Ceramic Bowls: Trimming a Foot

Video Transcript

"O.k. so now we centered up our pot to be trimmed and the next thing we're going to do is trim a foot onto it, and we're going to use these tools here for that; that I showed you earlier. And just a quick note if your clay feels a little dry you can always just give it some moisture like this; o.k. so the first thing we're going to do is trim the outside edge here and I like to use a tool like this which has a bunch of different surfaces, and I'm going to use this surface here to simply trim in a rounded edge. It's important to look before you start doing this at the bottom base of your bowl and feel how much clay you have left in there. I've left a little over quarter inch so I know how much clay I want to take off. So now as you can see I've created an outside edge and I can put a little detail in there at the other end; something like that, as you can see this has created a nice edge for the bottom of my bowl. Now I'm going to move over to the top edge and I'm going to draw my smaller tool across the top to take any unevenness out of the surface like so. Now what we're trying to do when we put a foot on the bottom of a pot is make it so that it's not one whole flat surface. So there's a nice foot so that if the bowl is sitting on an uneven surface it has a tendency to sit flat. So now what I'm going to do is just cut out the inside edge being aware of how much clay I have underneath and now you can see this clay is ready to be trimmed because it's not sticking to itself; I can simply dust it off and here we go, smooth out this lip and as you can see what we have now is a nicely trimmed foot on this bowl. I'm going to repeat the same process with this one and then I'm going to show you a couple little tips on finishing up, and we'll be doing that next."