Tips on how to throw a large serving bowl

In this video, I'm going to show you some tips and tricks on how to make a pretty large serving bowl on the pottery wheel. So let's get into it. So if you haven't seen my videos on wedging and centering, you should check those out. I'll have them linked in the description below. But the first thing you want to do when throwing this large of an amount of clay is you want to get it as close to center as possible. So this is somewhere between probably 7 and 10 pounds. I didn't measure it out. But it's a fairly large chunk of clay. And I'll get it as close to center by slap centering it before I go into coning. I find that coning is best for large chunks of clay like this because it allows me to get my back and my weight involved in the centering process. So once I have centered the clay, I'll form it into a wide puck because I want it to form a wide bowl. And to make a wide bowl, you need a wide base. We're going to trim out a lot of the clay later. But after you have made your wide base, you want to make a well. And to do this, I'm going to use my middle finger and my thumb and I'm going to press into the center of the clay, feeling for the middle. At this point, you don't want to get off center because it's really hard to adjust your walls and to get back on center if you get off center making your well. So I'll take extra time here to make sure that I stay centered. So after I have made the well, I'm going to use my needle tool to check how thick the base is. I want to leave about a half inch to maybe like three-fourths of an inch at the base, even up to a whole inch because I want the foot to be fairly thick. Again, later I'm going to trim some of this out so I can see how much I have here. And I can make adjustments at this point. So once the base is the thickness that I want it to be, I'm going to go directly into pulling the walls up. You can pull it open. You just have to be careful that you don't flatten the bottom out, unless that's what you want. But a lot of bowls have a continuous curve all the way through and I want to maintain that in this large bowl. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to try to press from the inside and press the clay on the outside like at the same time. So my inside hand presses and my outside hand presses together. And really I'm just trying to make that wall smaller. You may need to open it up a little bit, but again, when you're doing that, you want to try to maintain the curve. So later you're going to see that I actually do end up needing to open the wall up a little bit more to get that edge a little bit closer to the outside. But right now I'm just thinning out the wall. I'm trying to pull up the clay on the outside and I'll use my sponge for this. It helps me to make sure that I don't lose a lot of that clay. But even still, as I'm pulling up, some clay is lost and that's okay. I'll just take it off, put it aside. Here you can see I needed to get the pot a little bit wider. So I had to open up the bottom and I used both hands and I'm trying to maintain that curve along the inside as much as possible. Again, the wider the base, the wider your bowl can be. So if you can make your puck a little bit wider, it'll make it easier to get a wider bowl, but you'll have to trim out a lot later on. Okay, so now the bowl is the right width and I can just focus on pulling the walls up. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to focus on making the walls taller. What I'm going to do is I'm going to use my knuckles here for a couple of the bigger pulls. So remember that you can pull with your knuckles, you can pull with your palm. It's all generally the same movement. You're forcing the clay up, you're making a notch, and then you're forcing the clay to go up. So here you'll see me pulling the walls up and I'm beginning to pull and shape at the same time. But I'm going to leave a good chunk of clay at the top because I know that as I stretch this out, that rim is going to get thinner and it's going to not want to hold up under the stretching. So I'll leave a bunch of clay at the top and I'll begin to shape it out into the direction that I want. So I'm pulling and shaping kind of at the same time. Once the bowl has reached the general size that I want, I'm going to take my metal rib and run it across the bottom and inside the bowl to compress the bottom. But also to continue that curve, to try to get a continuous curve across the bottom and on the inside. Again, later, if you really mess this up, you can trim out the inside. It's okay. You'll see that it's a little bit off-center here. And again, that's okay. You can always trim it out a little bit later and what we'll try and do is pull it to make it a little bit more centered. And that's pretty much it. So you'll cut this off. I usually cut them off by twisting the wheel or spinning the wheel as I pull the wire through. It makes it a little bit easier to cut it off and then you lift it away and you're done. So thanks for watching. If you like this video, give it a thumbs up. Also, if you like this video, you'll probably like these ones too. Have an awesome day. I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.