Making the Base for a Clay Coil Pot

Video Transcript

" Hi! This is Roy Stringfellow for expertvillag.com. Our next step in building our coil pot is after we’ve placed the bottom of the pot into the form that we’re going to be using, what we’re going to do is take a tool like this and begin scoring around the edge of this bottom. We want to make just little deep marks around here. What this is going to do is allow the first coil, along with the slip that we’re going to place on this, to bond a little bit more solidly with out pot. Get a little of that oil off of there. After we’ve scored the bottom of the pot, what we’re going to do is actually make our first coil. If you remember, what we did was place the clay into the extruder. We’ll just simply operate the extruder this way and squeeze out a piece of clay or coil, cut it off here, set it aside. In order to help this, what I’ll do is take this coil and sort of pinch the end of it. Get it ready and take some of our clay slip with these little sausage type sponges. Get the slip on the sponge and place it around the edge of this clay bottom. Now we’re ready to put on…it doesn’t have to cover it completely, but now we’re ready to put on the our first coil. What we do with this simply take the coil and make sure that it’s pressed against the inside or the top part of the bottom. It’s a little slippery with WD40, but if you do this you’re going to be glad that you put that on there because this clay will stick to the side of whatever you choose to put there. Now the other thing that we do, right at the very end of our coil what I like to do is make sure that I put a little bit more of the slip right here, which will help, and I should have scored that a little bit, but it will help the two clay bodies attach to each other. Then I’ll take this little instrument and make sure that the clay is pulled down on top of the coil that’s there. So if you look at it, this is the very basic beginning of what we’re going to call our coil pot. "