Tools for Making Pottery Mugs

Series Summary

Ceramics, the craft of forming pottery, is over twelve thousand years old, pottery appearing in the tenth millennium before the Birth of Christ. The pottery wheel was invented between the 6th and 2nd millenniums B.C. in Mesopotamia and completely changed pottery production, allowing pottery to be created much faster and more uniform in shape. Today, in the twenty-first century, pottery is produced on a large scale; however, individual potters can mix their own clay or dig it from the ground and focus more on the art and beauty aspects of creating ceramic pottery. A ceramics artist can use the potter's wheel to throw many different types of ceramic vases, pots, and bowls. Learn how to make pottery mugs on the potter's wheel in this free ceramics video series featuring artist Chris Cook. Cook will demonstrate how to center clay on the pottery wheel, how to open clay on the wheel to make pottery mugs, how to prevent cracks in pottery when throwing on the wheel, how to pull the walls of a pottery mug, how to form the rim of a pottery mug, how to form curves on a pottery mug, how to trim a pottery mug, and how to remove a pottery mug from the bat.

Video Transcript

"Right, now we're going to do some mugs with some handles on them. Handles can be intimidating but I'm going to show you a few methods that you can try and one of them will work out for sure. So what you want to start out with once again is the, that cylinder of clay that you can use to keep coming back and cutting the proper amount of clay that you need while you're sitting down at your wheel head. So you're not coming up and working your table, then sitting down, working, working, coming sitting down. So you want to get, you've got your cylinder ready, got your towel ready, you got your tools. Two sponges, potter's knife, wire tool with no kinks, and trimming tool which eventually we're going to use. It's good to have it out, and your needle tool, and a rubber rib somewhere in here. Okay, you got this, the blue rubber rib and I mean to say, there's also a black rubber rib and you can tell by the colors. The company makes them. The black rubber rib is really rigid and it's used for certain things but not for what we're doing. This blue one is really flimsy. That's the one you want to use for this process here. So now that we've got our tools ready, we've got our water ready, we've got our ware board set up where we can get right to it by sitting down. We're ready to get down on this production."