Pottery Pitcher: Finishing Up on the Wheel

Video Transcript

"So in preparing this pitcher for the drying closet and to be dried out there is a couple of important things we need to do. The first thing is to get any remaining water out of the inside that is in there and what I am going to do is use this sponge and I am just going to dip it down inside, collect up any water that is in there and can you hear it, then pull the sponge back out. Now this is a very important part because if we leave water in there this vessel is going to dry out unevenly and the bottom is going to stay wet which means when we try to pull the pot off the bat later on it will often times just pull the bottom out of the pot or in the worst case scenario it will actually seep into the walls and make the pot collapse. Either scenario we don't want and it can also make it crack underneath. So the last thing we are going to do to prepare it for the drying closet is just release it from the bat and we may have to do this again later but it is good to do once you have thrown it and for this we are going to use this wire tool and I'm going to turn the wheel slowly and I'm going to put the wire down on to the bat and simply draw it underneath the vessel. Now it is important to do this while the wheel is turning because if I just pull this wire underneath it while it is still I will pull a little chunk of clay out of the bottom here and that will make it hard when it comes time to trimming or if you just want to leave it with a nontrimmed base it is going to make an uneven surface for it to sit on so now we have completed and prepared our pitcher to be put into the drying cabinet and the next section is going to be trimming and then putting a handle on it to hold it. So we will talk about that in a little while."