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Essays

Pottery Class: Day 5 Posted Aug-24-2005


Follow along with the fun! My 6-week Pottery Class Journey
Intro : class one : two : three : four : five : six

Trimming and Decorating

Class Experience:

I will complete a bowl ... that will be protected and dry without someone touching it so it can be fired.

Well! My bowls survived a week of "leather" drying in the studio and were happy to see me again. If they only knew what was in store for them they might have retreated back under their plastic covering!

Tonight was all about taking those bowls and trimming the excess clay (weight) off of them, and giving them a more refined form. You can see application of this technique when you turn over a piece of pottery and see a "foot" on it, usually a rim-like ring with a void center. That's done during the trimming stage.

Since my bowls were amazingly bad examples of good pottery form, there was plenty of dead weight clay to trim off them. The trimming process includes placing them back on the wheel upside down (securing them with pieces of wet clay), and using the wheel like a lathe as excess clay is trimmed away.

This refining stage for a beginner can turn out disastrous if too much trimming is done. One (me) can easily gouge too much from a foot void and break through the bottom, or get trim happy on other parts of the piece. And once the clay is taken away, you can't put it back. Because of these risks, I opted for Stella to use one of my bowls in a class trimming demo, so I could be sure at least one would survive the night. Stella did it with ease, and the bowl looked great.

I worked on my other piece for most of the class, and miraculously managed NOT to destroy it. My kid-glove approach was too careful though, and I think more could have been trimmed away. Oh well.

The final fun of the night was adding some finishing touch decorations on the bowls. Others in the class happily introduced me to some cool tools for doing this, a few that reminded me of baking utensils. That's where creativity really gets to play — in the decorative embellishments. Perhaps I should mention that it is possible to produce stunning errors in this process as well (who would have thought that a decorative line circling the outer circumference of a bowl might not meet with its starting point?). Still great fun.

Stella patiently watched me finish and then had everyone carry their pieces down to the kiln area where they'd dry out a few more days before getting their first firing. After that, we move onto glazing.

While we were in the drying room, my eye caught some clay sculpture projects done during another class running parallel to ours: the daytime clay camp. That class is working with clay in a "hand building" process without the wheel. I looked on with envy at some of the fun stuff coming out of that class, which ironically I was signed up for initially but cancelled due to my participation in the Kids Art Camp. (© 2005 Chris Dunmire)

Next: Pottery Class: Day 6

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