Hands are locked just like I did on the first one and I'm cutting straight down from the point that I made contact on the bottom. Now this foot ring might have a bit more depth to it as well because the wall is so slanted. I'm starting in really far so it's gonna be slanted and look a little deeper on the outside, that is. Okay, now, as I do this, as I'm starting to trim this away, what I wanna do now is I wanna transition this so this becomes more tapered. So the foot ring itself is angled. So that's kind of the fun thing. When you're trimming, you can completely change the dynamic of a form. So that circle that I put on the top is not reflecting, the exterior circle is not reflecting where it's attached. This little circle here is reflecting where it's attached. So it's really angled, which will actually be quite nice to hold by the foot ring if I wanted to turn it upside down and dip the edge or something and glaze. Now all of this wonderful, these ribbons of clay as they come off, that's all easy to recycle. If you're recycling by hand, spritz them down, put them in a bag and after they're spritzed and they sit, for a little bit, then you can just wedge them right up. In my case, I'm now using a pug mill. So I'm just gonna stick them in my pug mill and I'm doing just a little angle right there on the bottom. I like to round where the foot ring comes out. I don't like it to be a sharp angle because they can tend to get chipped there. Okay, now before I do the interior, I'm gonna go ahead and finish the exterior. I like to do the exterior before I do the inside because sometimes when you're doing the inside, it might get a little delicate or thin. So I'm just adding a wee bit of water and I'm using my little rib. All right, next comes the interior of the foot ring and this also has to be at an angle because remember, the foot ring should be the same thickness. Like, I don't want the foot ring to be thicker or thinner at one spot. So the one side of the wall should always reflect the other side of the wall, whether it's the floors, the wall, the foot ring. You should have a parallel counterpart to it. There we go. That is looking pretty good. Now I'm gonna just, again, add a little bit of moisture. Take my finger and just compress. That compression on the foot ring will help to have a really nice, smooth pop bottom. So as you can see this, you can see the angle. The interior is reflecting the whole foot ring. Angles in. Obviously the outside of the foot ring is deeper than the inside, again, because you have that curve. So just the whole, the nature of the curve, it's going to be a little bit longer on the exterior. Okay, I'll set this one aside. All right, now the trimming for the third and final bowl. If you remember when I threw it, I actually had used a notched card. I used like an old credit card where I had made like a little notch on it there. And I had used it kind of at an angle like that. So I was able to kind of create a little bit of a foot ring. Now, why would I do that? Sometimes I don't trim a foot ring at all on my pieces. Sometimes I leave it flat and I would just want to have an exterior with maybe a little decoration. Now, in the case of this one though, I am going to trim a foot ring. I just wanted to show you that when I threw that it's possible that you don't always have to do a foot ring. All right, so as I look at this, I'm looking more at the top of the bowl. And I want to get the top of the bowl just a little bit more centered. And you can see I didn't actually get the bottom truly centered when I did that yesterday. So I'm just going to redo the exterior going straight down. I think I had thrown that off a little bit last night when I was using that card. I think I had thrown it off a little bit. So there, I'm just going a little bit, a little bit farther in than what I did last night. And the pot does seem to have a little bit of an up and down, maybe a little asymmetry. I may have stretched one side so it's not perfectly flat. Now, watch every once in a while, like in the case of this, I have a little foreign matter. I believe it was a little piece of sponge there. I'm going to throw that away. You always want to watch if you get something weird like that caught in your trim tool, it'll really mar the surface. So you want to be mindful of that. I'm just making sure this is down all the way. There we go. All right. So slight angle coming in, followed by rounding that corner. And then going straight down for the interior. And this one is probably only about 3 8ths of an inch in depth. I don't think it's a full half an inch. So I'm going to be just a little more sparing with how much I'm taking off here. And when you are trimming the middle, honestly, I tell my kids, you can go from the outside inward or from the inside outward. Just make sure that you have a nice steady hand. Try to lock that tool with two hands. So you can see as I, as I'm doing this, my left hand is braced on the foot ring of the pot, but my left thumb was also braced on the handle of the tool. So I'm really, I am touching the tool with both hands, just to be on the safe side. There we go. And then here, I'm just going to, again, add a teensy bit of moisture, smooth that, compress it with my fingers. Oh, and the one thing I didn't even realize I had forgotten, that is I was going to smooth this with a baby rib. So red rib, yellow rib, metal rib, they all work well. I don't, I just grabbed the metal one because that's, that's what I happen to have here on hand. All right. Now, oh, I definitely have a line I have to fix on the outside. If you can see that, I totally missed that line. I just got distracted. The inside looks good though. The inside, now here's a trick I'm going to tell you, since I need to trim the outside, let me just grab a stick or a ruler here. The biggest thing that I try to emphasize to kids is knowing, can you blaze the inside there? And the rule of thumb is, I always tell people, you need to have a pretty good clearance. So if you can kind of see right underneath that, you can see the clearance from the ruler. If it were much closer, I would either trim down more or if you're afraid, don't actually glaze the interior of that. But it's always sad when a kid has glazed the interior of something that's way too shallow and then it sticks. But that is one reason that I have all the kids make patties for their pieces. I don't fire their glaze pieces unless they have put a patty underneath it. Because sometimes either they're just careless or too gutsy maybe, or just not observant. Okay. So that's looking pretty good. All right. So I'll say a little something about the sticky bat. I just wash this off with water and you can sponge it or take a clean rag over it or something. And then when I am going to put it away, I always hang it. I have like a little wire loop here and I hang it. Don't store things on a sticky bat because if you do, you end up by getting an unfortunate impression and it can damage and mar the surface. So I'll just hang this up. And here are the three bowls that I just trimmed. The first one, more of a traditional bowl. Okay. Rounded outside, rounded inside. Great little cereal or ice cream bowl. Foot placed underneath the angle change on the interior. This one, much more of an upright, more of a V-shaped bowl, maybe a noodle bowl. Again, great for ice cream too. Believe me, I've eaten a lot of ice cream out of these shaped bowls. And then the foot ring on this is actually quite flared because I had it start at a skinnier point and get a little wider. The reason I had to get wider was for greater stability. If I made it straight up and down and it was at the narrow part, it would be a lot more tippy. Whenever I have a real narrow foot, I try to flare it out for greater stability. And then this one, a much wider foot to begin with. And again, under the major angle change because this was a much wider bowl on the interior. Now I will be stamping these and signing these later, but for now I'm going to put a bag over them because I have one more thing that I'll do in a future video that I wanted to show you some different ways that I might want to finish them and do some surface design on them before they're fired.