Trimming the Lid of a Clay Birdhouse

Video Transcript

"So now we are ready to trim this lid. This one is set up, it is at the leather hard stage. That means that if I smear it the clay doesn't move very much but it is still soft enough to stick in my thumbnail and make an impression. First we want to wet the vat and then we want to wet this interior rim that the lid is going to be standing on. This wetness is going to help us with suction for trimming. Then we flip this upside down. Now I normally tap on the center so with something like this it is hard to reach the point that is down on the wheel to tap so I am just going to spin it and sort of fix it with my other hand. Now once it is centered I am going to press down pretty hard on its center and especially directly over that ledge that it is standing on. Make sure it is on there. Now I am going to take a ribbon tool. It is called a ribbon tool because it makes a nice ribbon of clay and see we lost our center there but you can fix that easily. You can actually tap this back into center this way and we are just going to trim down until we take the corner off of this lid. It is not wanting to stay on center and this happens sometimes but you just have to be patient with it and move it back on center and make sure that you are pushing as hard as you can in the middle. That is another reason that we left some extra space there in the middle as an extra step was so that we could have this room to push down without collapsing it. Now you can also take a wider ribbon tool and it is still not wanting to stay so what I am going to do is I am going to show you another way to hold this in place since it is not wanting to behave."