Handmade clay patterned square tray or plate

Hello everyone, this is Laura Hanley here inside my Muddy Paws pottery shop in Summit, New Jersey. Today I'm going to show you my first hand building project. Hello, this is me, but you'll just see the clay from now on. And the first project that I will be showing you is a textured square footed tray. It can also be used for tapas, it could be used for soap, it could be used for just about anything. So I've created a nice work space for myself. I'm going to put this towel on top of my legs to keep the dust away. I have my large work board poly backed so that the water doesn't go through and warp the board that it's attached to. The supplies we'll need today to make our square tray is some sort of bowl. It can be paper, plastic, ceramic, anything you want it to be. A little bit of saran wrap, a roller, this large side of this double-sided roller will work. Our needle tool, a sponge, some water nearby, texture. It can be leaves, it can be stamps, it can be the back of a rug pad. I love to use lace so we're using lace today. And our clay. I also have a little bit of slip here. Slip is just some gushy clay mixed with white vinegar or water to help pieces stick. So here we go. So the first thing we're going to do is roll out some clay. Slab work is my favorite way to make a hand building project. So most of my projects will be made with slabs but we'll add in some coil and pinch pops in my upcoming hand building videos as well. So if you have a wire tool you can cut some clay about a pound and a half with your wire tool. And I say pound and a half, I'm using a pound and a half to make a quarter inch thick five by five inch square. You can use more if you want to make a bigger square tray or less if you want to make a smaller square tray. With my unused clay what I want to do is take this and wrap it very very tightly so it stays nice and moist for the next time I use it. If you don't have a wire tool just grab some clay with your hands. Let's just pretend I grabbed this clay here okay. Put it down, start pounding it on your tray, flip it, pound it some more, flip it, pound it some more. Get it as flat as you can with your fist making uniform thickness. Then we're going to start to roll. When we roll we want to roll up at the end instead of down so our clay slab is a uniform thickness. We can flip it, roll some more, flip it, roll some more. If you have a large rolling pin, same idea. Roll up at the end, roll, roll. We want to see how thick our slab is. We can do a little cut off the side with our needle tool. Set this aside for later use. So this is about a quarter inch thick so I think I'll stop right here. Add your texture down. I don't want my lace to cover my entire square so I'm putting it off to the side a little bit. I'll take my roller again, roll it in flush. I want to see all of this lace pattern. So this is flush against the clay. I'll peel it off and then take my square template that I've just cut from random paper I have in the house, you know. Cut the square out. You notice I'm taking these little bits of clay off the needle tool every time I cut. It just makes a nice cleaner cut. You can take your extra scraps aside, put them in a pile or put them back in that tightly packed plastic bag that your clay is all staying moist in. Peel off my template. Then I'll take my sponge or just my finger, just a little bit of water. Whenever you're working with clay you need to use your water very sparingly. Just want to clean up these edges a little bit. I want them nice and smooth because I want my finished piece to be nice and smooth. By taking those little bits of clay off your needle tool while you're cutting it makes a nice cleaner cut so this is much easier. I'm going to do the back side too so I'm going to gently lift this up and just gently smooth out these sides a little bit. I want to avoid smoothing the top of this slab because this will be the bottom and I also don't want to smooth it too hard here. I don't want to do this because I don't want to smash out that beautiful lace pattern on the other side. So we'll flip this again, put this aside. We'll get our paper bowl and I've determined the 5 by 5 inch square to use with this bowl because I knew ahead of time that this would fit in quite nicely. The saran wrap will prevent my clay from sticking to the bowl and also look at this I can move it around just in case I didn't put it right in the middle. I want this to be right in the middle. So I'll take this, I'll set it aside until tomorrow or I can put it in a sunny window, I can put it outside in the sun, I can put it in front of a fan just to firm this up until it gets to the leather hard stage which means it's not bendable anymore but it's also not completely dry. So let's set this aside and what do you know handy dandy I have this here because I made this one yesterday and it's already dry to what I call the leather hard stage. Now gently take it out, set this aside. I'll turn this upside down. I'll gently put it over here for a little bit. I'm going to take some of those clay straps and roll a coil. Coils can be hard to roll they sort of get a little flat so you kind of have to get a hang of it where it's thick just do this. Coils can be made to any thickness so I want to add four feet to the bottom of this tray and I want the feet to be the same size so I'm going to measure as I cut these. Set the scraps aside or put them wrapped in my bag. You can spend a lot of time making this look perfect. Then decide where I'll place these feet. So let's see I need it to be a circle about the size of a dime or so so I can put these here. Measure where I want them before I make my scratch marks. Just tracing around this to get a little bit of a guide and removing them and what I'll do is I'll scratch not too deep so I'm going all the way through that wouldn't be good and then also not so shallow that it's like chicken scratch. I just want enough for my slip to stick with too. Okay what I'll do is open up my slip here which is just gushy clay mixed with vinegar and water. Add some on here add some add some you want to have enough so that it has a good stick. I'll place these on it's been a lot of time getting these to look real perfect. This on here it's not done yet almost so I can take my finger or my sponge try and get that excess slop out a little bit now a little bit later then what I want to do is flip this over very gently give it a little push just a little push so the gushy clay smashes down and the bottom of my feet are nice and level. See that? Okay flip it again so they're on there now now I can just work with this make sure that's nice and even get the excess excess clay out bada bing bada boom you can do this with any size square you can do it with circles any shape you want then I like to let my trays dry and I will clean this up a little bit more anyways you can spend a lot of time cleaning this up if you want to you can sign your name on it I'll put a little LH for Laura Hanley and then you can let it dry like this nice and level another finished piece another finished piece you can find your work boards and a lot of equipment at my website madewithclay.net or on my Etsy shop called Muddy Paws Pottery Shop thank you and have fun with clay I look forward to seeing you in my next hand building video