Throwing, Trimming, and Finishing a Faceted Stretched Cup with a Stained Clay

Please check out my other video on how I prepared the hunks of clay in order to ready them for throwing with the two different colors of clay with the stained clay body. And now I want to show you how to create a faceted and stretched marbled clay form. This is a little cup that I made. I want to show you how to facet this. I have already shown another video on my channel on non-marbled clay of how to create a faceted cup like this, but this is really quite fun for the stained marbled clay. So I'm going to go ahead and do that. If you hear an on and off sound in the background, I do apologize. It's my kiln. I have it preheating for firing right now, so it's cycling on and off. I'm not going to explain in detail the steps of throwing, but please look at my videos on my channel if you would like to see a step-by-step video on throwing cups. Here I've sped up the centering process. Again, you can check one of my other videos for a step-by-step explanation of all these processes to understand it fully. When throwing a faceted form like in this video, I leave the wall much thicker than normally because I'm going to cut the facets while the clay is still in the plastic stage, while it's here on the wheel, and I want to have it thick enough that you don't just inadvertently cut right through the wall. So the rim part I go ahead and thin because I'm not faceting the rim, and I'm also going to just trim that a little bit more level, and I try to make sure that the bottom part of the wall is straight, and I'm going to remove a little bit of slip here. Okay, now before I cut the facets, I'm going to trim a little of the excess clay This makes the faceting part a little bit easier. And then I'm going to use my cut-off wire, but I'm going to just wipe it off first. Now I start a facet. I'll do it over here so you can see it. I start it at the beginning of the thick part of the wall and go straight down. And if it gets stuck like that, you can carefully poke it and take it off. So occasionally when I make a cup like this, I actually throw the wall a little too thin, and I might cut through it. When you're used to throwing thin, it really takes a lot of concentration. Remember to make that wall thicker so you can facet it. It's like the whole muscle memory thing just kicks in, and you do it out of habit. That one's not very even. Okay, now that I have it faceted, I'm going to attempt to stretch it from the inside, and this is kind of the moment of truth. If I've gone a little too thin, I could poke through. So without touching it on the exterior at all, I'm just trying to stretch it from the inside, making sure that I have plenty of water. Just to round out that belly a little bit. And this is really the mug that's going to be the hardest to scrape away anything on the inside. The irregularity of the facets make it fairly difficult to scrape, but I'll reach down there far as I can without damaging the wall. And I'm also using a softer rib this time instead of the metal rib to hopefully create a little less damage. And I'm going to go back to the metal rib here on the exterior. And then lastly, I'll try to finish off the rim by scraping away the surface. So okay, so now I have my mug faceted. I will let it dry. And then I'll be trimming the bottom, and I'll take off some of the awkward thickness that's present on there that you can see right now. This is the faceted marbled cup that I threw, and I'm ready to trim. I have quite a bit of weight down here. I am trimming on my Giffin Grip, and whenever you have something that's faceted, you have to make sure that it really is indeed centered, because sometimes the facets can throw it off a little bit. That looks pretty good. And just like trimming anything, I'm going to start by trimming the outside of the foot first, going straight down. I'm going to go ahead and get my wheel started. It's a little noisy. So the placement of the outside of the foot is corresponding to the angle change which happens on the interior of the cup. And this is where it gets a little bit thick, because we have the faceting. So usually what I do here is I just angle this up a little bit. I have another video on throwing and trimming a non-marbled faceted cup as well, if you would like to see that. Once I have trimmed the exterior of the foot, I'm going to trim the interior of the cup. So again, straight down from the top, and if they are straight down, then your two lines should remain parallel, and your foot should remain even. And lastly, I'm going to take my finger and compress the very bottom edge of the foot, because I want to make sure that I don't have anything rough, like brawl, which will scratch my table. So I just compress that back in there. Let's take a look. There we go. I feel like I have my excess clay off, and now it's ready for a handle. I'm going to prepare some handles for the cups that I've thrown, and I am going to just take a little bit of the blue clay, the stained blue clay, marble it slightly by wedging it together, and then I'm going to roll handles just like I normally would. I'm going to make tapered coils that are sort of like a carrot, and here I'm just trying to speed up the process of making the handles, the carrot-shaped handles. Now, when I make a handle, I will use a sponge and water, and that is going to make my handle a little bit muddy, but then I'll have to clean it up later. So I compress the top, and I'm going to use some water, dip my fingers in water, and I'm going to pull it. So this is kind of a fake pulled handle. There we go, and I will be cleaning that up and getting rid of some of the messier look of it. I'll put this on a wear board. I position it in the curve that I want, smack it down, compress, and again, all that water does kind of smudge up the marble effect, but I will scrape it later. And once again, I'm just trying to speed up this process. I toss down the carrot shape, compress it with the sponge, then I lift it and kind of stretch it with wet fingers to thin it and shape it a little bit better, and then I arch it and put it on a wear board to get leather hard. And here's my wear board with handles. I have my trimmed cup that I fastened with cut-off wire, and I have my handle, which I have made and allowed to get leather hard, and I will be scraping this handle to reveal the marble clay. You can see right there, the clay is very marbled, but on the exterior, it looks pretty muddy because I ended up having to use my sponge. Now, I'm going to go ahead and attach this handle, and they are the same moisture. I'm going to get this handle attached, and then I'm going to be scraping this, so I'm going to reveal the different layers of the clay underneath. And lastly, I'm just kind of going through this process rather quickly of attaching the handle, slipping and scoring. Here, I'm adding a very small coil for support above the handle, and then I'm blending it with a little wooden tool, and then on the interior of the bottom of the handle, I'm also blending it, and then I will be cleaning it. You can see here I'm scraping the exterior slip to reveal the striations and the layers of the clay.