Pulling the Walls of a Pottery Mug: Wheel Throwing Techniques

Video Transcript

"Okay, now that we've established the bottom. You want to maybe clean up the wheel head a little bit. Just take your sponge, clean it down. Don't really so much worry about the bottom of this yet. I mean you can if you want. Take your potters knife, and straighten that out, just so it doesn't look so wobbly. But it's on center, it's doing what it's supposed to do here. We're going to start, we're going to start lifting this guy. There's not much throwing involved. There's a lot of pinching. What you want to do is you just want to pinch and pull. Now I'm pinching from the bottom , pulling to the top and stopping just underneath the lip. I'm stopping maybe about a thumbs, you know thumbs distance away from the lip here. So you don't want to come all the way up to the top, it's unnecessary. Pull it in and a little collar with your hand. Just collar it on in. Now say you know, you want to make a pot bellied mug at this point, so you don't really want to go too tall because we're going to bring it out right here. We're going to leave some clay there. We'll pull clay from here, we're going to bring it to the middle here and we're going to bring it out. So in order to do that you want to place the clay in the right places. Because if you've brought it up too high it's going to be too thin and when you go to pull out the walls they're going to collapse. So I'm going to show you how to place the clay in the belly."