Hand-Build a Textured Platter with clay slabs (Handbuilding Pottery Tutorial)

Hi guys, welcome to this week's video where I show you how to make this platter from flat laps of clay. Now before I start I just want to say thank you so much. I had posted a video on my Instagram with snippets of the process and I've had so many of you reach out to me with such lovely comments so thank you so much for all your love and support. And in those comments I had a lot of questions that kept coming up over and over again so I thought I'll address three most frequently asked questions right here right now. Question number one, can I buy this platter? Yes, you can buy this platter. I have it available in a couple of different colors. All the details on how to purchase will be linked in the description below. Question number two, can we use air dry clay? Yes, you can use any clay for this project. The only thing you have to remember is with air dry clay and with oven baked clay. Basically any clay which is not fired in a kiln. Those clays will not be suitable for food use and for holding liquids. That's the only thing you have to remember. You can make this platter and use it as a little catch-all tray you know in your entryway table. You can use it as a jewelry holder on your vanity desk. You can use this for holding your kitchen towels you know on your kitchen countertops. So you can use it for a lot of different things. The only thing you can't use it is for food and liquids. You can see air dry clay and oven baked clay with acrylics and a coat of varnish but again they will still not be suitable for food use and for liquids. That's the only thing you have to remember. You can use it for any decorative purposes and that's completely all right. And if you want to know more about different kinds of clays, I do have a freebie which has a lot more detail about clays. You can find it again linked in the description below. Question number three. I love this platter, how can I make it? So here's a video showing you the entire process on how to make this platter. Hope you enjoy it. Now let's get started. As usual we start with a slab of clay. This is rolled to a quarter of an inch thickness and that's the thickness I would like to keep for you know something like a platter because especially when you're making a bigger piece it makes sense to have a little bit of weight to the piece and also just helps with keeping it like warp less, crack less. I think it just adds to that and not thinning down though when we add the texture it is going to thin it down a tiny bit which is all right. This is recycled clay you'll be seeing some of these air pockets here. Don't worry about them you will see how a lot of them you can get rid of just with the compression. They come to the surface and you can get rid of them if it really bothers you. Take a little wire tool. I like to use this guy which is boring. Just take this and go over the spots where you see them then again compress with the drill jib. That is done. I'll be using this template that I got from I think Plum Island Transfers. They have these templates and a bunch of other templates as well. Of course they have tissue transfers and you know newsprint transfers but this is what I bought from them and it's a beautiful template. You can make a lot of template by yourself. Even something like this can be made at home but if you want to get one that's where I got them. I think I'm going to just mark out where I need to add my texture. That's it. Once I do that I'll bring in my whirling pin. This is one of my favorite pins from Algis Crafts. I'm going to just use this one and this will actually cover the width of the entire platter. It's just going in slightly off the edge. Now my clay is pretty soft so it tends to stick to the roller. That's to be expected. There you go. Now with some of the rollers you might find that they have these really fine little marks. So what I do is I just take a damp sponge and quickly just go over them. That takes care of those little fine marks if they bother you. Clearly they bother me. So I just take a very lightly damp sponge and just go over them quickly and that's taken care. Doesn't even take like two minutes and that's sorted. But I love this particular texture. One of my favorites. They do have a lot of amazing designs and their rollers are pretty reasonably priced. I also have a code with them. I'll be listing all of that in the description below. So what I'm doing is I am releasing my clay like this because I want to make sure that it covers this template. If I release it you know this way that's going to stretch it stretch the clay in this direction. If I release it this way it's going to stretch the clay in this direction. So that's why I intentionally release the clay in this direction. Always release your clay bottom line because you don't want to cut out your template while the clay is stuck to the board because then it's difficult to peel off. So I'm just placing it here. This looks good and I'll just start cutting on the edge. Hold on to your template, the foam template and then with a needle tool or a clay knife. I like to use a needle tool because I don't really have a proper clay knife. I use an exacto tool and that sometimes tends to be a little too sharp for the clay. It's just a little difficult to control sometimes. So to make this kind of cuts I just use my needle tool all the way here. Then release cut. We may add a footring so I'm going to save the sides to use later. Okay I'll put this under a piece of plastic so it doesn't dry out. Now what I'm going to do is move this onto a different board so it's easy to move the slab around. I'll bring another workboard, lift my clay slab. Oops it's already stuck. So that's why if you don't release the clay it'll get stuck onto the board and then when you try to release it, it'll end up you know making those dents in the side. Okay now here's our clay. Before I do anything else I'm going to take again my damp sponge, squeeze it nicely and then just go over the edges once. Take care of those. It's a good idea to just go over the edges once. It takes the edge off, it cleans up. You know if there are any clay clumps there, takes care of those. So all of that is taken care of when you do this. Okay you can use this with your hands also. Do this with your hands. So I'm just slightly softening the edge here. It's part of the finishing which we start at the beginning. The next step is to place your pottery form and find the center. This takes some time so take your time because you don't want a wonky one. I mean it's handmade you can have a wonky one but yeah I like to have it as uniform as possible. So I'm going to just take a couple of minutes here. I'm just kind of you know eyeballing it, not using any special tools to measure this. Just eyeballing it, turning it around to see if the two sides are more or less lined up. So I just kind of turn it around see from all the sides if it looks centered. Okay once that happens then I'm going to bring in another board now and place this on top of this. Lift the two, hold them tightly and then flip which I'm doing slightly off camera because I didn't want the camera to be knocked off. Okay once you do that then make sure that your clay is released before you pull this board away. So that's how this looks. Next I'm going to lightly first press it. I would lightly press around the edge, not too much because I don't like the sharp edge too much but just press it around very lightly. Then I'm going to bring in my banding wheel. I have this tiny one. Take the red rib from Cheryl Mattu and then I start at the base, clean this off. If you want you can add your signature or whatever here. And then what I'm going to do is very lightly I'm going to start here by pressing the base. I'm bringing the base in. If you see I'm pressing this in. Instead of pressing it down like this I'm pressing this in like this. This is to ensure that there's no stress on the edge here. Another thing that you can do, an alternative to you know to make sure that you don't get the edge is to add a thin foam something like this on top of this. This helps with a more smoother transition on the side rather than that harsh one. But now I think TR43 foams has certain foams which come with a softer transition. So I'm just right now with my fingers just kind of pulling the clay in but at the same time making sure this is sitting flat on the board. That's the other thing. So one you're pulling it here bringing it close to the form so that it finds its shape there and then pressing it down at the same time to make sure that it conforms to that shape. Then I'm finding the rim there basically and then pressing against that rim. I first start with pulling the clay in so that it's not pulling it from the top and then once I find that once I do that then I start finding the rim and pressing against the rim. That's the idea here. You go around doing that a just around here making sure it conforms to this and then again with my finger I'm just going around the rim here to make sure that my clay is sitting flat against it. Right once that is done then what I'm going to do is just clean off the edge here as well the rim like we did in the front to make sure it's nice and clean without any sharp edges. A little bit of cleanup here so that you know later it becomes a little easier. This is one of the things I spend some time on is my edges. I don't like sharp edges. I like nice smooth edges so I do spend some time there. Also where I see you know some sharp cuts angles I just take a few seconds there to make sure they're all nicely clean and softened. All right so we let this sit now once we are happy with the way this looks I'm going to go around one more time just to feel everything looks okay. I'm going to let this sit here on top of this mold for some time because this has this little bit of an overhang we want it to set up before we pull it away. Now don't let it dry all the way it just has to set up the clay. The clay has to stiffen up a bit before we pull it away because we want these things to stay where they are the sides to stay where they are instead of just you know flopping back as soon as you remove them. So yeah that's going to stay and then I'll see you once it's ready to flip. Time to bring in our platter. It has had some time to set up and I can see that if the sides are slightly you know lifting from the side not entirely but a little bit. This isn't that leather hard yet but it's close so what I'm going to do is try and flip this over and see if that works. So I'll bring in another board now if you want to add a foot ring to this you can. Okay I want to add my signature so now what I do sometimes is if I have missed my signature instead of putting a stamp here I'll just add this on the side somewhere so that it's still there and I just take this because whenever I do this it is going to kind of push on the texture on the inside. All right so I've done this I'll bring another board place it flip it over put this out the way. So that's our platter now it's sitting quite snugly inside what I'm going to do is slightly peel it away from the form so that we can take it out otherwise it will be difficult so just release the form slightly lightly I'm just peeling it away okay that's what I'm doing just pushing it pulling it away from the form so that gives a little bit of room to move then two sides here and pull. So that's our platter and I think that looks really good it's centered has a nice rim everything looks good with this nothing there doesn't seem to be any issue I'm going to just clean up the edges damp sponge clean it off and then go over and clean off the edges. Yes we do do this a couple of times in our process because we pressed when it was lying upside down it forms a little bit of an edge in the front so you just clean that off and you'll see a little bit of the texture has also gone from the sides that's okay because you're pressing it down that happened sometimes it happens sometimes it doesn't really you know do this so it will depend on how much pressure you put clearly I added a little bit too much pressure so I'm just cleaning this all off making sure the rim is nicely cleaned up and all these sharp edges are also taken care of sharp angles actually are kind of taken care of that looks good all right okay so that's my platter now that I have the platter all ready what I'm going to do is I'm going to cover it with a sheet of plastic and weigh it down with something on top and let it dry very very slowly I'll usually use either my glaze bottles or some other pieces from us to keep the platter flat and I will let it sit under plastic for about a week and I will keep checking on it every day just to make sure there's no moisture being accumulated in any part of the plastic and things are drying nicely and evenly that's important to make sure that the platter doesn't warp and also during the week I will let the platter breathe a little bit where I will let it dry without the plastic for some time every day like a little bit you know 15-20 minutes without the plastic so it dries as well and then about after a week I think it should come down to close to bone dry and at that stage I will remove the plastic and still keep it weighed down with again glaze bottles or other pieces from the studio and I let it dry without plastic for a couple of more days and once only once it's completely bone dry will this go into the kiln for bisque firing now bisque firing different clays will have different temperatures this is a cone 5-6 clay so for this I bisque it at 950 degrees celsius and once it's bisque then we glaze and finally do the glaze firing I will probably record the process and share it with you but that's all we have in our class today hope you enjoyed this one I'll see you next week