Clay Measuring Tips

Series Summary

Making pottery is the art of creating earthenware vessels from clay. The process involves shaping a vessel, by hand or with tools, and cooking it in a kiln. Mankind has been making pottery since the times we first learned about fire. Ancient civilizations used pottery for all sorts of things, from storing oil, wine, and other foodstuffs, to holding papyrus scrolls, the organs of dead god-kings, perfumes, and various religious offerings. Because pottery is durable and lasts long after its creator is gone, it has helped us to learn about entire groups of people that we might have otherwise never known; these hand-crafted objects tell stories, not only from their complex structural designs, but also the carefully wrought stories painted on their surfaces, a sort of iconography of a time and place in history. In this free video clip series this clay expert will be addressing the art of pottery forming and molding the clay with your hands. She will include several examples of natural hand movements you can use to create life in your pieces as well as several creative ideas for new and interesting designs no one has thought of yet. This will make each piece you make special and unique. You will learn tricks for scoring edges of clay, attaching them and even how to ensure each piece is the exact same size. Take a look at these great videos and go play in the mud!

Video Transcript

"Alright now we did our two bowls for our set of five, we're just going to put that over there. And we're going to work on, I'll show you how to make a plate set. But first, I want to be able to trim this piece today. Then I'll let it sit over night, it's nice and it's getting to be a little hard but it's still kind of tacky, you can hear it. But, I want to put it on my absorbent canvass work table here. We'll flip it upside down so the air will expose itself to this base here so I can just get in there, trim a foot on it. So we want to approach the plates at the same way that we did the bowl set. I'm going to use our tubal clay here. Now with plates, I like to use a little bit more clay, so you don't want to have a flimsy plate. So I'm going to use this. It's about four pounds a clay. I'm going to cut it right in half. For the two plates, I'm going to show you how to make. So we'll just take a little bit of clay from this one, about that much, just kind of slam it in there. Alright. So, they're about the same size. Actually, I'll take more off from this, let's put it over here. I'm not going to make gigantic plates, I want to go ahead and make a smaller ones. So those are the same size. So from here, we just want to get this guy centered and we'll take it from there."