Pottery Salsa Bowl: Wedging the Clay

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 series of pottery lesson videos, a ceramics expert will demonstrate how to throw a clay pottery salsa bowl, which is a large bowl for chips which contains smaller bowls for salsa and guacamole. He will explain each step of the process, from shaping the clay for the bowl to pulling the clay for the walls of all three bowl. Watch this series and become a better potter.

Video Transcript

"So we're going to make a salsa dish which is going to be one large kind of flat bowl with larger bowls. And then a set of little bowls inside to put guacamole, stuff like that in. So it's going to be one bowl with three small bowls inside. And you want to start off with a good wedge here. See I've got it going. Folding in on itself. And then folding in on itself. Really important that you give your clay a good wedge. And this is how I like to approach these type of things. If I'm going to make a salsa bowl that consists of three different objects? I'm going to have, one bowl come off, I'm going to throw it off the hump then one bowl's going to come off of here, the other bowl's going to come off, the other bowl's going to come off then the rest of the clay that's left I'm going to make that final bowl with. So if you think about it ahead of time like that you're going to be a lot more productive. So now we're ready to get our tools together and get on the wheel."