Video: Clay Pottery Drying Tips

Before you can trim and define clay pottery you have to let it harden. Learn about the correct hardness to trim and perfect your clay pottery from an expert in this free video clip.

Video Transcript

Okay, so I've got a lid and I've got a base that have both firmed up. They've sat about a day; you want to make sure that it's firm enough that you can't easily push it around. This stage is called leather hard. When you smear, you should not be able to smear anything. But your fingernail should easily be able to make an indention. It's kind of like Parmesan cheese, or any other hard cheese. That's what stage you want this to be at for this step. So, at the wheel here, we want to take off the bat that we were using to throw and set that aside. We also want to take off our splash pan. We don't need that for this step. So we'll just slide that off the wheel, and this has a lot of slip in it from where I was throwing. I gather my slip in a bucket behind me, and I just save this for later. It can be used for other things. If you have a pug mill, you can use it for remixing your clay. There are a number of things you can do with it, don't throw it out. So now we're ready and we're going to trim this lid to fit because it's a little bit too big.

Clay Pottery Drying Tips

Comments

Related Ads

Related Articles & Videos