How to Make a Coil Pot

Video Transcript

" Hi! This is Roy Stringfellow for expertvillage.com. Today we’re doing a coil pot, as I mentioned in earlier segments, and at this moment what we’re going to do is build some coils. There are a couple of ways to build coils. First, is by hand, actually manually by hand. So you take a ball of clay, pull a piece of the clay off, and begin by rubbing the clay between your two hands, something like this. You begin getting the form of maybe a clay rope kind of look like that. What I like to do, because my hands aren’t quite as wide as the clay I’m going to have going, is put it on a flat surface and very gently begin to roll the clay out. You can do it with all kinds of speed, whatever you feel comfortable with, but the thing to do is remember you have a length of clay that you want to have bring out here. If you keep your hands in one position, you’re going to have a critter that comes out of this. What I do is kind of roll the clay, paying attention to both ends, and move my hands out with the clay so that it doesn’t split or fall apart. Then you notice that you can get long and longer pieces of clay and coil. You have to pay attention. Like this place here is becoming a little too thin, so I’ll try not to get that one too much with my hands. I slowly roll over this clay and then make it the length that I think I’m going to be able to work with, and the thickness that I’m going to want on my clay pot. Now, as we roll this clay out, you’ll notice it gets longer and longer. Sometimes your going to have this thin spot that’s eventually going to break off. What I do is I say well lets cut our losses, lets move that over there like that. Now I’ve got a piece of clay that’s a little bit more workable and I’ll move it out like that. You can tell by working the clay with your hands this way, you’re going to have eventually some long pieces that are going to be a little bit unmanageable. So this a more difficult, although this is the accepted and accepted way of making coils for a coil pot. Now, we didn’t lose this piece, we’re just simply going to bring it over here and attempt to make it the same size. My idea is that you want your coils about the same thickness and diameter. You’ll see as we put them on a form in a pot, why we want something like that. The other way to make coils is with an extruder, and we’ll talk about that in the next segment. "