Throwing a Yarn Bowl

Today I'm going to be throwing yarn bowls which are something I've only done a couple of times before generally as special requests and then the other part of that is that the reason I'm going to be throwing them is that I'm doing a different way of selling this weekend. So on Sunday night I've got a handful of products in predominantly this glaze and the Borealis chrome titanium glaze, a dark clay and then floating green over the top. It's a nice way of selling because normally what I have is I have my designs set up and established and then it's a bit of a pain to add new products because I've got to work out exactly how they're going to be. Whereas doing a shop update which is how most potters do it the rest of the time anyway, I can just make one off so I've got a couple of these one-offs and they're looking like they're going to be one of the more popular designs so this glaze is particularly nice with it. So I'm going to throw some more obviously for the next shop update. So these are basically, I throw them as cereal bowls and then I'll do a second part to this video following up but the trick that I have learned with these to stop them warping you carve everything out but leave a bridge in across there and I'll film a video when I cut the ones I'm about to throw to show you exactly what I mean. But there's a trick that seems to work reasonably well on the few that I've done. So if there's any, if you want to check out the limited edition pieces that I'm putting up tomorrow I will put a link below. Mostly mugs, a couple of bowls, just sort of experiments with the new glazes mostly and then a few pieces that don't have a home anywhere else they've gone in it and the idea is that they're there but Mark just sold out at the moment and then there might be a better way of doing this but square space, there are a couple of clever things you can do with square space and then a couple of things which are a real pain. So the easiest way I can see of doing a wider shop update is you export products to CSV which allows you to adjust the visibility and quantity and what that means is you can set, you can really easily set the products as visible but with no stock which is how they currently are so they're sold out and then tomorrow what I can do is I can set the visibility to invisible and the stock to one so there's one of everything but no one can see them and then when it comes around to the time to do the shop update which is going to be 7pm British summer time and I'll post what that is in other time zones below because I can't remember off the top of my head but basically 7pm in the evening here then you can just upload a CSV in which you've changed the visibility back to visible so if you're using square space and you're trying to work out a good way to do it look into product editing the product CSVs in the meantime I'm going to see if I can come up with a better way of doing it. Clay is the white clay that I have I've been throwing in dark clay recently which is what those two pieces that I was showing were on and this was the bag that I think the last video I posted was me throwing a plant or a fruit bowl or something where it was a couple of kilos of clay and I was really having to fight it and it's doing the same thing here it's this bag is particularly stiff and I'll be glad to see the back of it it's not so bad with small pieces like this so as I can as far as I can tell with yarn bowls there's sort of a range of sizes and they happen to tie in fairly nicely with either my cereal bowls which are five to six inches diameter and maybe three high generally more like five inches diameter and three high and my small fruit bowls which are eight inches diameter and probably a similar sort of three four inches tall so depending on the size of the ball of yarn that seems to be a fairly standard range of sizes for them and I don't actually make any particular modifications at this stage I'll have to check all of this with some people who use them to make sure there's nothing I could do to improve it I think so long as there's a reasonably smooth curve to it as the balls the ball of yarn will unspool inside it you want to leave a reasonable amount of well get the walls even and then up to you but I try and leave a fat ish bead at the rim like you don't want to go to too sharp a point but also you don't want to leave it really heavy because once you cut through the rim it's not going to support it and then foot trimming tool and that is basically that and I'll come back tomorrow when it's dried a bit and so it's stiff enough to carve with a sharp scalp where you can carve it relatively dry but see the drier it is the greater the risk of something going wrong the wet clay will warp whereas dry clay will snap so you don't leave it too late but drier gives you crisper edges in a film the second part of this video tomorrow hopefully if not on Monday do the follow-up but I'm going to post this video today because by the time I get this up edited and up on YouTube it'll be about 24 hours before the shop update and if you want either of those bowls or any of the mugs in those glazes this time around then you probably need to be on the site at around that sort of time because I know there's been a few people waiting for those glazes so this batch will probably sell out fairly quickly I'll aim to get more up for the next one this is sort of an experiment to see what works best with product editing and picture editing and uploading and all that and I must say it is a lot more faff than the way that I'm used to selling because when you're editing every single product needs its own description and picture and check sizes and things like that versus just having a standard listing there's definitely a lot more pre-sale work in this way of doing it but they're nice to have people buy stuff that's ready to ship out rather than having an order come in and then I have to make it which is how I normally work and that has its upsides but the downside is you're always playing catch up so see how this goes and if you're watching this video within the first 24 hours you can probably head over to my website and see the stuff if you're watching it after 24 hours you probably can't but you might be able to see the next batch depending on how far in the future you are