Ceramic Bowls: Wedging Clay

Video Transcript

"So we are making a set of cereal bowls here today and our first step was to weigh the clay. The next step is to wedge the clay. What we have here is a wedging board which is a piece of plaster covered in material and the plaster actually absorbs moisture so that we have a good dry place to wedge and it won't get too wet and the clay won't stick to the surface. Wedging is the primary reason we wedge clay is to get any remaining air that is inside the clay out of the clay. So the first thing we do is just put it down on our wedging surface and start kneading it, much like dough and you are just kind of moving it around in a circular motion like this and as you can see what I'm doing is spiraling the clay which prepares it for the wheel and puts the clay into a nice spiral pattern which is going to make it easier to throw and I'm going to pat the clay into a ball once again. This makes the whole process of centering the clay a lot easier once you get on the wheel. I'm going to repeat the process with this one. So now what we've done is weighed and wedged the clay and the next step is going to be the wheel and we will get to that in just a moment."