Video: Forming the Shoulder of a Clay Coil Pot

Learn how to form the shoulder of a clay coil pot and learn about this and more in this free arts and crafts video series on making pottery.

Video Transcript

Hi! I’m Roy Stringfellow. We’ve build our coil pot up to about this size and the next thing that we’re going to do is pull it out of our form, which is kind of tricky sometimes. You’ll notice this is kind of what you’re going to get. Invert it and the next thing that we’re going to have to do now, and very carefully because you can see how easily that loses it’s form or takes on a form that you may not want to happen. We’ll put it on our banding wheel here and then we’ll begin. You can either build it up higher and taller, depending on what you want to do, or in this case what we’re going to do is begin to build the shoulder of the pot. We’re going to build it so that the clay coils now are not going to go on the outside edge, they’re going to go on the inside edge so that your pot now has a different form to it. What I’m going to do is take one of the pots that I already have in the same stage and begin building that coil up. Obviously, you’re going to have to have more of the coils. We’ve cut a little piece off here and we’ll do the same thing. Where we’ve already got it scored, we’ll score now the inside edge of the coils, because this is where we’re going to start applying our slip. What you have to be aware of now, and maybe a little more sensitive to, is the use of your hands. You’ve got to be able to hold the form that you want on the pot and still press down attaching the coils to the coil that’s already on the pot. So we’ll give that a shot here. Again, we’re going to pinch it like this and then we’ll pay more attention to the fact that we want this coil, as you can see now, go on the inside of this pot. Then we’ll pinch this off again. Then you can add any number of coils. We’ll add another one to this. We always go through the same process just for consistency sake here. Make sure that our pot doesn’t fall apart on us because they can separate as the coils dry. You see how you can pinch it together. There you go.

Forming the Shoulder of a Clay Coil Pot

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