I made quilt-inspired nerikomi pottery

This video is sponsored by Squarespace. Narikomi is the Japanese art of cutting colored clay and arranging it to create gorgeous pottery. I tried narikomi a few years ago and I cannot believe it's taken me this long to try again. It is such a cool technique. My vision is to create a quilt pattern out of narikomi and using that to create colorful little quilt inspired plates. The first thing I need to do is stain some clay. And the easiest way to do this is with reclaim. So dry reclaim. I always separate my wet and dry reclaim because it's just easier. You don't have to wedge as much. But alternatively, you can also just wedge in your stain. So it's going to be a bit of a mixture of different clays. But this is all stoneware, so I reclaim it altogether anyway. And I need to weigh it so I know how much stain to add. Try and get a kilo of each color. So I've measured a kilo of each dried reclaim in each bucket. And then I got these stains from Kaiega if you're in Germany. They have, they're called Fabkörper. And what's great about them is they have the percentages that you're supposed to add. So each one is a little bit different. So I'm just going to follow the recommendation. I'm sure your stain manufacturer also has a recommendation for how much to add. So what's cool about doing a kilo is that is a thousand grams. So I can just take these percentages like, say, six percent. That's just six grams. Easy math. Please, please, please, if you're going to use stains, use a mask because you do not want to breathe that stuff in. Unless you're making your own stains, you have no idea what's inside of them. Better safe than sorry. OK, so I got all the stains in. I am writing down precisely what percentage of stain I'm putting in. By the way, I misspoke earlier. With a kilo of clay, that's one thousand grams, which means if you're doing six percent, you need to do sixty grams, not six grams. But I did somewhere between three and ten grams for each of them, just following the instructions from my supplier. So now I need to add water and this is going to make the clay workable. So I don't know precisely how much water to add. Like typically when reclaiming, I'm just filling it up to kind of the edge. So I guess I'm going to do that. Maybe I'll measure. I'll try and put the same amount in each one and we'll see. Once all the materials have gotten wet, you don't have to worry about breathing it in anymore. But for now, that's why I'm kind of like peeking in. I don't want to let that stuff get into the air. I feel like I'm going to need more than 500 milliliters. Can you hear? It sounds like a rainforest. That's all of the water penetrating into the clay and slaking down the clay, breaking it apart. I'm going to let these like down for maybe an hour and then we can check on them and see if they need any more water. But otherwise, basically, the next steps are just to process it like normal reclaim. So I'm going to let it slake down and then we're going to put it on bats, wedge it up. It's normal clay now. So it's the next day and basically we just need to reclaim these now. I think you know how to reclaim. Look at that. Very green. I like soft, sea foamy green. So I'm going to give it a good stir before I take it out. I feel like it was a pretty good amount of water, actually. I suppose I could have done a little bit less, but I think it's good. You can see how soft your reclaim gets when you just reclaim dry stuff. I want to get all of this out. I'm not sure if I mentioned this, but these stains are like quite expensive. So I'm like very conservative with them. Like I try and get as much clay out of them as I possibly can because they really add up. And I find one of these things to be really helpful for stuff like that. Gorgeous. Okay, this looks so freaking beautiful already. So the tones when they're fired are going to be a lot darker. So like more saturated. But the color should more or less be like this. So it's kind of hard to tell because this pink is reading very pink, but it's actually theoretically supposed to be red. But I'm really liking how they look right now altogether. So I feel like that's a good sign that they will go together later, even when they're a bit darker. I'm a little scared about how the colors are going to go together. It's very colorful. The other thing that maybe you can see is that the colors are not fully incorporated quite yet. It's quite mixed, but not fully. Don't worry about that. I'm going to wedge these a heck of a lot. It's going to get fully incorporated later on. Okay, now we just have to wait. Let's take a little break to talk about today's sponsor, Squarespace. If you've never heard about Squarespace before, they're an all-in-one website platform that artists and entrepreneurs use to stand out and succeed online. I've personally been using Squarespace ever since I started my online business because it has incredibly easy to use features, including their drag and drop website builder and integrated SEO tools. Whether you're just starting out or managing a thriving brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website to sell anything from physical products to memberships, digital products, and even services. You can also schedule appointments, create on-brand invoices, and send newsletters. And for the artists watching, I know you will love their cutting-edge design tools where you can create a bespoke website that perfectly fits your brand or business. So head to squarespace.com right now for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash pottery to the people for 10% off your very first website or domain. Now let's get back to the video. Good morning. Our clay is fairly dry. You can see it's sort of peeling up off of the bat. So I'm hoping that I can wedge this up now. So wedging is going to help more thoroughly incorporate the color. Nice, huh? Okay, well, I know that we're all very excited to get to the next part, the actual making of the Nerikomi canes, I think they're called. I think I'm going to let these sit for another 24 hours. I want to let them chill. I want them to be able to fully incorporate all of the clay, the reclaim, the stain. Also, some of them are a little bit on the wet side. Like I do want them to be a little bit wetter than normal clay straight out of the bag for the extruder because it will just, it'll be easier to push them through. But this one's a little bit sticky still. So I think it is wise. We're going to let them sit for another 24 hours. I'm going to cover them up with some plastic so they don't get too dry. Then tomorrow we can come in and finally start assembling our Nerikomi canes. I am very excited for this. I have no idea how it's going to go. This is where things start to get real and a little bit scary. So we'll see how that goes. Good morning. Let's extrude our Nerikomi pieces today. I am so excited about this. Is this part where I start to get nervous, though? I must admit. So, OK, originally I was planning to use my big extruder over there, but I don't want to do that for this because the stain is so expensive and this extruder, it ends up wasting a lot of clay. Like you don't get all of it through. And if I wanted to get one of these for a while, like a smaller extruder for smaller things, because this is honestly just overkill for a lot of these projects. So we got a smaller extruder, but more excitingly, we got some custom dies made. So my friend Tomas, he made me a die for tile making before. I asked him to make me a couple more. So we have two sizes of square, two sizes of triangle and put all together. We are going to be able to make a quilt. See a better picture of it here. This is my little sketch and I've already worked out how many of each colors I need in which shape. I think I think I got it right. I've never used this before, but hopefully it's just like using a caulking gun. This fits really well. So let's extrude. I'm excited and nervous. I'm mostly nervous for like attaching them together. I don't know. I'm going to start with the big one and we need to extrude both the red and the green. And this is going to be for the center block, the center square of our quilt square. I just realized I'm going to have to clean the heck out of this. How am I supposed to clean this in between colors? We're going to cross that bridge when it comes. A square works really well. Why does that work? Well, we keep going. Oh, I guess that's it. See how much waste that made. Not so bad. How am I supposed to clean this? Sponge on a stick. Can I take this off? Oh, I can take this off. That is very helpful. What a cool little tool. I got this from Kaliega. If you're German, you can get it too. I think it was like 50 bucks or something like that. I mean, it's an investment for sure, but I've been wanting to get one for ages. So I thought this would be the perfect project to kind of pull the trigger on. I suppose I should do all of one color so I don't have to keep cleaning this. That's a method. Big square's done. I'm going to be smart and do the other red one next. So I don't have to clean this. All right, this is getting exciting. So now we're going to do the tiniest of them all, the little star parts, the pointy parts. And I feel like with this amount of clay, I'm going to make a lot, a lot of little guys. Ooh, this is a lot harder to push. Ooh, just push it really slow. Okay, there we go. Got stuck. A little better. How do we do this without destroying it? Maybe we just dangle. I'm not sure if this is going to work. Maybe I should have made bigger pieces and then made them smaller like in the traditional Narikomi way. It's just really hard to press this and I have really small hands so it's hard to like get a good grip on it. I don't know, it hurts to press it. Like sometimes it goes really easily and then sometimes it doesn't go. That has to be enough. That's like such a workout. That was not fun. The rest should be better. I mean, I still have to do the small ones for the blue. I can save this red in case I need more of it for something else. Look, I didn't even put it all out. So much left actually. Maybe I need to make more big squares of this. I'm not sure, but that was intense. I needed a break. Wait, do I need to do anything else red? No, I don't. I'm still gonna take a break and do an easier one next. Big triangle next. Hopefully this one will be easier. This guy wrapped around the handle has been helping a lot with pain of squishing. That was a lot easier but I fear it's time to go back to the thin ones. Just gotta get it over with, you know? Okay, tiny triangle is done. I don't know if it's the three cups of tea I had today or not but my heart is like beating out of my chest right now. This is kind of like stressful. I'm sort of like asking myself as I do this like why did I not just make two different colors? There are some seriously beautiful quilts out there that just have two different colors. Why did I do such a ridiculous ambitious project for my second Nerikomi that I've ever done? I don't know. This is what I do. I always bite off more than I can chew. I've extruded everything that needs to be extruded. Now my hope is that I extruded everything in the correct ratios so that we don't have to come back and extrude more but I have a feeling like what are the chances? What are the chances that I extruded everything in like a perfect ratio? Not high. Oh look this is the amount of waste clay waste clay in this extruder which is like laughable compared to the big one. So I think this was a good decision. So I've decided against using slip or scoring or anything when I'm attaching these. Basically it's based on a hunch. I don't want to score because that's going to make the line messier and I have a feeling using water is going to make them stick worse. I don't know why I think that. I just feel like that's the truth because it's just going to be water. It's not going to be scored. Like the main part of slipping and scoring is really the scoring and I feel like if I'm not going to score water is only going to be detrimental. It's only going to make it like slippy against each other instead of like the stickiness of the clay is going to glom onto each other. That's my theory about this. I have no freaking clue but let's try and assemble these, huh? You should touch in the middle. It's possible I already messed up because I feel like these two are supposed to touch in the middle. Otherwise they're supposed to be 45 degrees. Let's just go with it. I am confused because my die is 45 degrees. Messed something up somewhere along the way. Okay and then we do green, big, big triangle in the middle. This is not going to be a triangle I think once I squish it together or I would really like to cut this already but we need to do the other sides now. Patience, okay. I definitely, definitely miscalculated the ratios because I got a whole red boy here. A whole big red boy and I'm out of the little blue guys already. Like I only managed to do this one, this one guy. Just gonna keep going with the colors that I have and we'll see what's left over and then I can decide if I'm gonna like, I don't know, make more. So do we think that there's gonna be holes in here? Should we? I'm gonna do a test cut. I really shouldn't cut this yet but I really want to see how it's looking. Oh wow, that is looking unbelievably good. I actually can't believe it. There are holes but I'm hoping it's just the outside. I really need to let this sit so we can incorporate more and then maybe I can flatten it and squish it a little bit more. I don't know if the ear is gonna be trapped. I don't know how to manage this but this, this, it looks so good. I need to let these dry out, incorporate before I start like properly cutting them up and utilizing them. I need, I think that this is going to help with getting it all, I don't know, to stick to each other. I guess like with cracks and stuff is the issue, isn't it? So let me set this aside. I'm gonna wrap this in plastic and then we keep going. Okay, well I was trying to extrude some more but I've sort of broken my, I mean I haven't broken, I have to, I can fix it but it's, I'm at my wit's end with this thing. The clay, I need to, needed to extrude some more of these little triangle guys but the clay is just too hard for that. It's just not working and that's why the extruder is starting to fall apart but I have a few of them so we're gonna see how much we can make. I'm like quite shocked by how few pieces I have in the end. I'm not sure like what happened to the clay, where the clay has gone but let's see what we can put together. Okay, I made one more little tiny log. This is all I could fit with the pieces I had left. I do have a decent amount of clay left. I was kind of hoping to use it all but you can ignore the yellow because we haven't added any of the yellow yet. So I don't know what I'm gonna do with this but I'm gonna keep it wet for now and maybe I'll come back and make some more stuff. I don't know if I'll do nerikomi or maybe I'll throw with it. That might be fun. Okay, let me see here. What do we have? I'm hoping that this will complete, more or less, more or less completes the log. I mean, this one's definitely longer because I do want to incorporate both patterns in one plate or dish or whatever so I was kind of hoping that they would be the same length. It's close enough. So what we learned today is I think it would have been helpful if I measured the length of the pieces and maybe worked with like about a foot, 30 centimeters of length. I mean, this was fine. Some of the extruded pieces I had to piece together and 30 centimeters is like a perfectly long piece that would work. Yeah, and then just like having more of a plan in advance. So I needed eight of those small triangles for each one of these and just like had, if I had measured out like, okay, eight approximately foot long pieces and then one of the thick logs and then I wouldn't end up with so much left over because it was mostly just getting my ratios wrong as I was worried about, but that's fine. I feel like, I don't know. I'm curious how much this will make. I feel like it's not gonna make that much but it will make a couple. I also love how this looks with them all smushed together. Maybe I do something with this extra clay. Okay, I'm going to let these homogenize under plastic. I need them to kind of chill out. I feel like that's gonna help with the cracking and then tomorrow I'm very excited to get into actually cutting them up and placing them into like a slab shape. And that's when we'll also incorporate the yellow. So see you then. Good morning. I'm hoping we can make some dishes today. This has been a long time coming. I feel like we've done so many days of work and we haven't even made pottery yet. We've just been preparing the clay which is so funny to think about. So what I want to make is a little dish with this bisque mold and my thought is I can use my circle guides and I can maybe do the 14 centimeter. So I want to arrange them in this quilt pattern and I can use this as a guide. I can drape it over this bisque mold, shape it and make it perfect. And then we have a bowl. I'm hoping I can make a lot. I really have no concept of like how many slabs this is going to make. I'm going to cut them fairly thin and I think I have a plan for connecting them. I'm not sure it's going to work but let me show you. The one part that I have not prepared yet at all is the yellow and I'm just going to roll this out and cut it into strips and it's going to be the border of the quilt squares and I'm going to use these extra thickness gauges. So this is half centimeter and this is three millimeters. My plan is to cut them at this width so eight millimeters and then I'm going to place them, roll them to half centimeters so that they kind of squish together a little bit. I'm hoping that this will help with any sort of gaps that we have. Let's see. I'm cutting these into one centimeter strips. The quilts themselves are three centimeters so I figured rule of thirds. I should go with one centimeter to make it look balanced. I don't know if I'm going to have to let it rest in between. Again, once we assemble the slab, I'm not sure. It depends on how similar the moisture level is. And all of these, this is feeling very wet so I'm a little worried that the quilt parts are going to be too dry in comparison. We shall see. Okay, I cut some strips. I'm just going to let these sit here I guess and now we need to cut the quilts themselves. So I'm going to cut them at eight millimeters each. Let's try, start with the little guy. I can use this guy but I need to, this guy doesn't go all the way to the ground so I need to kind of elevate this guy somehow. Oh, just use my ruler. That's perfect. Okay, so okay, see how it needs to be down there. Okay, that's okay. So I'm just going to try and make this as straight as possible. Okay, there we go. That's our beauty. Now we measure eight millimeters and we try and cut as straight as we can. This is going to be our challenge I feel. The more precise we can get it, the better. I guess the less warping and whatnot it will become when we roll it out. I already feel like eight millimeters is too much. They look so good. I just think that looks so cool. I actually can't believe it. I would like to do the other one so then we can arrange them and figure out like how many fit. This one has a little bit more gapage going on. That's better. Looks a little bit like a pie. I'm going to try and roll it now I guess. It's kind of like the moment of truth right now. There are still cracks so I'm trying to figure out what to do. Like I could roll it thinner but I'm also wondering if I should add the yellow to the canes themselves. I mean there's still going to be seams then but there will be fewer seams. I feel like I should do that. Okay, that might be the solution. Okay, so what I did... I don't know. I mean we'll see. We'll see if this works. But I wanted to compress it but obviously if I just compress it, it's going to smear it. So I used some cloth but then I ran into the next problem whereas when I was compressing it with a cloth the cloth would sort of buckle on top of itself and indent the clay. And so I sprayed it with some water to get it to stick to the clay and that actually worked. Let me... I want to try putting this on this thing. I might go back and add the yellow to the canes but I do want to give this one a try. This guy ended up being so much bigger so you don't actually need all the clay I added. It's good to know. Basically I need three by three. So much work just getting cut off here. It's kind of sad. This is getting really exciting. I need to let this sit now so I can firm up but it looks so good. I actually can't believe it seems to be working. It seems to be working. Okay, so what I want to do now is I want to add the yellow to the canes. I think that's gonna help because it's going to be a few less seams that I have to contend with and I just have to contend with the yellow meeting each other and if I just put it on this side and this side then they'll go together. Does mean a little bit more clay wastage though but I think that's okay. I'm gonna let this one dry and we're gonna see how this one looks and yeah and then tomorrow we can come back in and make some more. I'm getting very excited. Okay, so I've sort of run out of yellow. The story of this project is running out of clay. I have this much yellow left which I basically have done half a little bit over half like I could bring it down to a half centimeter thick but instead of trying to stretch this I want to see how they look without the yellow border. I think that also might look cool. I don't know. It's hard to guess but I want to have like a variety of like options and a thinner yellow border is just less inspiring to me. So I'm going to let these firm up once again. We're gonna push this into another day. This bad boy is pretty much done. I'm going to wait until tomorrow to finish this guy because I want to smooth out the edges a little bit and that will be better when it's fully dry but look at this. It's our first piece. It looks so good but we will see how the colors look when it's done because it's gonna look a heck of a lot different than it's gonna be a lot brighter a lot more vibrant a lot just different colors. So I've kind of gotten used to these colors. I kind of like these soft pastel tones but we shall see how it actually looks later on. Okay see you tomorrow again. Whenever I'm doing something super repetitive like this and like needing to be precise I always think about like what sort of tool would make it easier and I think I figured it out for this one. What I need is a sort of box that this can live in so two sides and a bottom and the box needs to have slats in it so that I can feed this perfectly straight down and at perfectly spaced intervals because right now I feel like when I'm making them a lot of the distortion is coming from cutting these precisely like I'm not I'm like wiggling a little bit as I go down you know I just measured each piece by each piece. That would be really a fun tool to make and it's something that I could make with my laser cutter. I love my laser cutter. This is not one of the most beautiful things you've seen in your entire life. So satisfying. Good morning. Yesterday I made all of the nerikomi pots with the yellow border. I do have two canes left but we've made some serious progress so I think they look so good and I was drying them well drying them. I kept them under plastic for 24 hours because I want them to slow dry but honestly I feel like these can just dry out now. I feel pretty confident in my seams. I think the compression under cloth was really really helpful. There's a little bit of smudging and then I'm decided to wait like the edges are still a little messy but I decided to wait till they're either bone dry or bisqued to sand them because I realized when I was using the rib on the edge of the other one it sort of smudged the edges and I would love the edges to just be this perfect cut to have the pattern carry over the edge. I think that would look so nice. I think I'm just gonna let these dry out now. I'm so pleased with them. I have no idea how they're gonna look when they're done. I'm a little scared for the color I must admit. So today I just want to finish. Here's all of my scraps and I kind of want to do something with my scraps but I'm not exactly sure what yet. Maybe like I could just roll them out and make little bowls out of scraps. I'm not sure. I also have like a couple random scraps as well of the other ones. First step I think is to cut up our canes. Okay so I finished all of my bowls. I have quite a variety actually. The actual design was meant to be this so we have a couple of different types of quilt squares with it looks like white but it's going to be yellow in between but because I had different quantities of the quilt squares I ended up making a few with the same quilt square with also the yellow in between and then I ran out of yellow so I started making ones without the yellow and I think this is I think these might actually be my favorites. I mean who knows how they're going to look when they're done but I think this one looks so cool. This one also looks really cool and then I had extra clay left over so I wanted to use it up like all of the colored clay so I did I don't know if you can tell but there's like some marbling in here. We'll see how that looks and then I also tried some funky inlay so I just placed the blobs of color on top of a slab and rolled it in. I tried some different things. We will see how they look but anyway they've been drying for a couple of days so let's load these in the kiln. Cross your fingers I am a little bit worried about my edges sticking together. I'm a little worried about cracks along the narikomi lines where I attached two different colors together. Hopefully my compression worked well enough. Yeah we shall see. Okay the kiln is cool. I'm hoping that I don't have any cracks along my connection lines. They look great. They look so good. I'm so happy. We have one crack but it's fine. Obviously you can see the color has not yet come out yet fully. It will come out after the final fire. So as much as I would like to glaze and fire these today I have to sand them I think. So I'm gonna wet sand. I don't sand very often just because I hate it. It's not fun. I'm kind of of the philosophy like you just finish it before you know then you don't need to sand but sometimes you just can't avoid it. So I've got a big chunk of water here and I'm just gonna dip them in and sand them. Let me try and get through this as quickly as we can. All right they're all sanded. They're looking really good. Now I just need to wait until they're dried out. I'm gonna let them sit until tomorrow and then we can glaze and fire them. Okay I've managed to load about three quarters of them into the kiln. I am quite nervous about this firing. I actually cannot believe how long each one of these took to make. They're very simple little plates or bowls but my goodness like I really feel like is one of the slowest techniques out there because wow it really feels like a bunch of little tiny art projects. I just hope they turn out. All right seriously pray to the kiln gods for me. I'm putting them all in at once. I mean I got nothing to lose. So this kiln took two days to cool because there's so many shelves in there. Okay okay wait I need to see more. Wow oh I like those. These are so freaking cool. I have to like just digest these for a second. I don't really know what to say. They like they look nothing like my design. Do you remember my design? The colors are so completely different. It's like almost comical. I don't hate them. I just like it is not what I was expecting at all and like part of me is a little bit relieved because I feel like my plan was just too intense. It was just too bright. There was so much going on. Oh my god but I think they look good. I am so in awe at the quiltedness of these. Look at this one. It's so good and then also on top of it all these weirdo ones. I really like the marbled ones. I mean this is not marble this is inlay but this looks really cool. The marble one looks fabulous. This one oh this one is really cool. I mean they're all different. They're all so freaking cool. There's a couple of pinholes which is a bummer and we have one crack. This is the first crack that I've noticed though. Oh gosh I think my favorite is gotta be this one. This looks so good. The yellow is like so it's so not yellow right? It's like very tan. These are my favorite. I'll have to keep one. I love a quilt. The quilt pattern is truly some of the most beautiful patterns in the world and I am so tickled that this worked. Like this took so long. I have mad respect for Narikomi artists. I've done this before and yet I completely forgot how long it takes but the result is so cool because it's just such a different quality than painted on or even glaze. It just looks so different. It's a little bit more like tiles. You can just feel that they're made of these colors. I don't know how to describe it other than that. Gosh I know I say this with every project but I really want to do this again. I think I want to try a simpler color palette next time. I think that that will make this project less stressful because definitely when I was assembling them and like extruding the different colors I got a little stressed out. If I just did like two or three colors that would be so pretty because I like I really like these ones anyway. Like I'm even imagining like a black and a white. Like how cool would that look? And now I want all of my dishes to be made with this technique. I do have a project in mind where I make like all of my dishes from scratch and I do have a lot of handmade pottery of course but like a lot of it is just super mix and match and wouldn't it be cool to make like an entire set that all matches? Anyway let me know if that's a project that's interesting for you because part of me is like is anyone really interested in me just making like bowls and plates and stuff? But anyway thank you guys so much for watching. Let me know if you want me to do more Nerikomi and if so what you want to see from me. And don't forget to subscribe to my Patreon. I have a new Patreon you guys where you can see behind the scenes and also get my templates. I'll see you in the next one. Bye friends. I also saved this cute little just a little slice. He could be like a little brooch or something or just hanging on my wall.