 Okay wedging does a few things for your clay. This is called Japanese wedging. It works best for larger pieces But it's difficult to teach without hands-on. What wedging does it eliminates all the air bubbles in your clay It wakes up your the particles gets it moving and soft ready for the wheel and it makes it homogenous There's no wet pieces or dry pieces For the sake of this DVD what we're going to do is we're going to talk about forward wedging It does the same thing as the Japanese wedging, but in a smaller piece of clay So to forward to wedge a piece of clay you want to put your hands directly out in front of you Call it this way and then you put the palms or the heels of your hands in And as I do that I stand the clay up He looks he looks in my tummy and my fingers are facing each other at the back of the clay and I'm going to pick it up. He's going to look at my tummy and it's going to pivot on The balls of my middle finger so pick it up and down up and down some people call this cow head wedging Because if you look at him give him eyes and little horns and a nose kind of looks like a cow Anyway have him look at your tummy roll it and go around you can tell if you're wedging properly if I put a Dent in the top of it with your thumb and watch that dent roll around and disappear So now all the air is out of the clay. It's homogenized It's woken up and it's ready to make pots roll it out into a loaf And what I like to do is when I'm wedging clay I know what I'm going to make before I go on the wheel and so I tell the clay When we go on the wheel, we're going to make three cylinders This number one number two and number three So I like to Sort of pat them around if you go on to the wheel and don't know what you're making you Are indecisive the clay doesn't know what to do go on there with a destination or a goal And you'll have a better chance of reaching it. So we're going to go on the wheel and we're going to make three cylinders