 Yesterday we made our little cylinder. It's sat overnight under plastic, so it dries slowly. It's now called leather hard. It is firm enough that I can handle it, but it's soft enough that I can add clay to it or take clay off the bottom. What we're going to do today is we're going to trim the bottom. Trimming does a few things. It takes some of the weight away that you have here, making it lighter. It makes a nice rim on the bottom. If you turn over any soup bowl in your kitchen, it has a nice little ridge on it, and that rim on the bottom elevates it off the table. And also it puts the bottom of the pot in shadow. So when it's sitting on the table, it is the glaze is coming down. You can't see where the glaze ends. So in order to trim it, you put it back on the wheel, and I'm going to wet the wheel head and wet the rim of the pot. And I'm going to turn it upside down and I'm going to hold it in place and it will create a bit of a slurry, sort of a clay glue there. And that's going to hold it in place. Some people like to put little balls of clay on the edges to hold it down. But I think you've got it this if you've got it to this stage and it's still round. You're doing good. Let's not smash it with a little ball of clay. So this this is there. It's not going to go anywhere. And now you want to make sure it's in the middle of the wheel. If I were to put it way over here and spin it around, you can see that it's very far from center. The furthest part it is from center is going to touch the needle. Well, we wouldn't put it that far from center, but it's the same principle as you center it. The furthest part that is away from the center of the wheel will touch the needle. So again, I'm holding the needle like I did when I trimmed the top of this off. It's like a pen. My elbows are on my knees. My hands are joined together and I'm going to hold the needle there and make a mark. If you hold the needle firm enough, you can make a mark all the way around. You just want to touch it gently with the needle and make the little scratch mark and then center that mark in front of you. Put your finger on one side and your other finger on the other and then thumbs in the middle and gently push away just a little bit. And now it should be closer to center and one more push should have it. And that's pretty close to center. Now, we talked yesterday about making sure it's level. If it wasn't level and you put it on the wheel, it would be going like this. So it's very important before you take it off the wheel to make sure it's level. OK, now it's centered. It touches all the way around. And there it is. I have the trimming tool. There's various trimming tools. I like this one because I'm used to it. It's it's there's no better one or best one. I've used this type of trimming tool for years. It's just a ribbon tool and I'm just again going to join my hands together and I'm going to run along the side of the pot and cut off the extra clay. OK, now I want to make the rim I told you about when you're first starting, you might want to decide where you want the ridge to be. Skinny one looks too skinny and if you do it too fat, it looks too fat. And in the middle is just right. And so there you can see what it's going to look like. And so if you'd make your it's a good place to start, make your guideline. And then we're going to work on the radius, meaning we're going to just go back and forth in the same line you did to to smooth the bottom. We're going to cut it away and you just put the toe of the tool in and pull it out to that line you made. They have to be aware when we talked about the bottom saying thicker is better than thinner. If you don't have a lot of clay there, it's not going to take much to go all the way through to the bottom all the way through the other side. So you can tell by listening. I don't know if you can hear that or not begin. It's different tones, the higher the tone, the thinner the pot. Also, if you do that and it starts to move, you're done. So now we have the tiny little bottom and it's just the edges are rounded and the bottom is cut away and it gives you a nice frame for your signature. And we're going to sponge it and seal that clay in so you can't tell where the trimming started and the throwing ended. So now it's done, it's trimmed, it's tidy. I'm going to push it gently away from me with both hands of pressures in the middle and it'll release from the wheel. I'm going to turn it over this way and you have left a mark by the wheel head, just sponge that off. And now your pot is done. It can sit on the table. You want to cover it slowly or cover it lightly or loosely is the word I'm after. Loosely with plastic so it can dry slowly. It's best for pots to dry slowly. You don't want to sign your pot until it is dry because if you run your needle or your pen through it now, it'll plow through and make it very messy. Let it dry completely, it'll change color. Sponge it, moisten it a little bit with the sponge and then sign it with a pen, it works well. But everyone's saying, well, that's all great, but my cylinders aren't as straight as that. So I made one that isn't and to show you how to trim a pot that has a bit more rhythm, as we called it. So again, wet the wheel head, turn your pot upside down, hold it so you get that little slurry and then now it's stuck. And sometimes it's nice to have a towel just by your leg when your hands get wet. Now, if you can see, this one has quite a bit of rhythm. So we're only going to worry about centering the part that we're going to trim. We don't care what the rest of the pot is doing. I'm going to trim from here to here. So I'm only going to center above that line. And the rest of it can dance all it likes. So again, make your line, center it in front of you, push it away, and erase the line because I get confused from the line that I did now from the line I had before. So always just run your fingers so you only have one line and you know where you are. So just going to trim this little, just the bottom and the rest of the pot can do what it likes with as much rhythm as it wants. And make your little guideline if you like so you know where your rim is going to end. And there it's trimmed. People sometimes get really nervous about trimming. Don't. There's it, you can't, you really should make your pot look finished and you just relax and do it, push it gently away from you and sponge off the marks the wheel head made. And now it can sit beside the cylinder you trimmed last time and they can dry slowly together under loose plastic. That is trimming a cylinder. Okay, yesterday we made the little vase. It is sat overnight under plastic and dried to the state called leather hard. Meaning it is soft enough that you can add clay to it or take clay away, yet firm enough to pick it up and handle it. We want to trim the vase like we did the cylinder. We want to tidy up the bottom so we want to give it some undercut so the bottom of the vase is in shadow so you can't see where the glaze ends. We want to give it also some presence as it sits in the table slightly elevated on a foot. And also it gets rid of any excess weight if your vase has some sturdiness to it now's the time to get rid of it. There's two ways to trim a vase. Some people use a chuck which is a best collar that you turn the vase upside down in and then trim the bottom. I prefer to put it up right on the wheel head and just trim the sides away and undercut the bottom and it doesn't necessarily have to have the ridge on it. There are the rim on it that a bowl or a plate does. So now to trim it, we're going to wet the wheel head and wet the pot and hold it in place and it will create the slurry which is a glue and it's stuck there, it's not gonna go anywhere. Now I want to center it. Yeah. And what I want to do is make sure it's in the middle of the wheel. So if I were to put it way over here you could see that it's very far from the wheel and where it comes to the needle and touches it's gonna make a mark. We're obviously not gonna put that far from center but the principle is the same. The part that's furthest from the center will touch the needle and make a mark. So you want to center that line in front of you, put one finger on one side, one finger on the other. Your thumb's in the middle and gently push it away for you a little bit. So it's in the middle of the wheel. And that's pretty centered. Now the needle touches all the way around. What I want to do is, when we turned the cylinder upside down we didn't put clay balls onto it but I want to join this a little bit to the wheel and all I'm going to do is run the tool down the side and it's gonna pick up a little layer of clay and attach it. Now there's like a little layer of clay there and it really is stuck, it's not going anywhere. I knocked the center when I did that. When I become queen of the world I'm going to make it a law against the universe for pots once they're centered to move until the potter who centered them says they can move because quite often, see that's worse than it was before, as you start centering this thing it'll decide to move and it's most annoying but I'm not queen of the world yet. There we go. Now it's in the center again. I like to trim the whole bottle. I like to, where as a cylinder I trim just the bottom of it I like a bottle to have a nice line and there's no rule that says you only have to trim the bottom. You can trim as much as you want. Mind you keeping in mind that you do have a limited amount of clay in the wall of the pot but you can really make it a nice smooth bottle. Now that just has a nicer line to it's cleaner, it doesn't have any throwing marks and I'm going to under cut it using just the edge of the tool going under, getting rid of that excess, making sure it has an under cut of enough so when it sits on the table it sits in shadow. Now I have that little piece of clay that's stuck through all the trimming that attaches it to the wheel. I'm going to follow down with the needle and cut it off and get my wet sponge and sponge the side of the pot sealing it back up again. It gets rid of any fingerprints it might have or little globs of clay. Gently put both hands on the pot and push it away and it's trimmed. Sponge off the wheel marks from the bottom and now it is ready to dry. It can sit loosely under plastic until it's dry. It's best to sign your pot when it's dry and turn to color. If you try to sign it now it's very wet and you'll leave a lot of dirty plow marks from your pen. Just let it dry. Also if you sign it when it's dry it gives you one more chance before it goes in the kiln to see if you've left a messy fingerprint or a smudge or a mistake. So it can go over there and dry with the rest of the guys under plastic and that's trimming of Oz upright on the wheel. Okay yesterday we threw the bowl and we threw the bowl on the board. It has sat overnight under plastic and dried to a stage called the other hard which is a stage where you can add clay to the bowl or you can take it away but it's firm enough to withstand the handling but soft enough to take alteration. Okay now since we threw it on the board I like to trim it on a board. It's kind of what I call the sandwich of pottery. You can turn it upside down and right side up and you don't have to touch it. Again it's hard enough to get this guy around. There's no sense picking it up and squishing it at this point. So I like to work between the two boards and it just makes it tidier. So we put the board on yesterday to put a bit of water on the clay bats or the clay balls and on the back of the bat to make sure it doesn't dry out in the process and then I like to add water to the bat and then the bat is wet. We're gonna put the bat on the bowl and then I can put the bowl on the wheel without having to pick it up. You line up your holes and then take off the board that you threw with and put it to the side. Now we have our bat, our bowl upside down. Sometimes these bats aren't completely level. The one you throw it on or the one you're trimming on. So before you do anything you wanna make sure that this pot is level. That when you hold your needle it touches all the way around. If it doesn't, if there is a point in the bowl that's higher or lower. At that stage you can, this one happens to be level. You can just see where it isn't and then just raise the bat a little bit by putting a little ball of clay under there. But this one's level. And sometimes if you wanna make a bowl that has texture or has a little bit of wonkiness with this method you can allow for any kind of rhythm in your bowl and still maintain the sort of integrity of your throw. Okay so this guy is level. So the next stage is you want to center it. So I want to, what I'm doing is holding my needle and it's scratching the pot. It's, if the pot was really far from center you could see how it's going to touch the needle at the part that's furthest away from the middle. But we're not gonna start that far from the middle but the principle is the same. You want to make a line and then put that line and center that line in front of you. Put one finger on one side, one finger on the other side, thumbs in the middle and gently push it away. Being careful to push the pot and not the board. Sometimes the bat can have a little bit of play in the holes and you find you're pushing the bat around and it'll never center because you're not pushing the thing you should be. So make sure the pot moves and not the board. So that's centered there. It's level there. Now it's time to trim a foot on it. What I'm going to do is I'm going to trim away the excess clay here. One, it takes away some weight of the bowl and two, it undercuts the piece so when it sits on the table it has a rim, some presence and it just makes it look finished. It makes it look as nice on the bottom as it does on the top. It's one complete finished piece of pottery. So I like to use this tool because I've always used this tool and I'm just going to apply the ribbon to the side of the pot. And notice my hands are joined. My elbows are always on my knees. My hands are always joined and I have my finger pushing down on the pot and my needle is cutting. I haven't bothered to put any balls of clay around the edge because of the moisture on the wheel head and then the pot will join it together and it's there. And you don't have to trim just the bottom. Now you can do a foot a few ways. You can just have it come that way and then put your line for your rim and then trim the middle out. I like to give it a little bit more presence on the wheel, on the table than that. I like to give it a definite ridge and you can do that just by dropping the tool straight down that way, getting into the excess and now it has a definite rim it's sitting on. So when it's sitting on the table, it has presence. It starts here, it ends on the thick, it starts at the bottom, ends on the thick rim and it says I'm a bowl. So trim the side to the ridge, make a definite edge for it to sit on and then trim away the middle. Being aware that you don't go too thin. I talked about when you're throwing your bowls and your plates it's better to have a thicker bottom than thin. At this point it's, now you know why, you want enough clay on the bottom to make a nice rim and also if it's paper thin it won't be very sturdy. You can tell if it's thicker thin by listening. You can hear the different tones as it gets thinner to thicker. And if you do that and it starts to move, you're done, because you have no clay left. So that's basically your little bowl. Just a nice little foot on there with a rim, kind of a frame for your signature. Spunge it off, sponge the whole bowl side so you don't know where the sponging or this throwing started and the trimming ended. So it looks like a complete finished piece. Put it back on your board. I'm gonna put this side it's cleaner and then now you can pick it up maybe now you can pick it up and turn it this way and you haven't put your greasy fingerprints on it yet. So I'm going to put it back on the wheel and if you knock it gently, it'll come off. Now you can just turn it around. I don't bother to center at this point because I don't want to. I'm just taking off the mess that the turning it upside down made on it. So I'm just sponging the top and there's a nice little finished bowl without any fingerprints on it without any squishing or destroying in the trimming process. It sits on the table with shadow and undercut and it's a nice little bowl to have in any kitchen. So that's trimming your bowl. Yesterday we threw the plate. It sat on a plastic overnight and it's dried to the state of leather hard meaning it's soft enough that we can take clay away or we could add clay to it but yet it's firm enough to stand up to the process and the handling. So what we're going to do is we're going to turn it upside down and trim it making it as tidy on the bottom and as finished it is on the top. Trimming gives it some undercut so the bottom is in shadow. It also gives it presence on the table. We threw this plate on the board so we want to trim it on the board and just as yesterday as we trimmed on the board we put water on the little balls of clay and on the bat so it stays stuck through the process. We'll do the same today. You want to make sure that it is wet enough that it doesn't take the moisture from your piece that you're trimming away and then it comes undone halfway through. So I call this the sandwich technique. I've wet the board and I'm going to put the wet board on top of the plate and turn it upside down that way so I can remove it from the bat without touching it and knocking it off center. Plates are hard enough to make as it is you don't need to get it to this state and wreck it. So now it's off the board. I like to at this stage scrape that stuff off. You don't want, if you do reclaim you don't want to put that in your bucket because this is open wood and there are little, sometimes little chips will come off and if you get that in your reclaim and a little piece of wood is in the clay it will get into your next piece and it'll burn out and leave a little hole and again the same thing is the nicer the plate the more propensity it has to have a hole in it from the chipped wood. So just the stuff you scrape off of that just throw it out, don't try to reclaim it. Okay now this was thrown on a bat and the boards sometimes are not completely flat and these ones, the throw it on aren't flat and sometimes these aren't completely flat. You want to make sure before you do anything else that your plate is flat, that it's not higher than one side so as it spins it does this. So we're going to just drop the needle down and if it touches all the way around it's level. If it's not level, what you can do is the side that's not level is you can get a little piece of clay and just lift up the bat a bit and raise that side until it is level. But this guy is level. So now I want to make this level and now I want to make sure it's in the middle. If it was way over here you could see as it comes around and touches the needle the part that is the furthest away from the center touches the needle. We wouldn't put it that far from center but it's the same principle. The scratch the mark it makes is the mark that has to move to the center. So you center that in front of you put your fingertip on one side and your fingertip on the other your thumbs in the middle. Some people like in a plate a larger piece to make a mark so you know which way you're going and so you know which way to push and then you push a little bit. At that point you erase your lines. You also want to make sure when you're pushing the plate that you're pushing the plate and not the board. Often the board will move and the plate doesn't and you don't really realize it and it takes a long time to center it. So make sure only the plate moves push it gently toward the center and then until it's centered. Now the needle touches all the way around and it's level on the bottom so now I can trim it. So I'm going to cut away this excess piece right here making it a nice smooth line from the top of the plate to the bottom. Notice how my elbows are on my knees my hands are joined at all times keep your elbow on your knee and your hands joined together. Now this state you can just leave it this way or I like to give it a ridge to sit on and it just gives it more presence on the table and it just has a definite bottom, wall and top it looks like it's a plate. Now you want to cut the inside away some people like to because they're not sure when you first start trimming of how much of a foot you want if you drop your needle down you'll say that's way too thin or way too thick I like to the middle that's just right and then I'm going to do is I'm going to trim the rest of this stuff away. I always work on the radius going out to the edge and you have your mark there as a guideline to stop at. There's no real rules of how wide your foot should be just what looks good to you it's your plate you can do it your way. We talked about thick bottoms before quite often plates don't have that much bottom and so you don't want to do a lot of trimming because you can go right through and if it is paper thin if it does survive the whole drawing and firing process it won't last very long in your kitchen. So we just make a definite ridge and that is your plate. Now you want to sponge off the trimming mark sealing your clay back up again and it's a trimmed plate. Now I'm going to go back to the sandwich method again I'm going to put the board on the top going to lift up the bottom one then now I can lift my plate up without touching it put it back on the board I threw it on and then if you tap those gently it'll come off maybe it's not listening there it goes and you put it back on the wheel I don't worry about centering it perfectly at this stage just near the center because all I'm going to do is sponge the ridge that sat on the bat and got messy from the trimming get rid of any fingerprints and there's your plate now it can sit under plastic until dry it's important that plates dry slowly they like to crack the edges will dry first and then if you allow them to keep drying too quickly they'll just open up a little crack they'll have a little crack right there every time so always allow a plate to dry slowly under plastic if you can elevate it on a cookie rack or a baking sheet it just allows air on the bottom and the top and allows it to dry evenly