Pottery Pitcher: Attaching Clay

Video Transcript

"Okay so preparing the bat to put the clay on to is a very important thing and it can hamper a lot of beginning ceramicists if they don't get it right and what we are going to do is you see these two holes in the bat, we are going to place those on the pins. Here we go. Now we've done that and it is important now to get a good clean surface to stick your clay to. Now if the bat is very dry the clay won't stick. If we have excess water on there the clay also won't stick and it will slide off. An introductory ceramic student will often have a lot of water on there and try to stick the clay down and it's a big mess. You spend far too much time trying to get the clay stuck on the wheel so this is a very important thing. We take some water on the sponge and this is how I like to prepare a bat. I simply wet down my bat allowing as much water as I like to get on to it. Now I am going to take my towel, a little dry section of my towel and I'm going to run it over that spot. So now we have prepared the bat for the clay and we are going to attach the clay to the bat and we are going to sort of get it in a spot that looks fairly centered up and you can see that the way we have wet it too it helps us because there is now a round ring on the wheel and I am going to put my hands on either side of this lump of clay and slap it down, give it a few pats and you can see a lot of the work has been done for us. Now we are ready to start centering this lump of clay and that is a whole process in itself and we are going to get to that in this next exercise."