 Today I'm going to talk a little bit about wedging. This is a wooden top table. It's a very tight particle board. I used to use canvas. I prefer the wooden table, the compressed board table, to the canvas table. The wood for one thing doesn't move when it gets wet. I'm going to, and also this table, is a comfortable height for me. It's at a height where I can, I can get my upper body strengthened by the weight of my body over top of the clay, and it makes it easier to wedge. There's two kinds of wedging. Now these are plug clays. It just came out of the pugnall. There's forward wedging, or ram's head wedging, or cow's head wedging. And I use that for smaller pieces of clay, and it's a rolling motion, but you make sure that your hands are on top of the clay, and your fingers are straight across from each other. If you can imagine if I were to, which would be unpleasant, drive a dowel through this knuckle, through the clay, and through that one. When you did your wedging, it would pivot on that dowel. You want to make sure your hands don't migrate to the top of the clay, but they stay on the side. And it's called ram's head, or cow's head wedging, because you can see, if he looks at you, you can see his little eyes, and his nose, and his little cow. Anyway, you can tell if he's going properly by putting a thumbprint in it, and you can watch that thumbprint roll down. And this wakes up the clay, gets the particles moving, gets it ready for the wheel. It also makes it homogenous and gets rid of any air bubbles. Now that piece is ready for the wheel. If you want to do a larger piece of clay, I prefer spiral wedging. When I slam them together, it gets rid of any air bubbles, so I have less wedging to do. And that's a different type of wedging. It takes a bit more practice. But what I'm doing with this hand is I'm making this cone shape. And I'm going to pivot it, and I'm going to push this part of the cone down here to pick up the clay. Again, this hand is just like a train that pivots this one turned. And again, this one stays almost karate chop to the table. And you can see this cone that I keep making, and I keep picking up one here, or these spirals, and putting it down here. And you start, there's a rhythm to it, and a practice. You can see as I put one down, I pick one up, and I maintain this cone shape. I'm certainly working with this amount of clay, and the rest swallows around. It does take some practice. Your thumbs are touching here. It's almost the right angle. Here's this hand goes from here to there, and it pushes down to pick up, to place down that one, to pick up that one with the edge of your thumb. I also call this one no bounce aerobics. When I first started doing this, I couldn't quite get the hang of it, and I had to walk around the table, which in the public pottery class was inconvenient. But anyway, you keep doing this, and you can see if there are air bubbles. And since that one, that one popped, you'll force out the air with it. And then to finish it off, you push more with your, less with your right hand, and more with your left, making the spin, more spin, and that cone is getting bigger and bigger. And it's incorporating the big fan you made into it, until pretty soon you've incorporated all into now. That one's ready for the wheel as well. And that's the spiral wedging. And no bounce aerobics.