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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