Finishing Pinch Pots

Let's start with seeing how these are. Now, remember, I covered these up, worked on them, covered them up, and now, oh, they're perfect. It's a nice leather heart. See, I can still bend it a little bit. I can put my fingernail into it. Now, I can add to it. I can add handles. I can add feet. I can carve it very easily. It's at a really nice stage. I can finish them. See, this one's really firm, too. This is just right. Now, remember, if you're not going to be working on it, cover it up. And if you cover it up on a board, the board will suck the water out, so it'll dry on the board, even under plastic. If you want to stop it from drying at all for a while, wrap it all the way around, and it'll be good to go the next time you come back. I have my two pinch pots. They're rather hard. I have to decide what to do with them. So, at this point, I think I'll do some cleanup first, and then I'll add feet. Now, remember, you can put more than one together. I could do something like that. Attach these. All kinds of possibilities. So, I'm just going to clean this one up right now. So, at this point, it's leather hard. I can still bend it a little bit without it cracking. I can smooth it out. So, the way to smooth it out is to take a rib and scrape it, and go in opposite directions. Now, you could also speed things up. If you have things like I have on this side with texture, and I don't want that texture anymore, I can take a toothy rib, a rib that has a serrated edge, almost like a saw, and go over it with that. And you go in opposite directions, back and forth and back and forth, changing the direction every so often. Then you go to the smooth rib and scrape it, and by going in opposite directions, it levels the surface out. You go just in one direction, your tool will just follow the form. You can see you can do it that way. There are other tools. This is a tool that you can get at the hardware store. This is called a Sureform, and it's like a cheese grater, and it cleans things up really quickly. It just grates that clay off. Say you wanted a really flat surface, this is the way to do it. And I'm going cross-section again, back and forth, back and forth. Now, if you ask Jose, I believe he has a few of these at school that he could loan to you. If you really want flat surfaces, this is a nice quick way to do it. Now, remember, don't forget the bottom of the pot. This needs to be flat. If you're not going to put anything, like adding a foot, so I can either use this Sureform, you can use the flat rib, just going opposite directions. Another tool you can use is a credit card. That works really well. It's a little smoother than the metal rib, and it's good for the next stage if you want to really smooth it out. Remember, at this stage, you can turn it over, turn it around. You don't have to hold it in your hands the whole time. Notice I haven't added any water. Remember what I said last time, that sure, add water, but take it away, because the water will tend to take away the clay and leave just the grime that's in the clay. Not to mention, if you really saturate the clay and get it really super soft, it'll weaken the clay. It's just kind of a beginning. It's all crooked. It's not crooked. You can also paddle the clay at this point too. And you'll find it will be a little bit different, if not a little bit better than when it was plastic. Get it into shape. Now that top edge leaves quite a bit to be desired. See, it's kind of a regular. It doesn't have a regular shape. A couple good tools to trim would be the fettling knife. And remember, you can always use these as a scraper too. I'm keeping this clay. Why not use it again? Until it's fired, you can use clay over and over and over again. Now there's another tool, an X-Acto knife, any sharp knife. Say I wanted to change the shape a little bit on the top. You can cut it out. That just cuts like a nice piece of cheese right now. Water. Say I wanted to use a little water. That's okay. Use a little bit of water and go over it. And when you go over it, what happens is it takes the clay away. And you can see as I rub it, there's the clay on the surface. And those little black spots are little tiny pieces of grog. After you've done that, come back and smooth it out with your rib. It's almost like buttering it. Now I just created a little bit of slip. Not much, just a little bit. And that's what you use as glue to stick pieces together. And the slip a little bit goes a long way. It's just to soften up those two pieces. And it's good for attaching things. Ways you can make slip. One simple way to make some slip. Get a ball of clay. Get your bowl in it. Put some water in it. And stir it up. And you can see the longer I do this, I'm getting some slip. The white liquid clay, that's slip. One way. One way that you can't make slip is just to try to take plastic clay and put it in water. Because what it does is it just softens it. If you want to soften that clay, that's a good way to do it. You put it in there, leave it for a while, and it'll gradually, like a very, very dense sponge, soften. You can see it's not slip right now. It's still plastic clay. The best way to make slip is to get some clay, some trimmings like I've got here, and let them dry. So I've let some clay dry here. I could just put this right into the water and it turns into slip. If I want to speed it up, all I need to do is grind it up into smaller particles and it'll become slip faster. Take that. Get some clear water. Pour it in. Leave it alone. In a short time, that clay absorbs the water. You pour off the excess water and you'll have slip. Now, I have these trimmings that I just made, little pieces of clay, and they haven't lost their moisture yet. With these, I can make these plastic clay again. And you can do this when you get on the potter's wheel and want to start trimming. You've got clay that isn't dry yet. Just take a little water, squeeze it on there, get that together, almost like you're working dough. All those little pieces together. Don't squeeze them really hard. And then you can just dip it, squeeze it out, work it a little. And I've got slip all over my hands and I've got a very nice soft piece of clay here. So now, I just have to wait on that. Give it a little while, 20 minutes, an hour, and this will become plastic clay again. I've got this piece. Sits down pretty flat on the table. I'm going to turn it over and add a foot. A foot is an addition. You could carve in. If you have it totally flat like this, make sure you push in so that middle part is a little bit lower so it sits flat on the table when you're done. So let me show you a few feet. A really simple one would be a coil. That's a square piece, but say you were doing a round bowl. Roll out a coil and cut it. And you can try things. You don't have to commit yourself to this. So a way to try it is to temporarily stick it on. Just a little bit of water. Push it gently. You can look and see how it looks. So there it is on that foot. You can take this foot, attach it, and then modify it. So to attach it, what you need to do is get your needle tool and draw around. I'm going to put a square foot on this one. Let's make four little pieces because it is a squared off piece. So I want to put this on. Putting it on like this, it holds for now, but as soon as it dries, it's going to come apart. So what you want to do is scratch the piece. Take these pieces off and scratch it. Really scratch deep. It's called scoring. Then you add just a little bit of water and scratch it again. Do it in opposite directions. See, I'm kind of developing a slip on the surface here. So then I'm going to do that to this piece. Stamp it a little bit. Put it on. Stamp it a little bit. Now, if you get tired of doing it this way, you may be lucky enough to have one of these toothy ribs. See, it's got teeth on it. So instead of going scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch, just go scratch, scratch. That's one. Scratch, scratch. A little water. Last piece. Scratch, scratch. A little water. It's always good to do it twice. I did it once. Do it again. It develops that slip. Now, when you put it on, just placing it there, it may come off. And this goes for anything you add. Say you wanted to add little balls of clay to the surface. If you want to put that on that surface, it's called a sprig. That's an attachment to the surface. Make sure you always scratch it first. Scratch it and score it and squish it on. I'm going to tap this a little bit. See how that looks. It's a little bit better. Now I can change it a bit. Now, as you're working, it's always good to work on a movable surface. So I've got it on a little board now. And then with a stick and just clean up those edges. Look at it again. Much better. It's flat on the surface. You may want to have the sides of the feet flat to relate to it nicely. Score, create slip, and attach. Now you can also, I'm going to make a lip for this. Here's a nice piece. You know it's good for working if you can take it, roll it into a coil, and bend it, and it doesn't crack. Put a couple of these pieces together. Roll the coil. And I'm going to put this on the top. That's enough. Okay. It's round right now. It's a flat form. You can squish it down. Or you can roll it down. Visualize a larger rolling pin. This is called a pony roller. It's a small rolling pin. Okay. Now this one, I'm going to use that new slip that I made. Now look. The water is on the top. The slip is at the bottom. So what I need to do is just pour off that water. And then down in the bottom is a perfect slip. Scratch it. Also known as scoring. All the way across here. And this time, instead of trying to create slip on the piece, I'm going to take some of the slip I just made. See, it's almost like a, it's creamy, almost like a milkshake. Or some people say peanut butter consistency is good. Put some of that on there. And I always scratch it again to work it in. Because remember, this is leather hard. The piece I'm adding is soft. And this will be the transition where it actually will attach. There. Okay. Place them. Paddle them into place. Really push them down. Now these ends I can just blend down. One thing about clay is it can look very, very hard after it's fired. And it's hard to maintain that softness, that plastic quality that clay has when you're working it. So by doing this, I'm trying to keep it looking a little bit on the soft side. Kind of a formal thing going on here. And remember, you know, at this point, you know, I could add handles to it. All kinds of things. And you can play around, and if you don't like it, just take it off. You can add texture to it. That's up to you. So I want you to be creative. I want you to explore different shapes. They can be wide, they can be narrow, they can have a wide lip, they can have attachments, they can have attached feet. Lots and lots of possibilities. Just have some fun with it. Now before I stop, I've got this harder clay that it's this piece, I bend it and it cracks. It's not plastic anymore. So what you can do, I could drop it in a bucket of water and it absorbs it really, really, really slowly. Takes forever. Doesn't work well. I could take a spray bottle, mist it. Same thing. You're just getting the surface wet. You're not going to soften the clay. If you have a hard piece, if you have a piece that you really don't like, that you want to break, or it's gotten too hard, this works. Even if it's gotten to the point where you can't bend it anymore, you can't add to it, you want to soften it up. Because remember, you never want to put plastic clay on dry clay, on clay that's bone bone dry. So what you do to soften it up, I'm going to keep this just the way it is and finish it off, is get a nasty old towel, dip it in some water, and just wrap your clay in it, and wrap it up in some plastic, and just leave it overnight. That is the best way to soften clay up and bring it back to being plastic again. It's good for small quantities like this. It works really, really well. Now all the rest of your pieces, if you've got little scraps, make sure you ball them up. If they're still plastic, you can bend them and put them back in your bag.