Hand Building with Clay: Tea Bowl

1. Intro: For this demo, I'll be showing you how to make a t bol using the pinch pot method. I'll cover tools, how to use your hands in an intentional way to help guide the wall of the pinch pot in the direction you want it to go. I'll also talk about cleaning up the shape in the leather hard phase, paying special attention to the rim and the foot. This project is beginner friendly. Hi. I'm Kelly. I'm an artist and educator in NYC. I have ten years of experience teaching ceramics in university settings, as well as community studios. I hope you enjoy this. Oh 2. Instructions & Tool List: Our class project is to make a pinch pot T bowl. To get the most out of this class, follow along with the demonstration at whatever pace feels right for you. Once you've finished with your T bow, take a picture of it and upload it to the project gallery for feedback from me and fellow students. To do this, go to the Projects and Resources tab and then click on Submit a Project. The tools and supplies you'll need include a fettling knife, a large trimming tool, a metal rib, some plastic, a red rubber rib, a small trimming tool, a sure form, water, wooden boards, and a wooden tool. 3. Opening the sphere Expanding the bottom: I've got my ball of clay here, and I took a moment to smooth out the surface, but if it's a little bit bumpy, it's okay. The pinch pot technique is pretty simple, but it can be very sophisticated as a technique if you use it strategically. I'm going to hold the ball of clay in my non dominant hand, take my thumb of my dominant hand and start pushing it, maybe wiggling it back and forth to give it a drilling motion so that it starts to make a hole in the middle of the clay. All the way to the middle, and then slightly pushing past the middle. Now, because this project has a foot on the bottom, we don't want to make the bottom too thin. I'm just pushing down enough so that I feel like I have maybe a half inch of clay still left on the bottom. The next step is to push your thumb down into the hole and start to push out the tip of your thumb while supporting the outside of the wall with the rest of your fingers, all with your dominant hand. Pushing out with my thumb and here's what it looks like. It's a sweeping motion in addition to a push. Once you do that in one spot, turn the ball slightly so that you can get the next spot, turn it a little bit more and you just keep going like that. I'm using my fingertips to also feel the thickness of the wall. I'm trying to keep it even. This is a good opportunity to practice your tactile skills. Tap into the consciousness in your fingertips and using the sensations as your primary source of information to know how hard to squeeze, how hard to push, and also maybe where you should leave it alone. If you feel a thin spot, skip that area, if you feel a thick part, maybe push a little bit harder. Now my hole is expanded at the bottom. If I were to put my finger inside, the top part feels pretty narrow still, but the inside feels very wide. 4. Pinching the walls up and out: Now what I'm going to do is start positioning my fingers just as they were. But as I push out, I'm going to create a little hook with my thumb and start hooking and moving up hooking and pushing out, but hooking while I make it's like a pinching, it's more like a sweeping and hooking and supporting from the outside. The goal here is to continue expanding the shape while simultaneously allowing the wall of the vessel to get taller. As the walls get thinner and taller, the importance of paying attention to the thickness of the clay becomes something you want to pay even more attention to. Because if you end up squeezing and pinching too hard in one spot, you'll end up an area that could crack. So Remembering while you're squeezing your fingertips together, it is like a pinching motion that you're doing, but you're not pinching as hard as you can. Usually when we think about pinching, we're thinking about squeezing our fingertips together as hard as they can in order to compress whatever it is that you're pinching. But that's not really what we're doing here. We're doing the pinching motion, but stopping the pinching motion when we feel that the space in between our fingertips is to the point where we're getting the results that we want in the thickness that is, showing up for us. Now I've pinched my way all the way to the top. If your pinch pot is looking a little wonky, that's okay. It does take practice to make it even. At this point, the thickness of my wall is even, and it's basically the same bottom to top? Now I want to focus on continuing to pinch out just a little bit pushing my thumb just enough to start to widen the shape. Now, we are a t here. As you're making your shape, you can think about, well, what kind of shape t have? Should it be wider? Should it be taller? In a lot of t bowl traditions. We would usually think about the shape being slightly wider than it is tall. But the good thing is, you don't have to be too committed to the height here because later on, when I show you the second part, cleaning up the shape, you'll have an opportunity to make this a little shorter if you want to. I'm just going around with my thumb, continuing to push out and widen the form, keeping it as even as possible. 5. Shaping the foot: Now, let's talk about the bottom for a moment. The bottom here is pretty thick, and that's because we're going to make a foot. If the pinch pot that you were making was not necessarily a table with a foot and you were just making a little dish, you might not leave quite as much clay at the bottom. You might push your thumb a little bit further with that initial hole that you made. You can always switch to the other hand too if your hand gets tired. I am going to call it good right there. Maybe just expanding a little bit more at the bottom. This is pretty good. Like I mentioned. This part here, you don't have to be concerned with completing it now, that's going to come later. Also the texture of the surface. If you love the way that it looks with the subtle fingerprints and that rough texture of the way that the clay looks the way that the clay looks when it's expanding gives you a little bit of this crackling texture that's actually quite charming. If you like that, you can always leave it, but this is something that we will talk about cleaning up later on if you want it to be smooth. Now talking about the foot of the piece. I'm going to turn this upside down, and this part is really fun. I'm going to take my finger and start dragging it around the circumference of the bottom part of the piece. I'm thinking about the spot where the thickness starts, towards the bottom of the piece, I start to feel like the wall blends into the thick base. The part where those connect, that's where I'm dragging my finger around the outside. Again, this part is optional. You can totally make a beautiful little pinch pot that could even be a table without doing this process here. This is just something added to make it slightly more interesting. I've made this little indentation here. Now what I'm going to do is take my thumb and very gently make a tiny little divot in the center of this bottom part. Then I'm going to use my pinchers here to start dragging the clay from the middle out towards the edge, drag, t, and I'm going to do this all the way around. The clay might start to look a little bit mangled because you're asking it to move so far. It's such a delicate thin little aspect of the shape. If it's looking a little funny, that's fine. Because the clay is plastic, you can get away with moving it and blending it and pushing it around in a pretty intuitive way. Once you get it into the position you want, then you can always smooth it and make it look like it had been that way all along. If you want to use two fingers, you can use two fingers. We want to make sure that the part here in the middle of this little crater isn't too thin from the bottom of the inside. If you pick it up and touch some of your fingers to this area here and some to the inside here and you feel like it's paper thin, that means that you may have dragged too much clay over or maybe there just wasn't enough clay there to begin with. If that's the case, you can always blend some clay back into the center. Or you can just say, Oh, well, and start again with a fresh piece of clay. Now I have the clay here to solidify the shape of the foot. Now, in order to make this look nice, I'm going to take my finger and drag it along the outside along the top and the outside. When something is sitting here on the surface of the table, I like to get both hands involved because when it's being held in one hand, I can only use one hand. But when it's being held by the surface it's sitting on, you can use both hands. There's no reason not to. It's nice because it feels like they're working together. Okay. Never underrestimate the power of your phone fingertips to make something look smooth, to blend something together. To drag your fingertip across what appears to be a crack or a crevice or some kind of discrepancy in the way that the clay looks like it's being held together. And we're coming up on the end of this phase of the project. Now, if your first table doesn't look like this, that's fine. It might look a little bit wider or taller. Your foot might be really short and small, if you didn't have much clay at the bottom, and that's okay. Now you can pick it up, set it down, see how it looks. You can give it a little tap. If you feel like it would make the look of the foot slightly more sturdy, Then just take a once over, make sure that you take the opportunity while the clay is still malleable, to smooth out anything that you think needs smoothing. A little finishing touches that you want for the shape. That's the basic idea for the pinch pot footed table, and I do want to show you a phase two of this project where I go in and clean up the shape. But if you're happy with the results you see here after your first attempt, and you don't think it needs anything, then it doesn't need. You can just leave it. 6. Prepping for leather hard: Now, I'm going to be doing phase two when the piece is leather hard. Right now it's plastic. In order to get this to leather hard, I want to either let it sit out maybe for 12 hours or so. It really depends on where you live and how hot it is, what the humidity is like. But somewhere around six to 12 hours is usually a good rule of thumb. If you're thinking of not covering it, you want to just let it harden. If you're going to do that, it's best if you store it upside down. It's going to be more even that way. If you want to set it and forget it, maybe you're working on this at a studio and you know that you're not going to be able to come to work on it for another week or so, you definitely don't want to just leave it here if you do want to do the leather hard work on it. That's when you'll take a piece of plastic, either drape it on top like that or possibly wrapping the whole thing if you want to be safe. If you were leaving it for a whole week, I would probably wrap it underneath like that. 7. Sur-forming the piece: All right. So I've got my leather hard footed t bowl here, I'm going to first check to make sure that it is, in fact leather hard. If I know that it's good to go, it's not too soft and it's also not too dry. I'll first go ahead and start trimming down the piece. If you feel like the object is not too heavy and no aspect of the piece is too thick, then you can skip this step. But I'm going to go ahead and trim things down. I'm going to grab my s form and start grading the side. The goal here is two things actually that are happening. One is I'm planning the surface. If you know that you're going to want to get a smoother surface on there, so it's not so lumpy, this is planing it. But I'm also getting rid of all of the unnecessary weight. After I'm finished with this step, there will be a nice little pile of clay sitting there that was on your piece, and now it's not adding to the weight of the object. So if you don't have a s form, the next best thing that you could use to go through this process is actually just to use your large basic trimming tool and make a diagonal scraping motion across the surface. I strongly recommend getting a s form. It's much easier. All right. Now that I've eliminated most of the extra clay from my piece. Then I'm going to take a good look at the shape and decide if there's something that I could do to make it a little bit more sophisticated. Maybe there's something about the transition from the foot to the main body of the vessel. I like to make sure that there's an intentional unification between the two or an intentional division. Right now it looks like there's neither of those happening. I'm going to take my knife and start making a slicing motion all the way around, make this incision. It's nice to use the long bladed knife here, the feeling knife because you can get a lot of distance with one rotation. Now I'm going to take the knife and hold it on the side while I gently cut into this bottom corner and it will slice off the clay to make a nice little division there. Now I think I'm going to do a similar slicing along the base of the piece on the outside just to clean up the separate ridges there. This is looking pretty good. On the inside of the foot, if it seemed like there was a lot of extra clay in there, you could take your smaller ended trim tool, either the curved end or the squared end and see if you could scoop out a little bit of that. Okay. 8. The lip: The next step is probably the most important part of making the piece feel fully functional. That's tending to the rim, also known as the lip. When you're drinking from a vessel, this part is really important. The first thing I'm going to do is make it flat. Now, if you struggle to make this flat as you're trimming it, there is a technique for that, but I'll be showing you on a different project because I think doing this by hand without doing any real measuring is pretty simple. With your knife, hold it as though you're peeling an apple and just draw the blade around the rim and go slow, go a little bit at a time. You might have to make a couple of rotations to make it even. When you've decided that it's straight enough, take a look and notice how there are two corners here, one on the outside, and one on the inside. In order for it to feel like you can drink out of it easily, it's helpful if you get rid of the internal corner, you only have the external corner there. I'm going to take my knife and slowly start whittling down the inside, going all the way around At this point, I'm going along the inside of where I had just gotten rid of that corner, and now I'm getting rid of the two corners that were left from that slice. You'll just notice some corners and edges here. If you just take your time, going over it lightly, bit by bit, taking your time. You can get rid of the corner so that you now have only an edge on the outside, and then it looks like it's sloping. This is going to create a slide so that if you're drinking t out of this t bowl or something else, as you're drinking, the liquid comes over that curved edge like a slide. And then having the edge there makes it easier for you to anchor the lip against your own lip. Okay. Oh. 9. Cleaning up the inside: Once you feel satisfied with the shape and the thinness of your lip, you can take a look inside and see how smooth or rough it is. Maybe it needs some cleaning up. Now, the inside of a vessel is the hardest part of the object to make smooth. It's helpful if you had already done most of your smoothing while the clay was still plastic. But if you're seeing some rough spots, maybe the edge of the tool had nicked in a couple of areas. You can take your finger and see if you can just use the softness of your own skin, to blend over those little rough spots. It really is the best way to do it. If you try using some tools, maybe the wooden tool will be helpful. Running the edge of this curved end across the rough areas. That can help you out a decent amount. It's worth trying. And if you want to try using a metal rib, you can try that as well, but it tends to be a little bit more difficult. They make metal ribs of all different sizes and shapes. This is something that you'd want to have a variety of shapes on hand, if you wanted to try that. I prefer to just use my fingers. 10. Softening edges: Finishing touches for this piece involve just smoothing out little corners or edges that I want to get rid of. I'm going to use water for this step, and you want to use water very cautiously. I'm just going to dip my finger and then, very gently run it along the edge here just to soften it a little bit, so it's not quite so sharp. I'll do the same thing for the very bottom. If this is really sharp there, it that with some water as well. Then additionally, if you felt like there were any little bumps or things like little bits of crumbs of clay somewhere that you want to smooth out or blend together, you can use a tiny bit of moisture to deal with some of that. Really, this is optional. You don't have to do it. It's only if you are feeling like you need just a little bit of softening. At this point, you could say, this piece is finished, and you can go ahead and fire it, glaze it, and savor a cup of tea. 11. Final thoughts: Thank you for watching the pinch pot Tb demonstration, I hope you got something cool from the insights that I had to offer, remember too that when you're pinching, it's all about the way that you pressurize your fingers in very intentional ways that is going to allow the wall to be built up in the direction you needed to go in. There's a common belief that making a pinch pot is literally just pinching the clay, and there's so much more to it than that. If you want to glaze and fire your work, and you're not sure how because you don't have access to a kn or glazes. I recommend that you check out the PDF that I have included, and it gives you a lot of information about how to get that sorted out for yourself. Did you know that clay shrinks as it's drying? And then again, when it's in the kiln? That means that when you're building your object, if it feels a little too big, that means it's probably going to be a size that you'll like when it's finished. Thank you so much.