Video: Ceramic Plate & Platter Foot Trim

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Trim a foot on a ceramic plate or platter by placing it upside down on the potter's wheel. Learn how to trim a plate foot with tips from a master potter in this free ceramics video.

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Video Transcript

Now we're ready to trim the foot. We're going to do that using a ribbon tool. This is called a ribbon tool, because when you hold it against the clay it makes a nice little ribbon of clay that comes right off. It's nice and sharp. You want to take this, and make the edge of that foot you're going to have; nice and clean. When I made the rim, I left a little bit of extra clay I'd like to talk about. Take a little bit of that out, just so that you can get a little bit of extra weight out of that plate. To leave a foot around the rim, the first thing you want to do is decide how wide you want that to be, and push your ribbon tool in at an angle; to create that foot. Clean it up a little bit. Start in the middle, and push down with the ribbon tool, and in a concentric line; go out. The depth of this is up to you. If you want this bottom part to have glaze on it, you probably want it to be significantly deep, because the plate might tend to sag a little bit in the glaze firing, and if there's glaze here it will touch the kiln shelf. If you're not going to glaze the bottom, it's not as important how deep this foot actually is. And there we have a plate with a trimmed in foot.

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Ceramic Plate & Platter Foot Trim

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