Smoothing the Outside of a Coil Pot

Video Transcript

" Hi! This is Roy Stringfellow for expertvillage.com. We’ve just about completed our coil pot and what we have done is take the outside from this kind of fashion. We’ve shouldered the pot, which is this up here, we’ve created an opening that makes some sense to the pot, and at the same time we’ve smoothed the inside of this pot. What we do then is smooth to whatever degree you want to smooth your pot on the outside. You can do it with your thumb; you can do it with a piece of wood or any kind of instrument to get the effect that you want. Sometimes with the coil pot, I would think that you’d want to leave some of the coils or the impression of the coil that is still present. The thing that I’m going to do with this pot, if you’ll notice on the very bottom of the pot, some of the dryer pieces of clay are beginning to separate. So what I’m going to do to make sure that doesn’t happen is take a damp sponge and simply go around the pot and moisten the clay to where it appears that it’s going to hang in there together. What you don’t want is for your clay pot to dry too quickly. If it dries too quickly the cracks are going to be there and eventually your pot’s going to fall apart. We’ll put that moisture there, put the water there, turn it back on it’s bottom, reshape whatever we have to reshape. That’s a nice thing about the pot still being wet. You can do many things with it, just don’t panic; you can always put it back into the position that you want. Then make sure that when you’re finished with this pot that the bottom and the top sort of dry at the same rate, as well as well as the inside and the outside. An easy way to do that is to take a plastic bag, take spray bottle, kind of squirt it around a little bit, take this plastic bag, and place it over the top. Wala, you have kind of a pot that’s going to dry hopefully at a pretty much constant rate. There you go. "