Throwing, Glazing, Firing & "Fixing" an Angular Bottle

Bottles are some of the most quintessential shapes from a studio potter's perspective. Growing up I was fascinated with forms like this by makers such as Phil Rogers or Richard Batterham. Essentially they're a type of vase with a narrow neck and normally in the current market for handmade pottery they lend themselves to being almost purely decorative. You may recall these two previous iterations I threw and whilst I like them I want to make a variant that has a narrow tapering bottom like this piece. These are the sorts of shapes that stand alone either as a decorative pot or stuffed with flowers and foliage. They're a centerpiece and I think they need to feel quite strong in that regard. But I think in a few of my previous iterations I've never been truly happy with what I've made and at the same time I think I've struggled to make a form that I feel fits within my family of work properly. They almost feel too traditional but I'm hoping by making a really tapering bottom and a sharp edge towards the top I can keep the form sort of refined enough for my liking. I think the real test will be seeing how wide to make the belly portion as I want these shapes to feel tall and elegant as opposed to feeling overly rounded like a barrel. Before I get properly started though, if you've already watched the throwing and trimming of this shape as that did make up the subject of a previous YouTube video, if you'd like to pick up after those processes I recommend skipping to about 21 minutes in this video. I'll be using approximately 1.1 kilos for these which is about two and a half pounds worth of clay. I'm also making sure to use stoneware that's not that soft. It's on the firmer side as I prefer clay that's in this condition when throwing relatively tall narrow cylinders. The process always begins at the same place with a quick wedge. This is the seemingly simple process of pressing and rotating the clay in a rhythmic manner until it resembles a sort of spiral shape, hence its name spiral wedging. Essentially the material is forced into a spiral that gets ever smaller and smaller beneath your hands. This stretches the clay and if there are any air pockets inside, as they're stretched they're eventually popped. And of course the secondary function of this process, beyond removing any pockets of air that might be inside, is to simply blend the clay so that it's one homogeneous texture throughout. Making and throwing pots successfully is all about consistency and thus if you begin that process with a lump of clay that's already full of inconsistencies, then the process of throwing on the wheel itself simply becomes much harder. The first step is surprisingly easy to get wrong. Essentially you want to throw down the lump of clay against the metal so that it lands as centrally as possible, not off to one side like so, as whilst it is possible to centre a lump of clay that's that off-centre, you're simply just creating a whole heap more work for yourself than need be. The second really important thing to know is that you want the wheel head itself to be mostly dry when attaching the clay down. For instance if I wet the metal slightly and then try and throw the piece of clay against it, as soon as I exert pressure onto the piece of clay it just slides off to one side. The fix is simple, just clean and dry the wheel head and also scrape away any sticky slip that might be covering the ball of clay too. From this point you can pat the ball of clay back into a shape that has a rounded bottom, this way when you chuck it down onto the wheel head again it doesn't trap any air underneath it, which it can do if it has a flat bottom or a slightly concave underside. That's not bad, but it's not great, but I can just push it closer to the centre so the lump of clay rests solely within one of the circles. From this point you can press a finger in at the bottom to seal the lump of clay against the wheel, and it's from here that the centering can begin, which is essentially a continuation of the setting of the foundations for the pot I'm going to throw. As you can see the piece of clay is wobbling quite a lot to either side, and it has a very uneven texture in appearance. My aim through this initial centering is to work it into a mass of clay that spins without any deformities in it. The texture covering the lump of clay should be smooth, and it should turn around very rapidly without any sense that it's undulating to either side. I initially do this sort of paradoxically by moving the clay around, as this process of churns the clay around, essentially wedging and mixing the material even further. It also causes the particles that make up the clay, the platelets, to line up. This makes the clay more plastic and easier to throw with, so they say. And whilst I don't always do this so thoroughly, if I'm making say just a simple mug or a bowl, but if it's for a shape that's slightly more complex, then I find spending a minute or two doing this really pays off. By the way, if you'd like to watch a video that's specifically about this coning process, it's a subject I've made a much longer, more detailed video about, a link to which I'll leave on screen now, and in the description below. As you can see, the lump of clay is now spinning around in a much neater fashion. Its surface is mostly smooth, and despite the messy slip that's covering it, it's not wavering around too much, or in any one particular direction. From this point, I find centre, and I'm going to press my thumb and index finger right into the middle. I tend to use the sharp tip of my index finger as the point that pushes in, and my thumb follows suit, helping to widen the hole. This process tends to dry the clay out quite rapidly, so I normally chuck another handful of water inside, as you need water there to hydrate the clay to keep it slippery. Otherwise, when you exert force onto the lump of clay, it'll just stick to your hands. The way I judge the thickness of the bottom is by comparing the depth of the floor on the inside of the pot with the wheel head on the outside. It's a technique that takes some experience to get used to, but at the same time, I also don't want to make it as thin as it could possibly be, as, ideally, I'd like to trim a footwell into the bottom of this bottle. If you do need to check the depth, though, you can take a needle and press it through the bottom. You then slide a finger along this until the tip reaches the floor of the pot, and then you pull both out together. However much of the needle is left exposed is how deep the floor is, which means the base of this is about half a centimetre thick, which is perfect. The final important thing about this process is forming an appropriate shape on the inside. You want to make sure there's almost a right angle between the floor of the pot and the walls. As if your base sort of curves into the walls, this can create a shape that traps additional weight in the bottom of the pot, which can actually be very difficult to utilise properly later, and even if you don't manage to, when it comes to trimming the pot, the clay is actually trapped in a portion of the vessel that you can't really trim without massively changing the exterior shape of the object. My first pull is really just a collaring inward of the walls. I then also spend a few moments just setting the rim, centring it, almost, so that the rim is kept at a very even, consistent level, and it's now from this point that I can begin to pull up properly. To do this, I sort of scoop the clay in at the bottom with a soaked sponge positioned slightly lower than the fingers on the inside that are pressing out. After each pull, I do the same thing at the top. I compress the rim to stabilise it. Essentially, the height of a pot isn't something you do in one process. You can't gain all of the height of a thrown object in one pull. As if you press in too hard initially and make the wall quite thin, that thin section towards the bottom wouldn't be able to hold up all that additional weight above it, and thus the pulling process itself is normally done in two or three lifts. This way the walls are gradually thinned out, which makes it less likely that it will suddenly collapse. I'm purposefully leaving some heft in the lip, as this additional material will help me to throw the distinct shoulder and neck later on. On the other hand, if at this stage the rim of the pot was really thin, then later, when it comes to throwing those more defined areas, you'd really struggle. If you ever see this happening towards the bottom of your pot, it's not necessarily a sign that the walls are too thin, just that the weight distribution isn't perfect. In this moment, the walls on the lower half are much thinner than all the clay left above, and thus it started to buckle and twist. But I caught it, which means I should be able to save it. I begin by pressing the clay out against the rib, straightening the wall, and then I collar it in, and from this point onward, when I lift the clay up, I'm going to start from about halfway. And as I continue to lift, I'll keep an eye on the lower section, and if I notice that the bottom begins to ripple too much, then I'll go back and correct it again. I can now begin throwing the rough shape I was after. The bottom tapers in slightly, and thus I'm going to mirror that on this top half, before collaring in the clay at the very top to create a more narrow opening. To do this, I essentially throw the clay inward, using my fingertip on the outside to exert pressure instead of my knuckle or a sponge. This is something I do bit by bit, but it was at this stage already that I wasn't too happy with this shape. The top tapering section of this bottle is far too short, which I think for me ruins the elegant profile I was going for. In retrospect, I also made the opening itself a bit too wide. But let's see, maybe I can fix it by collaring in the As this piece has such an overhang, whenever I do any shaping at all, I'll keep one finger inside supporting the wall, as otherwise it could potentially sag inwards due to how thin the walls are. Once again, I think I should have made the neck a touch narrower, but the problem is when you're making highly angular and sharp pots, often when certain shapes have been defined, it can be very difficult to go back. Anyway, I made the choice at this moment that this piece would go no further, and I think this is something that I've become much more comfortable with recently. Essentially, if I can spot at this stage that a pot is wrong, I just squash it and recycle the clay. As the last thing I want to end up with nowadays is pots with forms that I don't particularly like. If the very bones are wrong, no amount of slip or glaze will save it. In a way, the shapes of the pots themselves are the most important aspects of them, and I think it really does take considerable time to be able to spot what works and what doesn't. Thus, with this second iteration, I'm making the top section taller, and I'll throw the shoulder and opening itself to be taller and narrower. This is definitely an improvement, but I still think I need to throw it slightly narrower and taller, so I'll try that in the third iteration. I'm also not entirely sure how to finish the neck. Should this portion taper in slightly, or be perfectly straight? Ultimately, I think this is one of the things that I won't be able to properly realise until after the piece has been glazed and fired, as the way the glaze settles on certain shapes can change them rather a lot, as it essentially floods over them and softens certain areas, adding curves to areas that were previously thrown much sharper. I then scrape away any excess around the bottom, extending the straight, tapering section right down to the wheel head. I don't mind this one, it's passable, but it feels just a bit too rounded for my liking, and I think the form could be squashed and made a touch taller. Anyhow, now that I've gone through most of the process of throwing one of these, I'll skip through this process a lot more quickly, but if you would like to watch both this process and the turning of this piece in much more detail, those are again videos I've already made, links to which you'll find on screen now, and in the description below. This one already proportionally feels much nicer. I've made sure to leave that lower tapering section much taller, but I think some of what I'm struggling with with these forms is the lack of finesse they have at this throwing stage, but I'm hoping that that's something I'll be able to fix when it comes to trimming these. Otherwise, they are quite satisfying forms to make, although I think to some degree I was perhaps complicating the process, essentially by trying to eek out the shape too prematurely. If these are successful, and when I make my next batch of them, I'll begin by throwing a taller, straighter cylinder, with a touch of heft in the lip, and then I'll do all the shaping at the end point, as this way I think I should be able to make taller and narrower versions of this, without fussing over the shape too early. Here's that previous iteration versus what the third version I'm making now looks like. Another significant change, I think, was making the shoulder portion flatter. On this version, this part is around 20 degrees, whereas on the previous iteration it was probably about 30 or 40 degrees. It's small changes like this that end up making a difference, and part of learning how to create pottery is learning how to identify what it is that's throwing you off on a particular shape. It's learning how to see, essentially, and when you're making something from a rough sketch, sometimes in the process of transferring it from one to the other, you have to make some adjustments. I also need to remember that often when I draw things, I'm normally drawing them in their trimmed state, not their thrown one, which you can see here. This is something that I have to try and remind myself, as even though this shape won't change that much when it's trimmed, every single line and edge on it will become much sharper, and typically the lower half of the vessel will become narrower too, again heightening the elegance of the piece. For now though, I just scrape away a bit of material from the rim to make sure it's spinning around level, and then I can soften this using a chamois leather. In theory, this is a step I don't have to do, as the likelihood is I'm going to trim the rim anyway, but I don't think I could stand looking at a board of thrown work that all had scruffy rims. The bottle is then wired through. I then make sure my hands are dry too, and then I rest them on the surface close to the bottom and lift the piece away. I lift near the bottom as this is where the base spans the walls and therefore strengthens the shape, whereas if I attempted to lift the pot from further up, the vessel would simply crumple inward as there's less material spanning the gap and therefore the shape itself is more fragile. So here are the two forms with the second iteration on the left and the third iteration on the right, which is the one I prefer out of the two. When I make pots that have lower halves that taper like this, I tend to throw them with a bit of extra material in them as it just helps to stabilize the rest of the pot above it. You may have experienced this, but when you're throwing pots, if you're making a shape that has a really narrow base, but then a much wider expansive upper section, the piece can very easily become distorted, especially if that form has been sectioned off into more angry like so. Thus, by throwing them slightly wider than need be, it adds stability at the throwing stage, and then at the leather hard stage, this part can be narrowed further to give it a more distinct shape. I left these bottles out exposed overnight, and then the following day, in order for their bases to dry out further, I flipped them upside down. Come the end of that day, they were still a touch on the soft side, so I wrapped their neck sections in plastic, as those parts were already pretty much the perfect state of leather hard to trim. It's now very early the following morning, and the bottles were pretty much the perfect condition to trim yet. I had a few things I had to do first, so I wrapped them up like so, as this essentially pauses the drying process. This is something I do a lot, especially if I want to preserve work over, say, a weekend or four or five days. If it's a long pause, I give them a really good spray with water before I wrap them, and I press the plastic against the pots until it's practically sticking, and by doing that, it's possible to keep pots leather hard for a week or two. It's now time to trim. You'll see these a lot in my videos, by the way. They're bats made from high pressure laminate, and they're extremely smooth, and they don't warp or bend whatsoever. I tend to not really use them as bats. Rather, after a pot has been trimmed, I place them on these to dry, as trimmed leather hard clay is still relatively soft in the grand scheme of things, which means if you place a freshly trimmed pot down on, say, a wooden surface that has noticeable grain or texture on it, then that can embed itself into the base of the pot you've just trimmed, and it's for this reason that, for certain pots, I dry them on HPL bats. Now, bottles like this are obviously quite difficult shapes to trim, as you can't really place them upside down in order to turn them on their lips. Thus, you have to use something like a chuck, which is what this is, and whilst I won't show you how to throw one of these in this video, it's again a topic I've covered in much greater detail in a video that's specifically made about chucks, a link to which I'll leave on screen now and in the description of this video. My turning process doesn't begin with the chuck, though. Instead, I begin by attaching the pot upright to the wheel head. I band a really small amount of slip onto the foot of the piece, tap center it, and then I seal the very bottom with a plastic kidney, like so. If done properly, this creates a really solid connection, and it means I can turn the entirety of the shape without any lugs of clay or mechanical arms like you sometimes find on Giffen grips getting in the way. I'm not saying that to damn them, as both can be really useful tools, but by turning like this there's just less fuss, although there probably is a greater chance, especially when you're learning this technique, that the pot comes loose and flings to one side, destroying itself. But there's no success without failure. From this point, I can begin to refine the exterior shape. There isn't a huge amount to do, I'm generally just thinning these sections and further defining wherever there's a sharp, angular change. As I trim, I tend to keep one hand on the vessel, this way if anything does go wrong I'm there to catch it. You may find that the drier your clay is, the harder it makes it to achieve a lovely smooth surface, so to get around that, I tend to wet the surface first, and then I smooth over that, as this creates a somewhat burnished finish, which ultimately should help the glazes to settle on the form more neatly. The bottle can now be cut off the wheel head, and it's now that I can start to use the chuck. It's roughly tap centered, and then I insert the bottle into it. This too is then centered. And essentially I'm watching the base of the pot in the mirror, to see when it's spinning around perfectly level. I can then tap center the chuck, instead of tap centering the pot, in order to get it precisely right. After which I do secure the chuck in place, and I also use a spinner on top to push down through, as this just helps to keep the pot pinned into the chuck. I'm turning this portion again, just to make sure it's perfectly straight, as it's easier to see the form of the object in the mirror in front of me, now that it's upside down. As I burnish the clay, you can see it deepen in colour. This is what happens as it becomes smoother, as you're essentially creating a shinier surface. With that lower tapering section finished, I can now move on to the final bit of trimming, which is the foot ring itself. I purposefully left about half a centimetre's worth of clay in the bottom of this piece, as this means there's some excess material here I can turn away to form the foot. After every pass, I gently press on the bottom, checking to see if it bows inward at all, and as soon as it does, that's when I call it a day, as if they've become too thin. When the piece is flooded with glaze and fired, if the glaze itself overwhelms the clay work in terms of thickness, then it can cause a large crack to appear where this thinness is. The last step is stamping it with my maker's mark, although upon further inspection, the only issue with turning with a chuck is that the trimmings fall back inside it and softly stick back onto the pot itself, so I quickly centred the vessel again just to remove these, and then I sponged over the entire surface just to get rid of those scratch marks I'd created, but also to get rid of any blemishes created from where the pot was making contact with the chuck as it was inserted into it. These are really just minimal changes, and in the long run they probably aren't that necessary, as the glazes that I will eventually use tend to hide much of this subtle clay work underneath, but regardless, I like to know that the objects I create are finished to a certain degree. Anyway, here they are again, much thinner and finer and lighter than before, and I think I still prefer the variant on the right, although through trimming it, I really was able to alter the shape of the shoulder, which means I'm going to have to have another go at these in order to perfect the shape I was going for. As for the chuck, as ideally I keep this leather-hard for as long as possible, as leather-hard clay, when slightly soft, tends to stick to the pots that are placed into them, thus holding them more securely. I dip it in water, and then I wrap it up tightly with plastic, and through doing this I've had a few chucks that I've been able to keep leather-hard for years now. I can then place them into a box and store them away, ready for when they're next needed. As always, the steps from this point are rather formulaic. The pots are packed into my electric kiln for a biscuit firing to a thousand degrees celsius. You program these kilns and they fire automatically, and I set mine to go off overnight when the electricity rates are cheaper, and for this firing the pots absolutely can touch, as there's no risk of the clay becoming hot enough for the pots to stick to each other. I pack this as tightly as possible to make each one more cost-effective, and I only ever really fire it when I have enough parts to fill it properly. This may look like an easy process, but with the fine edges my pots have, it's much easier than you'd think to chip them, especially the sharp lips, and sometimes the feet too, if they're loaded into the kiln a bit too abruptly. It's then fired overnight, and about 36 hours later it can be unpacked. The pots have changed colour slightly. They've also shrunk a touch, as the clay has technically turned into ceramic, a much stronger material as the particles have begun to fuse together. Whereas previously, in their bone-dry state, if you dunked the pots in water they would simply begin to disintegrate, whereas at this point their particles have fused together enough to prevent that from happening. Instead, they'll still absorb water a bit like a sponge, and thereafter, depending on the weather or the temperature in the studio, they'll take a couple of days to fully dry out again. Now, any rational person might place this back in the chuck in order to wax the foot, but I think I can get away with it. There's some movement in this piece, so as I tap centre I make sure I'm centring the foot ring and not the opening and lip at the very bottom, which you can see is spinning off centre. This is the kind of discrepancy that can often exist in handmade pots, but the thing is, as soon as the wheel stops spinning and the pot is placed upright, you just cease to notice any kind of irregularity like this, and my general approach is that provided the pot has been finished with care and attention, and is in itself well crafted, then I really couldn't care less. Now, the first thing I do when glazing a shape like this with the foot ring is pour glaze into that region and swirl it around. The trick here is flipping the pot upside down fast enough so that it doesn't dribble across the outside form, and then I can place some fingers into the opening and dunk the piece right up to the rim. It's held, submerged for a couple of seconds, and then drawn out. I then place the pot on the wooden workbench and spin it around a couple of times to get rid of the excess glaze that clings onto the foot, and has perhaps gathered in a thicker band towards the base of the piece. The reason I dip the outside like so is that it makes it quite easy to create a really flush, even surface from top to bottom, and as this is the surface that's going to be on display, it has to be glazed as perfectly as possible. It's now the following day, and the pot had completely dried out, which means I can now pour glaze inside the bottle, swirl it around, and then tip it out. I try to do this relatively fast, as the quicker the glaze exits the bottle, the more unlikely it is that it will dribble over the outside surface. Once it's about halfway full, I tip it to one side and twist the pot as I pour it out. Thanks to the bottle's sharp edge and its very narrow opening, this is really easy to do in comparison to some of my other pots, especially bowls and the lined vases I make. There were a few bare patches around the rim, so I loaded up a brush with glaze and just dabbed over these areas. It doesn't matter too much if it's messy, as once this dries out to match the glaze that's underneath it, I'll very easily be able to fettle it back and tidy it. It's been a really mad month. It's been both 34 degrees and cold and stormy like this. It's now a few days later, and with the glaze completely dry, I can tidy over the rim, scraping back any glaze that's protruding too much to create a flush and neat layer of glaze that coats the pot. I always say this, but please be aware that not all glazes can be treated like this. There are some types of glaze, especially those that tend to be more matte, that even if you tidy them up very carefully like this, they'll still show the areas where these corrections were made once fired. Whereas this felspathic crackle glaze is quite glassy and it moves a fair amount, which is a good thing in a way, as it means if I accidentally damage the glaze at this point, I can just patch it up, work it back to being flush with the rest of the surface, and once fired, you'll never be able to tell that there were any fixes made. The only thing about dipping the outside of the pot like I did is that obviously the lowest portion of the pot was submerged for the longest amount of time. This means it tends to be thicker there, so I will spend some time tidying away the thick band that accumulates at the very bottom, after which I can move on to arguably the most tricky part of the process, which is tidying up the foot. I think there's a chance I didn't make the footwells deep enough on these, so I'm going to have to try and spend some time grinding the glaze back here to create more space between where the glaze finishes and the bottom of the pot. This is a job I just tend to do with my thumb, like so, and then I very carefully fettle around the outside edge and that inner edge. Whilst I do this, I work over a basin of the same respective glaze the piece was dipped into. This way, over time, I accumulate all the glaze that's removed, and then eventually, once I've accumulated enough, I can sieve what's in here back into the larger bucket of glaze the pot was dipped into. The amount saved really adds up over time, as otherwise it's quite easy to get into the routine of just sponging all the glaze that comes off and washing it into your clay trap, where it obviously can't be reused. But by working with my approach, you have to work in quite a tidy environment, and whenever I switch glazes, I give the tabletop a really thorough clean, just to minimise on any contamination that could occur. It normally takes a week or two to fettle all four or five hundred pots, and recently I was working my way through about 650. The next step is loading the pots into the gas kiln, and for this bottle, I raised it up on a kiln prop, just so it occupied more space above it, which means there's less empty space in the kiln. When reduction firing, the more space you're able to fill, the easier it is to achieve an even reduction, as there's simply less space for oxygen to occupy. The kiln is then lit and fired. This is an entirely manual process that takes about eight hours. The gas is slowly increased, and at 860 degrees precisely, I'll initiate the reduction atmosphere. I do this by increasing the gas pressure, the air pressure, and by sliding the dampers on the back of the kiln to be half closed, a process that essentially causes there to be too much fuel inside the chamber, with not enough oxygen present for it to burn properly. As a result, oxygen is stripped away from the clay and glazes themselves, and it's this that creates the characteristic blues and greens of the glazes I use. I then crash cool the kiln back down to a thousand degrees Celsius, as this helps retain gloss and color, and then the kiln can be fully closed up and allowed to cool more slowly. It's now two days later, and it's about 90 degrees Celsius in the chamber. Heat rises, of course, so the pots on the bottom are much cooler than those on the top, which meant that this bottle was probably one of the last pots I unpacked. It came out easily enough, but when I turned it upside down in order to tidy over the bottom, I noticed that the glaze had run on a few spots from the internal foot ring. I knew I'd played it a touch too close. Nonetheless, I gave it a quick sand using some diamond pads, and I tried my best to sand over these so they weren't sharp, at least. Sadly, the glaze had dripped a tiny bit on the other bottle, too. Maybe it's a sign, in fact, that I overfired the kiln a touch, but they work, obviously. I like them a lot, in fact, and I think it would be quite fun to make a smaller batch of these that are sort of a similar scale to the bud vases I often make. Equally, I think I should scale this up quite dramatically to create a more monumental standalone piece. The glaze is lovely and thick on this, and I like where the colour changes around the rim, where it broke over that sharp edge, and I think proportionally this one works. The other variant is nice, which is coated with a pale green crackle glaze, but it feels stout and a touch too wide and short for my liking, essentially lacking the elegance the taller piece has. Either way, next time I'm trimming deeper feet, or I'm coating them with less glaze, I'm happy with them, but I am disappointed by the glaze run on the foot, so I'm going to try and rectify that a touch by using a Dremel, and then by coating those areas with some tile protector, as when you sand a glassy glaze, it inevitably becomes quite rough and matte in appearance. Thus, if you use something like a tile sealant, it temporarily fixes that, and on a piece like this that isn't going to see much use, you aren't going to stick it through the dishwasher, for example, then this subtle fix should last a very long time. Some people even use it to coat the exteriors of their pots if they're left unglazed, as some pottery suppliers sell food safe variants. Now, it's an interesting method of solving a problem, I suppose, but it does sort of imply that the client, after a certain amount of time and use, will have to apply another layer in the future. It's not such a big deal, I suppose, with a decorative pot like this, but if it's a mug or a plate or something, then that changes the relationship to some degree. Now, where the glaze had run, it had essentially created these bumps in the glaze, so I'm grinding them back until I can feel that they're smooth when I run my finger over them. Essentially, I want them to feel in line with how the glaze should have been if it vied correctly. By the way, before I grind, I always dab some water where I'm going to be doing the work first, as this really helps to keep the dust down. You can see the small patches that are left, and hereafter I give the bottom another thorough sand with these diamond pads, taking extra care to not scratch any of the glaze that's pristine, as there's no point damaging the glaze further through this correction process. The other bottle only had one small defect, which wasn't nearly as severe as those in the dark green bottle. The key really is to take it slowly and to constantly feel where you're grinding, as the last thing you want to do is accidentally grind away too much, thus making it feel prominent again, but in reverse. As you can see, there are these little dusty patches left, essentially from where the glass is scratched. They aren't too noticeable, I suppose, but the difference once this stuff is coated over them is incredibly significant. As you can see, they quite literally disappear. If I happen to get it on the clay body itself, I just smudge it in using the fingertip, and whilst the areas are obviously still present, and you can see them in the right light, it just softens them so they don't stand out quite so much. In my opinion, if you're fixing pots like this, as long as it's done intentionally and the damage initially isn't too bad anyway, then I think it's still possible for a pot like this to be a first, but that does potentially change if it is a functional object that's going to see a lot more use. This sealant takes a couple of days to dry out properly, and you can even do a which can be helpful depending on the finish of the pots you're making. Either way, I'm really happy with the dark green variant of these two, and I think I'm going to try and bring it into the main rotation of shapes I make to introduce more variants, especially when it comes to larger one-off pots. Anyway, thank you so much for taking your time to watch, especially if you've made it all the way to the end. Let me know if you did, and, like always, I'll see you next week.