Making a Bonsai Pot

Hey everyone, welcome to my studio. I threw this and a couple other bark bonsai pots yesterday, and today I need to trim them and attach the little feet that I made. So let's see how that goes. So the first step is gonna be to get this big boy centered. So I can actually attach it to the wheel and trim it. Now normally, I would be trimming this on the metal wheel itself, but these pots that I made are too big, so I need to trim them on that. And it's also a little bit too big to tap center, so we're gonna do the best that we can. Now I'll just attach the pot a little bit to the wheel with some clay. It's gonna be hard to not disturb the bark texture while I do this. Again, we'll just do the best that we can. And that should be good enough to get started. I'm just gonna get started with my only bison tool here. These are a little expensive, but they are well worth it. They are incredible trimming tools. First step here is gonna be to just decide where I want the lip at the bottom of the pot to be. All right, I like that. We'll clean it up a little more in a little bit, but that is gonna be great for now. The bottom surface of this isn't too bad, but I am going to clean it up a little bit. I have to be careful not to push too hard in the middle here because this is fairly thin and it will poke right through if I'm not careful. Now I'm gonna decide where I want to put the big center drainage hole. Wow, that's thinner than I thought in there. I'm gonna be real careful with this. All right, interestingly enough, that is all the trimming that I need to do to this bark pot. That texture on the outside doesn't get touched much, so now we will attach the feet. I'm just gonna throw them on here real quick, loosely, and just kind of decide how I want them, what I think will look best, and then I will use a ruler to measure out exactly how I want them. Yeah, I think that's how I would like these feet to go. Maybe in just a little bit more. All right, cool. So now, I want these to be lined up really straight, straight as I can get them on here. I'm just gonna draw some lines, and I'm also going to measure away from the edge how far I want them. All right, so now, I'm going to kind of trace a small outline of each of these feet so that I can slip and score them. I have some slip that I just make out of the trimmings from my other pots, and this will glue down these feet very nicely. I'm just gonna spread a thin layer over the whole surface, place it back right where I put those score marks, and then slowly add a little pressure and just wiggle it into place. All right, so now that these are attached, I'm gonna spend a little time just cleaning them up. I want these seams where they meet the pot to look as nice as we can. One of the main things that I'm doing here is making sure that these corners are attached to the bottom of the pot. Attach nicely to the pot because they will pull away in firing. They're not attached very well. All right, there we go. So there are some other things that I want to do. I want to get wire holes in here so the tree that's put inside can be wired to the pot when it's first potted so that the roots have time to get established. So let me get my drill and we will do that next. All right, so I have my drill and I have a drill bit on there just so I can drill some very clean holes. So let's first measure out where we want those holes to go. You want them to be a little ways away from the center of the pot. You don't want to have them all the way to the edge in my experience. I'm putting them an inch and a half away from the edge centered between the feet. Now we will just drill right through here. The clay is still pretty wet so these holes are very easy to drill. And I like to drill holes instead of punching them through because the drill actually removes material and when you punch holes through something like this it just kind of pushes material out of the way. All right. Now I'm going to take my little 3D printed stamp with my insignia, my logo on it. And I'm just going to put it on one of these feet. Right, and there we go. Now let's remove the clay, flip this pot over. See how we did. I really, really like it. I think those feet raise it up nicely and that bottom lip that I trimmed is just the right height. I don't know. Let me know what you think in the comments. Thanks for watching. I appreciate it. Bye.