Handle modifications that bring new life to old forms.

Good morning, it's Vaughan. It's January 5th in Nova Scotia, Canada at westcotebellpottery.ca. By the way, I'm just going to show you how I'm going to throw some tankards, some colanders, some chip and dip plates, and then I'm going to play with handles for this video. So we'll see where it goes, but happy new year and hope everything's starting well for you. Okay, this is the bat system from artisanpotterytools.com made by Bill Wright. So I'm starting off with some small, I think these are about four and a half inch discs wide, and I cut a 22 pound block of clay into 16 of these. So they're probably just under one and a half pounds in weight. So I'm just going to cone it up. For those of you beginners, round off your ball before you put it down. So yeah, round off the ball of clay before you put it down if you're a beginner, because I can press really hard on my clay and center even if it's a square at the beginning. But I always cone it up. And this is a new clay I'm trying out. It's 519S from Pottery Supply House. So it's basically the same 519 that I use already, which gives you a really good color response, because it's quite a white clay, but it's got some grog in it to give it a little extra tooth, which is supposedly for doing larger pieces. This isn't going to be one of the larger pieces, but I'm trying it out with a bunch of pieces to see what its plasticity is like, and how it throws, and how you bend when it bends into a handle, if the handle cracks, and stuff like that. Because you never know with a new clay how it will respond, so you need to test it. But it's throwing beautifully, so I've made several pieces with it already. So now I'm going to slow the wheel down just a touch, pull in a little bit just to get it narrower at the top. Just put a groove in so you can get the wire underneath later on. I don't actually wire these off, because these little bats are meant so you don't distort the piece. Dribble some water down the inside, and then I'm going to scrape off and shape the rib. This is a metal rib, so I'm barely out a touch, and start tapering in, and do the tankard rim, which is basically a double rim, and get the water out. Now this is a speckled grogged clay, and I don't usually do anything to the rims on my pots, because I use very smooth clay bodies, which don't leave any roughness on the rims. This is definitely going to have a rough rim if I don't do something with it. So this is where you would use a leather, and I made these. If you look back at my videos years ago, I showed you how to make these, and it's basically just a rubber band with an O at the end of two pieces of wood, and that compresses the clay down. What it basically does is the grit that's in the clay is forced deeper into the clay, so it brings the smooth stuff to the top. Then I maybe need a new rubber band on this, because they get a bit rough after a while. Rubber tends to dry out. There we go, so I don't have to cut through. I'll do that when they're a bit firmer, and just lift it off. Okay, this is a bigger bat. This one is probably about seven to eight inches across, and this is about a quarter of that. No, it's an eighth of that 22 pounds, so that means it's less than three pounds, but it's more than two and a half. Now I'm going to make a really big rim on these pieces, but they're really chip and dips. I'm going to rethink my chip and dip as well. I don't want to go too thin. I'm hoping that isn't too thin. I won't know until I lift up the piece. First time you throw something, it's always going to have maybe some, you know, little things you've done wrong, but my goal is to make a piece with a really big, deep rim so you can lay vegetables or crackers all on this rim. And grog clay is tricky. I'm not sure there's a lump in that clay too as I'm spinning around. It's not an air bubble, it's a piece of stiff clay by the feel of it. I feel bad for clay companies because it's like they do all that work to make this really beautiful, nice, consistent clay. And how do they stop just a bit of dry clay falling in from, you know, maybe the edge of the machine or something? So it's an impossible job to get perfect all the time. So thanks, you know, thanks to having clay companies in the first place because they make great clays and we don't have to dig them up ourselves. Imagine if you had to go to the side of the road or something and dig a bunch of holes in the ground to find some clay by a riverbed. That's how you got the word potholes because potters used to dig up the roads when they weren't paved, when they were just dirt tracks. Because they would often find the wheels of trucks would expose clay, not trucks, I mean carriages. I do that little rim there so you could hang these on the wall. So you basically have that undercut and I dry that whole edge out so that water doesn't continue to soften it after I take it off the wheel. But how low can I get this now before it starts to feel like it will give way? And that's trial and error thing. But maybe before I do it I should compress the rim because once it goes low it might be very vulnerable to collapsing once you compress it. I do need another different rubber band in that thing. You see that lump just there of hard clay. Now some clays collapse easier than others when you lower them down like this. So this is the first one so I'm going to be cautious on this. I don't want it to collapse. I'm also going to do something that shouldn't work. I'm going to make little balls to fit in the center of these or maybe just off center a little bit in the center area. And I'm going to not adhere them in the soft stage. I'm going to place them on the piece when they're glazed with lots of glaze on the underside of the ball and actually see whether it will stick in the firing. Because you know when we take pieces out of the kiln sometimes the glaze dribbles down the edge and they're solidly stuck to the kiln shell. Why can't that be a way of like the adhesive that holds the ball I thought. And I've always wondered like I should do that. I've never done it so this time I'm going to try doing it. There we go. Now there's a little bit. This is that rubber band. It's got a little rubber. It's cracking the rubber band and it's leaving a little edge from the cracking the rubber band. But that's pretty low for how low can I go. Now does it leave. Oh good it didn't leave a little divot because sometimes the vacuum caused by lifting it off the pin leaves a little divot in the clay. This did not do that. But there you go. So I'm going to put handles on these. That went down pretty low. Handles on these and a ball but it won't be stuck in the center. I'm going to let the glaze stick it in the center and we'll see whether it works. The other thing I'm going to do is make some small berry balls. Round it off. There we go. I don't think I'll cone this one. I'm throwing these on a smaller little bat that's maybe four inches across. There we go. So I'll make sure that I get right underneath there. And when you make a ball obviously you're widening out from the beginning. So you can pull you're already starting to widen in and out. So dig your fingers right in. Get a lump of clay above your fingertips on the outside and just lift that right up through the wall. There you go. Grab the water out. Metal rib. And on the outside you use the metal rib to lift that water off the surface and give yourself a nice shaping by curving the rib a little bit with your fingers. You can make it into a little curve. This will help you get that nice curve on the outside. And then I flare the top a little bit more than the curve of the ball to get a nice area. So if I wanted to I could make these without a handle. I want to do some with handles. You don't have to have a handle. It's a decorative element as well as a functional element. But that's why I decided to re-look at my handles to make sure that they were aesthetically pleasing. And I thought, you know, they're not always that safe. So let's try working on some new handle walls. And then just compress the rim again. But I will change this rubber band. It's actually getting quite dry. Give you a closer look at this. It's just a stick with two cutouts at the edge down there so that you can slip a rubber band through and then pull it over the body and actually tighten it up by looping it over several times. And then you leave enough so that you can curve. And you can make these many widths. You don't have to be... This is probably three eighths of an inch across here. But you can make them any width. And it acts like the leather basically. I made these probably four or five years ago in videos. Anyway, this is the colander ball. So we'll put some handles on that too. Okay, this piece is still movable. So basically it's at the position point in time where I could support... It will support itself. And I can actually attach a handle without doing any scoring. I just kind of wet the area. And I didn't lower the rim on this one. Sometimes I would lower the rim a little more. And I'm going to put a handle there. So I put this in the middle so that I can actually make sure they're completely opposite each other. And then wet it either side. Just this one little area where I'm going to wet them. And the ones I've got here are simply pulled handles. So I just pulled the handle that I would normally do for a coffee mug. And I'm going to slice this one about a centimeter and a half in and open it up. And you can actually kind of round it off at each point if you want to. You don't have to because you can do it with a paintbrush once you put it on. But if you round them off, you can kind of try and make them a little bit more symmetrical. And then this kind of handle is meant just to be just enough so you can grip it. And I'm not sure... And this is what I've done before. And I wasn't quite sure how much I like this handle. So I thought I'd start off by showing you this one, which is what I was feeling a little unhappy with. We change all the time as artists and so I'm always looking to see what I can do to make something a little nicer. So we just round it off again. Opened up. Remember it's wet underneath and above. So I can simply bend this. And then you've got to look before you really make it permanent to make sure you do have them opposite each other and they look kind of even. And because it's still pretty soft, I just have to now squeeze and make that thumbprint. And this I've done... I think I've even shown this in a video before. But you simply... What I like about it is that it shows how the handle has been made. And I've always liked when I make things... You know, you look at slip cast porcelain and stuff like that and you could probably find a seam if you wanted it. But I've always not liked it because it doesn't have a story to tell as well. Like how this handle was placed on. It just seems to grow out of the body of the piece. So I like it when you've got a handle that you can kind of see how my thumbprint is in there and do the same on the outside as well. This is now that gritty 519 robbed stoneware. So normally when I do handle attachments on pieces, I'll put a little piece of plastic cling film across the handle so that it can dry a little bit more slowly. But this is an experiment with this clay. I'm trying to see it. Does it have the ability? I'm still going to dry it slowly. But you know, is it shrinkage rate just not as much because of the grogginess in the clay? So you won't have to do all of the protection stuff with your clay as it dries. Because you can get cracks in handles up here and literally would snap here and bend. This water is evaporating and it's shrinking. And if it shrinks faster than the body of the pot, and then the pot shrinking as well, it's pulling on that handle, which is already shrunk. And so it just cracks it. Anyway, that's what I've done for handles in the past. Just on pieces like this. Now I'm going to throw some balls at some point. And like I said, we'll have another experiment going on here too. The berry ball, which this will be, we'll do the same again. And I've got, let's do this, make sure it's level. So there's the end of the handle. I'm going to flatten this off a little bit. See that one doesn't look quite like the other side. So let's just flatten, make them sort of even before I cut. Cut down the end. Depends on how far you want it to go down. You can, I say a centimetre, centimetre and a half is adequate. You can do a little bit further. I just slipped and it doesn't matter anyway, because I'm going to press them together. And that distracted me, so I need to wet it again a little bit. It's pretty soft already. Okay, so is that, that's pretty opposite. So same again, I'm just going to press to leave my thumbprints in. So you've got that feeling of these handles being applied separately and you've got the thumbprint and your thumbprint is there for now, next 10,000 years. Even if the piece gets broke in the throw nail landfill, your thumbprint will still be there. Might need to be quite vertical or hang down. Let's see if I can see it from the side. So it's a basic, you know, everyday handles on these pieces. They could be a little smaller. I think I maybe made these a little big, but they won't get knocked off easily, that's for sure. Okay, so what I've been doing, I wasn't talking while I was doing it, but is I have made handles now for a lot of pieces. As you can see, we've got pulled handles, which is a traditional way of doing it, and I've got the handle tools supplied by Bill Wright at artisanpropertytools.com, and I did those ones. And then this one I thought was a bit big, so I didn't do anymore, but this one I'm doing. I think that one, I don't know the name of that tool there, but basically this makes a nice handle, I think. And then I've done my traditional rope handle preface here. All I do to finish those off is just thin out the center, and this is using that 519S, which is a speckle. And then I just do this sort of rope effect by rolling like that. And then because this clay is a little bit groggy, I'm just going to wet it down a bit, because I don't want it to dry, because when I bend that, most crease lines might make it crack. And I pre-wet my board here so that the handles won't dry out much while I'm preparing everything. But it is just a matter of thin out the heel of your hand a little bit, to get the two thicker areas, and then doing a little texture by rolling the edge of a rounded off corner on the actual clay. I'm just going to trim off. Oh, and I also made these different lengths, because I'm not sure what length I will need yet. This is the one I did last night, just to put the handles on before I went home. And it's now fairly dry, so that it's actually hard to pull the wire through. So my damper cover kept it moist a little bit, but it's dry enough so I can lift it off the bat without it warping. So these handles look like they've dried fine, and the rim is pretty dry as well now. So my guess is it's okay to let this dry naturally. There's no flexibility in the clay at all at this point. This is the very ball that I did last night, putting the handles on before I went home. And I felt like the handles were a little heavy on this one, which is why this morning I did some smaller to try and... And as you can see, these are actually, you know, pretty leather hard now, and the handles have not cracked. So I didn't wrap in plastic and left them in my damp cover, so that slows them down in itself. But the one thing I don't like about doing handles on these is you can't sit them upside down to trim. So the rim dries out faster than the foot, so you've got to be careful. That's why I have a damp cover, at least it dries it slowly. But these are ready to trim. So these are the pieces I did put in the cupboard last night without handles, and the rims are drying out a little bit, so I'm going to wet the rim down a little bit. So I'll be doing this to each piece as I take it out of the cupboard, just to make sure the rim will still be able to put a handle on it. It's actually one o'clock... No, it's 12.12. It's actually 12.12 at the moment, so it's been taking me a while to get going this morning. We have snow again outside, so I did a little snow shopping. We can let those stiffen up a little bit. Sorry, let those soften up a little bit. Oh, look at that, straight away. I throw fairly thin. So the way I'm going to do the handle on this one, just wet it down a bit again, just making sure that we've got a nice soft area to apply the handle so I don't have to do any scratching and scoring. If you're insecure about that, just do a light scratching or scoring. It gives a little tooth. And then, let's see which handle. I think that they were a bit heavy last night, but let's try the smaller one. We'll see how this one works. So basically, the same idea as with the coil that I did on some other pieces. We open it up. The clay is brand new. I just rolled this out. This is very soft clay. Before I stick it on, I'm going to put this across to make sure I can put my other handle on in the same place opposite, so they're even, symmetrical. Okay, so we can get those on. And then, this is how I applied them last night, in the right place. The clay wants to stick immediately because it's very soft. Once you look at it and make sure it's even, put a bit more light on a snitch, and then you just use your finger and thumb and you press hard. And sometimes, you know, messing around makes it worse too, so the less you do sometimes, the better. But you can also just use your fingers and kind of push this up a little bit underneath there and give your handle a lift. Do the same over here, of course. That's why I wanted to keep the clay soft, because we're really manipulating it and it might crack if you stretch it too much. Too much water also just makes clay unworkable. It becomes too slippery. Another thing you can do is, if you put your finger on the handle there, is you can make a slightly bigger opening for your fingers to go under by now using the brush. Maybe this brush is too big. On the rim itself, I'm pulling the rim down, so you end up with more of a space for your fingers to go in there. And then you can work on the actual joint on the underside of that, so you don't have that kind of cut line where the joint's showing up too much. Don't overwork, because the clay gets so soft it will collapse. So if it feels like it's going to collapse, it probably will. You have to kind of dry it off as quick as possible. Another thing you can do with these handles is you can actually just put your thumb on top, finger underneath, and you can just twist like that and you end up with a different type of handle that could be placed on the corner. Just tack it for now, finger underneath, so you don't end up distorting it too much. And then, if that will be stuck, you can open it just with some brushwork on the inside there to really make that twist, you know, extend it, elaborate that twist a little bit. Okay, I'm going to try a similar one here, finger and thumb, but I bent it the different direction there. And this one's so soft, I don't even need to scratch and score. I'm really pushing the plasticity of this clay, because this is a grog clay, but look how much I've bent that and stretched it out and it didn't crack. The last handle was very, you know, sort of large for the piece and stuck out a long way, becomes a little bit vulnerable as far as being knocked off at some point. So I'm going to try one here that will be a handle smaller and much harder to knock off. So I just cut all the way down, but only halfway down the thickness of the coil. And then I'm going to open it up a little bit. So I'm basically opening it up. So we've got a big gap in it like that. Is this soft enough now? Pretty soft. It's wet on the inside of that too. So I'm putting that over the top and it wants to stick immediately. So you've got to be a little bit forceful to push it down over. And you don't want to push so hard that it starts to dent the piece, but force it up inside the little opening there. And then you pull it down over the top without denting the bowl and work the ends down a little bit. And then once you've got it, you just do the press thing with your thumbs again and hard. You end up with a butterfly handle. And of course you could press stamps into the handle areas there, which I might do it when it's firmed up a bit. Another way, if your rim is firm enough, is to turn it upside down. And then depending on what handle you want to use, let's go with one of these again, is you can actually join them from the underneath. I was unhappy with my handles and they sort of made me experiment again, which isn't a bad thing. But there's another one. Okay, I'm going to do the same as the previous one, but on the outside rather than on the inside. So I take it and I'm twisting it so it's got that flattened edge with the handle coming up. I made little notches for the middle so I could actually see. And then I'm just putting it on the outside and tack it for a second. Same here. I'm twisting it by doing that to flatten the area that's going to attach with the loop above and tacking it. Let's see how big they are. Yeah, I think they work. They're fairly symmetrical. And then use your finger on the inside and your thumb on the outside and just really press down. And then the same on this side, same on this side. So I basically made myself some little tiny buttons, which in a second I will stamp on there. So it's going to be stamped to the handle and the rim to kind of give it a little extra support. I do this for my handles and my coffee mugs, but the lower part of the coffee mug I put an extra piece of clay in that little join area there at the bottom where the handle at the bottom joins the mug to give it extra support. But I also worry about this sometimes because it's often it looks like somebody's smiling at you. So finger behind. Okay, so do you see what I'm saying about somebody smiling at me? And if you know the wide mouth frog joke, and hi to Susan McKenzie in South Africa if she's listening or watching, this is what reminds me of that joke, the wide mouth frog. Anyway, just brush it over a little bit with that. It's a definitely, you know, it gives a support to the handle. But whether that makes you laugh now, that's another style of handle. Okay, this one, I just cut one of my handle tool handles, I just cut it in half. And then I'm shaping it carefully, which this is pushing the clay to the limit, I think. Because this is a rogue clay. My assumption is it's a little less plasticity than regular smooth clays. But I'm bending it and this area at the top there, I'm trying to compress as I bend. So we basically went from a straight to a curve. And then I've wet the area that's going to be attached on that side there. And I'll place it opposite to make sure they're actually even. Standing up from a distance often is a bit better to do this, and making sure that they're actually the same height, which is pretty close there. And then once again, I'm going to take my thumb, and I could do two marks, I could do there and there, or we could do one in the center. And I always tend to do the one in the center, but you can try it differently if you want. So it really, it was soft, you can see it squished out a little bit there with the pressure. Two of these platters to do, I intended making more of these, but then I ran out of time last night. How far up? Yeah, they're stiffening up. This side is softer there, this is stiff, and this is soft as well. So these two sides are soft enough so if the plate happens, and it's not collapsing, so I can let it firm up and then I'll come on it in a little while and kind of tidy it up a bit more.