How to Clean Pottery After Glaze

Video Transcript

"I'll be showing you how to take your ceramic piece from start to finish. The next step once we've clear glazed both sides of our piece is to make sure that it's nice and cleaned off and there are no drip marks or the little areas that we need to perfect. So one simple thing to do is, when you look over your piece, you want to make sure there are no drip marks or pools of glaze before you put it in the firing. If glaze pools like in the inside of your bowl, a really good thing to do is to have a really soft fan brush on by, to quickly and just really gently just wipe and spread it out a little bit more. Another thing to look out for is your drip marks. Drip marks are created by, when you double dip your piece, it can, when it runs down, it'll just gather in a thicker area and you just want to smooth those with your finger. There are 2 different ways to smooth it down and get rid of any of those drip marks. The first way is to hand sand it, the other way is to use actually sandpaper. I prefer to use my hand to do it because I can control it much easier and I find sandpaper really abrasive and it's much easier to break through to the glaze and ruin the people's painting underneath. So to hand sand, all we want to do is take your finger and just lightly rub and sort of sand off any of those imperfections. You'll notice when you're sanding you're going to create this very, very extra fine dust and you'll get it on your fingers. And that's exactly what you want. You want to take it very, very gently and rub it until there are no glaze marks. Then we're ready to wipe the bottom and put it into the kiln and get it ready for firing."