Wheel 1 Class Notes!

Syllabus

Studio Procedure

We are fortunate to have a large, well equipped and well organized studio at the community school.  The tips below will help keep things running smoothly.

- We supply all the tools you will need for class.  These are kept in specific labeled containers.  At the beginning of class, you can gather the tools you'll need that day, and at the end of class return them (clean) back to their containers.  If you can't find something you are looking for, ask the studio monitor.  Please don't steal your neighbor's tools!  (without asking. :)

- Our large equipment is also used by everyone, so feel free to use any of it that you need, and always clean it (and return it if you moved it) when you are done.  This includes cleaning out the extruder, and of course your wheel.  

- We reclaim all of our clay at CSA.  All this means is that when you are done working for the day, return any collapsed pots or slab scraps to the wedging board, put any trimming or dry scraps into the reclaim bucket, and pour any throwing sludgy water into the reclaim bucket.   We'll be using this clay lovingly re-wedged by our studio monitor for slabs and extrusions later on.  

- If your work happened to get a little... over zealous, please be courteous and clean up the giant mud lake you made or the wall graffiti, or the scrap mountain...  

Stoneware Clay

At CSA we work with beautiful versatile stoneware clays.  We currently use a buff white stoneware (Miller/Laguna #55), and a warm red stoneware (Miller/Laguna #80).  Both have great throwing and hand building properties and work well with our glazes, making beginning throwing easier and also giving professional results for advancing students.   (I use many of the same glazes and clays in my personal studio).  

So what exactly is stoneware and why do we use it?  Well, basically, stoneware is what your commercial dishes are: It is non-porous (unlike a flowerpot, which makes a bad coffee mug), it is food safe, microwave safe, and dishwasher safe.  Of course it can also be used for non-functional items too.    

Stonewares fire at a higher temperature than earthenware (those flowerpots).  The third main type of clay is porcelain, which can fire even hotter than the stonewares.  Our stonewares fire to about 2170 F.  

If you want to know more about clay and clay types, I highly recommend poking around in the bookstores and doing some reading online - it's a fascinating topic.  In the meantime we can keep it simple and just say that we're taking some crushed gooey granite which is made up of alumina and silica, shaping it into something cool, and heating it up until it fuses together in a crystalline structure (kind of like cooking sand to make glass - sand just has the silica without the alumina).   After we cook it once, we then coat it with glaze, which is again alumina and silica, but this time has more silica, and cook it again until all that silica melts and fuses into a beautiful glassy surface on our awesome pot.  

Wheel Throwing

  
1.      Wedge up a lump of fresh clay.  Remember to use short rocking motions rather than letting the clay fold over on itself (burrito wedging – good to eat but bad for making pots).  Finish with the clay in a ball shape. 

 
2.      Level a bat on the wheel head, get it slightly damp and slap your wedged ball firmly into the center.  If the clay is too far off center, peel it off and slap it again. 

 
3.      With the wheel running FAST, and your hands and the clay wet, slowly bring your locked hands slowly down onto the clay.  Keep your left hand along side of the lump, riding the bat, and your right hand on top.  Make sure your arms and elbows are anchored into your body as firmly as possible.  Use your body weight and the centripetal force of the wheel do the work – don’t try to muscle the clay into place with your hands and arms.  Remember to also remove your hands slowly from the clay, always with the wheel still spinning.

 
4.      Alternate pressure with your left and right hand to bring the clay up into a cone and back down into a disk, respectively.  Don’t let the clay fold over itself in this process, or you’ll be introducing air or slip bubbles.  Add as much water as you need to keep the clay slippery all the time.

 
5.      Once the clay is in place (and you’ve brought it up and down at least once), keep your hands on it to shape it into an appropriate starting shape:  Flat and wide for vessels that will be flat, or more of a tall shape for things that will go up. 

 
6.      Again with the wheel running fast, and using lots of water, lock your hands, anchor your elbows, and poke a hole in the center with your left thumb.  Stop the wheel to check the depth of the bottom with a pin tool.  Stop when you’ve reached about a quarter of an inch. 

 
7.      Using the fingers of your left hand under the fingers of your right hand, pull the floor of the pot to an appropriate distance (more for a wide vessel, less for a narrow one).  You can experiment using your left thumb on the bat as guide to keep the floor even.  Check the floor depth with a pin tool – it should be an even quarter inch all the way.  Don’t pull the floor farther than your original lump circumference. 

 
8.      Compress the floor with a sponge.

 
9.      Reset (re-center) the walls using your left hand to put pressure on the inside and outside of the wall, and your sponge to put pressure on top. 

 


10.  With the wheel on a medium speed, begin to pull the walls up.  Use your left index finger on the inside and your right middle finger on the outside.  As always, lock your thumbs, and also strengthen your fingers by supporting them with the other fingers.  Start moving the clay from the very bottom on the bat all the way to the top.  You’ll want to use less pressure as you go up.  Don’t try to pull too much at once.  Repeat pulling until the walls are a nice even thickness, just slightly fatter on the bottom than the top.  Consecutive pulls will want decreasingly slower wheel speeds.  Remember to reset and compress the rim after each pull or two.  Use less pressure to do this as the walls get thinner.


        Pull your walls up cylindrically.  Save shaping for the last few pulls. 

        11.  Wet trim the bottom with a wooden tool.  Try to match the outside shape to the inside shape as closely as you can.  If your pot has a precarious shape, it is okay to leave some extra clay to keep it from collapsing, but you want to get as much off as you can to save work trimming later. 

 
12.  Take the bat off the wheel and wire-tool the bottom of the pot. 

 
13.  Re-look at the pictures in Don Davis’ book, Wheel-Thrown Ceramics, on wedging and throwing.

 
14.  Make another.  

 

Trimming

This is to give a nice finish to the *bottom* of your pot, which you obviously can't get to right after you've thrown it and it's gooey wet.  So we trim when the pot is leather hard and can be handled without distorting its shape.  Trimming is not always necessary or desired, depending on the pot shape, but to trim here are some tips:

When your pot is leather hard, run the wire tool under it again to release it from the bat, since it has probably slightly stuck itself back on.  Carefully lift your pot off the bat, flip it upside down and feel the bottom.  If the bottom is significantly softer than the top, just put your pot out for a while, bottom up, to let the bottom firm up.  

When the bottom is medium leather hard, take a minute to compare the inside shape to the outside shape with your fingers, and mark on the outside bottom where you want to locate your foot ring, or start the curve you will trim to.  Also note how far up on the walls you want to trim.  This extra time will make a big difference in the quality of your finished pot.  

Next, place your pot carefully on the wheel head, bottom up, and as close to the center as you can.  Turn the wheel on very slow and either use a pin tool or your finger to feel where the pot is off-center.  Stop the wheel, move the pot a tiny bit, and feel again.  When it's completely centered, use three wads of soft reclaimed clay to anchor the pot to the bat.  Be careful not to knock the pot off center when you're pushing the wads down.  (Double check with your finger).

Start trimming!  Use a large loop tool.  Use the flat part to initially get some of the corner off, and then use the small end to start cutting out your foot ring.  Go back to the flat part of the tool and match the curve of the pot to your foot-groove.  Continue to alternate until you have about a quarter-inch foot.  Next, start marking out the inside of the foot with the small end of the tool, and then take out the center with the flat part (as long as it fits).  As with the outside, continue to alternate little end and flat part until your foot on the inside is a bit less than a quarter inch, and the center is smooth.  

When you think you're done, I highly recommend taking your pot off the wheel and re-feeling (I know that's not a word) the inside and outside shape relationship.  If you still have thick stupid parts, mark them with your fingernail, recenter your pot and trim some more.  You'll wish you did this after you've made some beautiful looking desk bowling balls...  

Last... take a damp throwing sponge and run it along the foot ring to take off the sharp edges and make everything look nice...  Take your wads off and you're done.  Be careful not to mess up your awesome foot ring.  :)

When the bottom surface firms up again, write your name on it and put it on your shelf to dry.  


Glazing

Glazing....  Where to start??  Here's a great way to get going...  Stand in front of the big "glaze chart" (the hanging clay rectangles on the wall) and look for color combinations that make you go, "Ooo..."  Then read what those glazes are and go find them on the glaze shelves.  Or... if you see a great looking pot come out of the kiln, see if you can find the owner and ask them what they did.  

I recommend starting with only two or three glazes your first glazing day.  

Write down what glazes you used!!  Sometimes the teachers and monitor can figure them out, but sometimes we can't...  and I guarantee you will forgot what you put on THE most beautiful pot you make...  

When you've found your magic glazes, bring the buckets to the tables and *read the small notes on the bucket*!  These are extremely important and easy to forget to read.  They can say things like, "This glaze is very runny, use ONLY on rims."  Mix up your glaze vigorously with a whisk.  Be very careful not to contaminate other glazes by moving the whisk from one bucket to the other without cleaning it.  Some of our glazes settle quickly, so you'll want to re-whisk it right before you use it.  

We glaze at CSA by dipping, pouring or brushing.  Sometimes this is determined by the size of your pot and how much glaze is in the bucket, e.g., if you have a six inch pot and two inches of glaze... you can't really dip the whole pot.  Each technique has its own idiosyncrasies, and I'll try to go over as much as I can in classes, but in general, you don't want to have wet glaze in contact with your pot for more than one or two seconds.  So if you are dunking your pot, dunk it under the glaze, count to "one" and lift it right back out.  Shake off the excess.  If you hold it under there for four or five seconds, your glaze will run and you'll be buying CSA a new kiln shelf!  (Whoohoo!)  If you start to layer more than two glazes, the thickness builds up and we again get nice fresh shelves and you lose your favorite pot.  :(

More to come in class...

Hand Building

We'll often want to enhance our thrown forms with hand built features such as handles for mugs, spouts for pitchers, feet for platters, and so on.  Below are a few basic tools and techniques for hand building.  

Slabs 

Plates, platters, soap dishes, wind chimes, jewelery, tiles, boxes... Any of these things can start with a slab.  

Slabs can be made with a rolling pin, an extruder, or the big slab roller in the studio.  It's simple to use and I will demonstrate in class, but some reminders are to flatten out your clay lump after you are done wedging it.  (about one inch thick works good for a 1/4 inch slab).  When you're done rolling the slab, transfer it to some newspaper to work on at the tables, so that the rolling canvas is available for the next person.    

Extrusions

Its a giant play-dough toy for adults...  With it you can make bottles, vases, handles, fast coils for coil building, wind chimes, flutes, and on and on.  We have a variety of shapes you can choose from.   Again, I will demonstrate extrusions, but some tips are:

- Use well wedged clay that is on the soft-side.  Too hard and you'll break your arms AND the extruder... 

- Mist the extruder lightly with water before you put the clay in.

- Clean the thing out when you are done!  Or better yet, get someone else to use it after you so *they* have to clean it out.

Pulling Handles

Just do it...  Stop complaining.  Always pull two more than you need.   Don't be afraid to use the natural shape of your hands - afterall that's what will be holding the handle on the finished vessel.  

Some tips:  Pull *past* the bottom on each pull.  Wet your hand for each pull.  And make sure you've wedged really well - this will get rid of lumps.  

Attaching Parts

Score good and deep.  Use red slip for red clay and white slip for white clay...

Anything with attached parts should be dried sloooowly.  Be patient, it isn't worth having a cracked joint later.    

Extra

Coming Soon, if you bring me food.  

 

ESP Home