My Very Particular Trimming Method

Over the past few months of making, I've really tried to impart a lot more care and attention into the larger parts I make. Both at the throwing stage and the trimming stage, I would sometimes not finish my pieces to the degree they probably deserve. And so, in this week's video, that's what I want to discuss. It's the small things, mostly, but what I've come to realise is the neater the surfaces are at this point, typically the easier they are to glaze. Thus, with these types of parts, at the throwing stage, before I take them off the wheel, I make sure the interior surface is much smoother and the throwing rings are less prominent. As the issue is if the throwing rings are too severe on the inside, as the vessel is trimmed quite excessively on the outside, the walls of the pot end up not being completely even all the way up from top to bottom. Instead, it's sort of striated with thick and thin spots, where the throwing rings get either closer or further away from the outside wall. And this means that even if I trim the pot to have a very smooth, straight exterior surface, once the pot has been glazed and fired, and the clay softens a touch during the firing, these throwing rings on the inside can actually show up on the outside as very subtle ripples. And it's for this reason that I've been softening and smoothing the inside shape. Now, when it comes to throwing these narrow-footed pots, I typically try to leave a bit of weight in the bottom tapering section, as having walls that are slightly thicker at the throwing stage give the overall pot some stability, which helps in throwing the angles and the delicate gallery at the top. In one way, it's just some supportive clay, and I'll trim away much of it at the leather hard stage. This isn't to say that the thrown shape doesn't already feel quite balanced, but it could definitely be lighter. And that's mainly what I'm trying to do at the turning stage, as with the amount of glaze that's going to be added to a pot this size, if I didn't turn away this excess weight, the pot could end up being horrendously heavy. It's the lid, though, where a majority of the work is. In one regard, with these one-off pots, I never really know the precise shape the lid will have. Thus, I tend to throw them as a much larger, wider and thicker component than need be. Provided the locating flange slots into the body, I can turn away the rest of the excess to reveal the ideal shape I'm after. There are also lots of subtleties about the lids I make. For instance, the locating flange is angled inward slightly, as this makes it easier to slot into the body of the jar, as you don't need to be so precise when you place one into the other. I also trim the underside of the lid so that it has a sort of overhang, as this means that when you look at the piece, you can't actually see where the two parts are connecting, which helps to convey the sense that the lid is sort of floating above the vessel. I have a very thorough routine when I trim the lidded pots I create, and the process always begins with the lid, because, as you can see, the lid at this point doesn't fit. This is partly intentional, not to this severity, of course, but I always throw the lid so that the locating flange has quite a bit of excess in it, as ultimately this means I can trim it back to fit the body of the jar perfectly. In fact, I leave it slightly tight, as this will make turning the underside of the pot easier later on, but it also means that once the pot has been fired, I can use valve lapping paste to grind away the tiny amount of remaining stoneware to create a perfect seal. For much of my trimming, I've been using this very sharp tungsten carbide turner recently. It really loves to leave a chattered, textured surface, but provided you don't use too much of the blade, and only trim away a very small portion of clay at a time, the surface that's left is quite smooth and even. That's precisely why I trim like this, from top to bottom, skimming away the clay bit by bit instead of trying to get rid of it all in one go. Essentially, the more of the blade you're using at any one time, the more you'll find chattering will occur. Every now and then, I lower the body over the lid to see if it fits. If it doesn't quite, I can then take it off, turn a bit more away from the locating flange, and then test the body again. I'm not looking for it to slot over perfectly. Instead, I actually want it to feel a bit snug and tight. And with that done, I can now begin hollowing out clay from the inside, removing a bit more excess weight and just defining the shape. The style of lids I create tend to be quite heavy anyway, so to try and counter that, I do remove as much material as possible from the central portion of these. That's the underside of the lid trimmed, which is arguably the trickier part. With that done, I tidy up the wheel head so there are no lumps or bumps left that could potentially get stuck underneath the jar when it's placed on this, offsetting it to one side. And to secure the pot down, I slip it in place. This is a technique you'll see me use a lot. There's a knack to it, and it can be quite tricky to get right, but it's also a subject I've made a much longer video about, a link to which I'll leave on screen now and in the description below. I then tap centre the piece until the internal portion of the rim is spinning centred. As you can see, there is a bit of a wobble on the lower section of this piece. The truth is, it's incredibly difficult to throw pots on the wheel, lift them off, dry them, all without any sort of movement occurring in the object. Thus, it's quite common when turning pots like this to deal with a slight amount of movement in the walls. From this point, I generally turn from top to bottom, and with a shape like this that I can fit my hand inside, I can easily feel the cross section as I'm turning, which is extraordinarily helpful as I can tell how thick the walls are as I'm working. As I trim, I'm trying to retain those sharp angular changes as best I can, as if these are smoothed over at all, then it completely ruins the angularity of the pot. The lowest half is always the trickiest. As you can see, this is where a majority of the movement is in the object. And thus, as I trim, in order to get rid of this, I hold the blade incredibly steadily. This way, as the undulating section spins around, I'm actually removing more clay from one side of the object than the other. And as there's enough clay in this section of the wall, I can do this without risking making it too thin. As I work, you can see how I keep one hand inside opposite where the tool is, and with this, I'm just constantly double-checking the wall's thickness as I trim. I covered this recently, but one thing I've started to notice more and more is the wear on these ribs I've been using. I didn't keep on top of it for a long time, and with use, their straight sides bow inward, which obviously makes them quite useless at scraping flat surfaces on the pots made, which is what I was using them for. I would offer the straight edge up to a pot too, to almost use it as a guide, to make sure the surfaces I've been turning are straight. And so, to fix this, when I'm deep in a making session, I'll straighten these tools once a week, which I do just by pressing them down against the diamond pad, which I pour some water over. I then just quickly check their edges against the straight wooden surface in front of me. This process also has the added benefit of really sharpening those edges, which means that when it comes to using them on the pots themselves, they're much more effective. In reality, the same is true for a couple of my turning tools too, but I'm a bit more cautious about straightening and sharpening some of my tungsten carbide blades, as they're much more expensive bits of kit that are much easier to ruin, as compared to ribs like these, that only cost a few pounds each. Once sharpened, I use these tools to run over the surface, not only to straighten them, but they're also fantastic at getting rid of the chattering marks that often cover the surfaces of these pots. One important thing to realise is that if you're using a grogged clay body, and you're turning it with a tungsten carbide blade, is that chattering, which is this textured surface you can see on the pot, which is actually almost quite nice, is simply a by-product of using tools like this. Sometimes I simply expect them to happen, knowing in the back of my mind that I'm going to have to go over them later to get rid of them and to straighten the surface. The only thing I beg of you is please be careful when removing clay from sharpened scrapers like this, as it's a really notorious thing to accidentally cut yourself on. Larger pots simply have so much more surface area. This means when it comes to glazing them, I want as many things to go right as possible. I also want to have to spend as little time tidying up their surfaces as possible, as otherwise larger works like this can be quite a big time sink. Thus, recently, I've been doing this quite a bit more. I dampen the outside first, and then I burnish over the exterior surfaces to knit together all the clay, as the thing is, when you trim grogged clay, often you just tear out lots of those coarse particles, which end up dragging across the surface, creating inconsistencies. As the pot is dipped in glaze, it'll sink into the small cavities left in the surface, pushing the air out, which creates a small bubble. This bubble can then pop and it creates a small uneven patch of glaze. Thus, the neater and more flush the surfaces, the fewer of these inconsistencies there are, which ultimately makes for a more pleasant glazing experience. With the body portion finished, for now, I can shift my focus into arguably the most exciting part of this process, and that's trimming the lid. I use a spinner tool, which I place on top and centre, and through this, throughout this procedure, I'll be applying quite considerable downward pressure, just to keep the lid pinned in place, as if the blade does happen to catch on the outside as I'm turning. If there wasn't this downward pressure, the lid would leap up in that moment, and in my trying to correct that, the rim of the jar could accidentally be damaged. There's a ball bearing in the spinner tool between the white part and the black part. This means my hand stays stationary, and the only part that's rotating is the white portion, and this makes it easier to keep that left hand far more stable as I'm applying that downward pressure, as it isn't being influenced by the spinning clay underneath it. As for this angle in the lid, I try to make it match the lower tapering half of the vessel. This way, there's some visual similarities between them, between the lid and body. The top comes next, and here I'm essentially turning a concave surface. This does two things. The first is that it removes a touch more weight from this component. But perhaps more importantly, it creates a hollow into which I can really pull the glaze. This means it'll fire with a more intense colour, and the crackled nature of the glaze itself will fire with more interesting patterns. It's not necessarily as deep as I've shown in this image, but it's probably about three or four millimetres shallower in the centre. This means that I can flood it with glaze and fire it into a perfectly flat layer, whereas if I left this surface of clay flat, and then piled glaze on top of it, it would fire into a slightly domed shape that would sit proud of the lid, creating a shape that I don't think is particularly sleek or elegant. I then also go over this surface with a scraper, and I'll also wet it and burnish it too. You can see the difference in texture this makes, as it goes from being quite matte and rough to smooth and shiny. For these bigger one-off pots especially, I place all of the components on these HPL bats. This way, I know that nothing is going to imprint itself or get stuck onto the clay I've really carefully finished. It's normally after the lid has been turned that I trim and refine the lip of the pot itself, and I'm extremely careful when doing this not to make this corner too thin, as in the past, this is probably where I've made the most mistakes. For much of the more delicate turning, I use one of these steel loop trimmers. It's sharp simply because the metal itself is so thin, and it leaves a lovely flush surface in a way that tungsten blades simply can't. You can see here how the rim is hidden slightly. Unless you duck down quite considerably, that portion of the lip that projects upwards is pretty much entirely hidden. By raising it up like this, it helps the lid cast a shadow onto the form beneath it, which I think helps to add some separation between the two parts, and ensures that visually it isn't just one large mass of clay. Now, depending on how well stuck down your pot is, removing it can either be incredibly easy or slightly tricky. I simply gouge a sharp metal knife underneath it, trying my best to not let that metal angle upwards too much, as you can potentially gouge away too much material in this process if you lose control. The wheel head is then scraped clean again, as the really great thing about this particular style of lid is that I can place it upside down and use it like a chuck in order to trim the body. As I've intentionally turned the lid to fit the body quite tightly, when I slot this part over, it's actually held really securely in place. You can see that something's spinning slightly off centre, and so the easy way of actually centring it whilst it's on the lid is to tap centre the lid itself, but not the body. The thing is, even though I've really carefully trimmed this entire pot in a very even and controlled manner, there's still always going to be some subtle inconsistencies as the piece is flipped upside down and the body is placed in a different orientation on top of the lid. This means I centre it as best I can, given this very small amount of movement that exists in the object. The spinner goes back on top, as I now want to pin the body portion down against the lid, and from this point, I'm going to return the lower tapering section, as in this moment, when I cut the pot off the wheel so that I could flip it upside down, I also assessed the weight of the object, and in this instance, I felt like the bottom was still a tiny bit bottom-heavy, but this is also a fantastic moment to straighten this bottom half. As I turn this portion, I'm looking in the mirror in front of me, as by looking at the form through this, I'm given a perfect side view, and this makes it easier to see whether the line I'm trimming is straight or not. In this instance, this tapering section was bowing outward slightly, so I focused my turning on the central portion where that bump was, and then hereafter, I'll go over this surface with a scraper, I'll wet it again, and I'll also burnish it again. In some cases, as the walls are thinned out and dampened, they can even become quite malleable again, and so when it comes to pressing in with that plastic kidney, I can sometimes actually bow the walls inward slightly to achieve the shape I want. Not by a lot, sometimes only by a millimetre or two in places, but it's enough to create the shape I'm after. This additional care that goes into creating these objects means that I typically have a more successful firing rate, which is important as they take up so much space in the kiln, and they're also some of the more expensive objects I sell. An urn like this, for instance, will sell for about two and a half thousand pounds, which is about three thousand three hundred and forty dollars, and if somebody's spending that much money on an object like this, which may also act as an object where they put the ashes of a loved one, then I really want to make sure that the object I'm creating is finished to the best of my ability. The crazy thing is, in watching this video, I can see the technical difference in the pot created as compared to those even made as little as a year ago. I suppose this will always be the most apparent to me as the maker, as I'm of course the person that's most in tune with the pots I make, and therefore I can spot things in my own craft that not everybody will. Craft really is a process of refinement and resistance. It often goes unnoticed, but if you practice something year in, year out, and undergo endless trial and error and failure, the difference in the quality of a handmade object is huge, even if the general style and aesthetic of the pot hasn't changed that much. Lots of that has to do with things like proportion. For instance, I think I used to trim the footwells of some of my pots too deeply, and I also left the foot ring around the outside too thick, both of which, when combined, created a finish that wasn't particularly elegant, and thus this is something I've really been trying to focus on, as ideally I'd like to mirror the level of finesse in the feet of my pots as what's seen on, say, the gallery or the lid, which in itself is a real challenge, especially when you're scaling work up. When I'm trimming the footwells of these, I remove clay bit by bit. Every now and then I'll check the thickness simply by pressing down on the bottom very gently. I'm looking for any sense of movement. For instance, if I press on the bottom and it feels very solid, and I can continue pressing down without it bowing inward, then I know for certain that I can continue trimming away more. But if I press on it and I can feel or see the base bow inward, then I know it's time to stop trimming. This is also a reason why it's really important to throw the interior shapes of your pots accurately. If I threw the internal base of this jar with a really prominent spiral left in the clay, then I wouldn't be able to accurately trim the depth of the bottom from this side because the interior shape itself is inconsistent. Anyway, with the form to my liking, I tend to just soften the clay before burnishing it, as this allows me to create a smoother, slightly more flush surface. And really, it's these facets on the bottom of the pot that I need to be the cleanest parts of the vessel, as the foot of a pot is important, as in most cases it'll be the only region of bare clay that's left on the vessel, and therefore I want it to match the aesthetic of the rest of my pot, which is highly finished. It also acts like a canvas for my maker's mark, which I press into the clay at this point, carefully and not too prominently, as I don't want to distort the foot itself, which can happen if done improperly, or if the clay is too thin or too soft. The body is then placed onto one of these smooth batts beside me, and it's at this point that I go back to the lid and double check it. Inevitably, throughout this entire process, as the two components have been rubbing together, there will be some amount of damage imparted onto one of the pieces. Normally, it's the lid, and thus I tend to just check how well it fits, and then I place it back on the wheel, whereupon I'll tidy over any of the scuff marks or scratches or burrs of clay that are present. For instance, you can see a rough edge around the outside, and on that locating flange, there are some subtle scratches and smudges from where the lid was forcibly slotted into the jar. I keep it pinned down in place with a spinner as I work, as this means I don't have to place lugs of clay around the outside of the lid to hold it in place. And then I essentially just double check the entire piece, often just running my fingers over those sharp edges, just to soften them slightly, so they aren't quite as susceptible to being chipped. And with that, the jar is very close to being finished. The last thing I do is place it back onto the wheel, whilst again keeping it on one of these HPL batts, so its base isn't damaged. It's roughly centred, and from this point, the very last thing I do is just sponge over the surface one last time. This gets rid of the more prominent fingerprints that cover the object, and it's also here where I'll double check that very sharp rim of the lid at the top. As that's the crown of the pot, so to speak, and if there's a burr of clay stuck into that lip or a chunk missing from it, then it really ruins the uniformity and finish of the rest of the object. And that's the piece complete, for now. I know that through watching this, you may think that I'm a very particular maker, and I am. I like to finish the objects I make to a really high degree, and I think with time, I'm learning how to do that faster, whilst maintaining quality, and I think that's one of the hardest balances that exists in the world of making handcrafted pottery. At the same time, this object isn't perfect. There's still plenty of movement in it, left over from how the piece dried. There are tool marks too, in places, and the interior surface definitely shows remnants of the throwing process. Here's a mini version I made, together with a whole heap of urns, which I'll soon be glazing and firing. For those wondering, I'll also soon be doing a couple of online shop restocks. Finally. I know. It's been a bit of a wait. The truth is, I needed these big pots to fill the last firing I have to do, as I didn't quite have enough work to fire all the pots I'd made. Thus, I've sort of rushed through this batch of jars, just so I could get everything through the kilns. The best place to get news about my shop restocks, by the way, is via my newsletter, a link to which I'll leave on screen, and in the description of this video. I only restock my shop three or four times a year, and they tend to sell out relatively quickly, so it helps to be prepared, and they're the moment it goes live. I wish there was an easier way of doing it. But the truth is, as a crafts person with several million followers across various platforms, there's simply no way I could ever make enough work to satisfy demand. Which is frustrating at times, I guess. But at the same time, with the various makers I collect, and work I love, I like the fact that everything is still made by their hands. It's sort of a wondrous thing that social media has allowed. The fact that crafts people can be more independent, can sell their work more easily, and to audiences all around the world. These are facts I still find quite staggering. And ultimately, I only have all of you to thank for that. So, if you've made it this far, thank you so much for taking the time to watch. And, like always, I'll see you next time.