Tap Centering Clay in Pottery Bowls

Video Transcript

"The next part of pottery making is to trim a foot on the bottom of your bowl. The trim foot is just it just makes the pot rise up the table off the surface a little bit. Now if you look at a pot that let's see let's try this one, a pot that I made yesterday you can see the different between a unfinish foot and a finish foot. So what we do is we let the clay dry up, maybe so it kind of like leather hard you can think of it like a belt or your shoe and we would take this and flip it over on the wheel and trim a ring foot on to it. You don't always have to have a ring foot but that is what I like to see on a ring foot and we are going to start that by. We are going to put this bowl over here, I'm going to use a different surface to trim on this is a foam pad and it is on a board which this is also it is called a bat or a board. I take this hard surface off, put that off to the side and put on this foam surface. These little holes fit right into these pins here. I take my bowl and I put it on there now I have to do this whole process of centering, again just like I center with the clay pushing my hands down I have to center this. I will show you how it looks off center I will put it really off. You can see it touches my finger only on one side so I have to get that to be in the center so I can eye it a little bit I can put it towards the center. Okay it is still off a little bit so I'm going to do what is called tap centering and that means that I'm going to watch the pot hit my finger off center and then as it hits there I'm going to push with my other finger with my hand I should say and now it is touching evenly all the way around and that is called centering. "