Rolling Pin Tips for Clay Pottery

Video Transcript

"Now of course the slab roller is the easier way to go, but not everybody owns that piece of equipment, so I'm going to show you how to make a nice slab of clay with just a rolling pin and your table. Now my table here is covered in canvas, that way when I'm throwing the clay, it's not sticking, it gives it a nice surface to absorb a little bit of the water as well, if you're letting your clay set up. So in order to make a nice big slab with the rolling pin, I'm going to stretch this out a little bit more. I probably want to get it to be in the end a little bit more than a quarter of inch thick. That's a good thickness to be sturdy enough to use and thick, you know thick enough to hold up. So I've got it a little bit thicker than that right now. I'm going to take my really big rolling pin here and I'm just going to kind of stretch that out a little bit more and make it nice and smooth. Having a really wide rolling pin helps because then you're more likely to have the same thickness all the way across. If you have a really thin rolling pin you're going to have to do it in a couple of different places and you might end up with ridges in the middle. So once you've got it rolled out to about the thickness that you want you want to take some kind of drywall knife and smooth the surface. Helps to, to clean off your knife first. And you're just compressing the clay and smoothing the surface. You did get some compression with that rolling pin, but this gives you just a little bit more. And if you have a few ridges, that's okay because we're probably going to end up wiping those out in the next steps of the process. So now we have a nice slab of clay."