Video: Pottery Pitcher: Pulling the Handle

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When pulling a clay pitcher handle, keep uniform pressure during the entire process. Learn how to pull the handle when throwing a clay pitcher in this free pottery lesson from ceramics expert.

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Video Transcript

So we have thrown our pitcher and what pitchers need are handles like this and as you can see we have a handle here that has been pulled out with clay and this is called pulling a handle and I am going to demonstrate this now and what we did is we had a piece of wedged clay and I am simply going to form a nub at the end of this clay rounding it out with my hands and pulling so you can see what I am doing now is stretching off a piece of clay. The important thing in pulling a handle is keeping uniform pressure down the entire length of your pulled handle and you can see what part of my hand I am using and this is a large handle so we want quite a lot of clay to start stretching it down. If you apply too much pressure in one spot you will feel a little bump in the handle you are pulling and you just want to pinch it off at that bump because you won't be able to rescue it. I'm just going to start pulling it down and winding my way around each side. As you can see now we are creating a long thin piece of clay and it is like an elephant trunk or something and what we can do next is kind of go over and just look at our pot and see if we think this is a nice handle for it. We can shape it slightly by putting our thumb in the middle and just running it down and continuing to thin it down. So there we have a handle and this we will now put on this board here and let it dry out for a little while. It is good to let it dry out so that it is leather hard and that means it is flexible and it won't crack but it can also hold up some of its own weight so in the next section I am going to be talking about how to attach this handle to the pitcher.

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Pottery Pitcher: Pulling the Handle

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