How to Finish a Clay Pot

Video Transcript

"So now all of our handles, our knobs, everything is on our casserole. It's already been undercut when I threw it on the wheel, so it's complete. Now I just have to cut it off the bat. Take your wire tool, hold it down really firmly against the bat, and then pull. You want to hold it down really hard, because if you let the wire come up in the center, you risk cutting through the bottom of your pot. Now, my knob is sturdy enough that I can actually check and make sure that I didn't do that. So it's still whole, I didn't cut through. That's fantastic. Put the lid back on there. And now I'm just going to take this whole pot off the bat. And what I like to do, instead of signing my name in the bottom of the pot, I actually made a stamp. And if you closely at this stamp, it's a backwards, lower-case "e". My name is Emily, and I've always signed my pots with a little "e". In fact, "Little e Pottery" is the name of my pottery. So, you can do this with anything, though. You can even have a rubber stamp made of your signature. It makes it a lot easier to put your mark on every pot that you make. Now I know you can't see exactly what I'm doing because I'm on the wrong side here, but the pots hanging over the edge of the table just a tiny little bit, and then I'm going to take this stamp and press it right up into the bottom edge of the clay. So now the pot has my mark, it's done. It's ready to dry, and then I can fire it."