Pottery Wheel for Beginners -- Learn How to Make Pottery on the Wheel!

1. Introduction: Welcome to Intro to wheel throwing. I am so excited to bring this class that I've been teaching for years into the digital world. My name is Maya. I run a pottery studio in Berlin called pottery to the people. I've been doing pottery for ten years now and teaching since 2017. Our mission here is to bring the pottery to the people and we help our partners from all over the world come and realize their dreams in clay. I work mostly on the wheel myself. So I'm super excited to bring you in this class today. Let's get started. 2. Understanding the Steps to Make a Pot: Okay. So here's the process that clay goes through from start to finish. So I just wanted to give you an overview before we start on the wheel. So first we'll be working with clay. Now this is what we'll be starting with. This is a stone workload that I use. I definitely recommend throwing with either stone wear or earthenware clay. When you're having this clay in his very wet stage, you want to be doing these two steps. The first one is called wedging. Watching is the process of preparing the clay to go on the wheel. And the second is called Throwing. Throwing is a potter reward for working on the wheel. So once you've done those two steps, you let your piece dry out a little bit and then it enters the phase called leather hard. Now, this piece here is called leather hard. Leather hard is the phase where it's still quite wet, but it's already structurally sound. You can handle it. It will stand up on its own, but you can still wiggle the rim a little bit. You can definitely still feel that it's wet. It's at this stage that we want to finish the bottom of our piece. This part is called trimming. So in the leather hard stage, you go from a very rough bottom to complete it. So once you've trimmed, then you let the piece dry it off completely. And when it's completely dried out, it's called bone dry. This is a bone dry piece. You can see that the color is also significantly lighter than the leather hard piece. This all this means is that it's completely dried out, but it's really important to get to this stage before you put it into the kiln. Because if there's any moisture inside the kingdom, when you put, when you turn on the calendar, it will explode or crack or cause problems. So this usually takes about a week for it to completely dry out. It depends a lot on the climate in your area. Once it's completely dried out, it's ready to go into the best fire. So different studios do it differently, but we fire him for the best at 900 degrees Celsius. And this takes about two days. It's mostly it heating up very, very slowly and cooling down very, very slowly. That's why it takes so long. But at this stage, it changes chemically into a new piece. So you can see that the color is quite different now because it's undergone a chemical transformation. However, this is not completely finished because you can still hear how hollow the pieces versus a finished ceramic is quite solid sounding. The whole point of putting it in this phase is so that we can glaze it because it's still quite pores at this stage and yet strong enough to hold the glaze. So then once you've placed your big square, you can put it back into the column for the final fire. So in RStudio we find our stone where to 1250. It takes another two days and then you open the can and it's magically ceramic. It's completely finished at that point, there's nothing else you have to do. 3. Tools You Will Need: So for the tools that you will need besides clay and we'll, and access to kill, you will need these. A wire to a small sponge, a needle to a trimming tool. I like these ones with a loop on one side and square on the other. I wouldn't nice red bucket of water, a towel, and board covered with newspaper. 4. Preparing the Clay: Weighing & Wedging: So I'm just weighing the clay so that it's all going to be the same size. So I'm going to start with 500 grams of play. For your first piece of somewhere between three hundred and five hundred grams. You don't want to start up too much clay at the beginning. So when I'm working, I'm usually making it separable. It just makes sense for the workflow. Making a bunch in the beginning, a probe on to trim a bunch. But you can start with just one piece if you want to. So we always start out with wedging our clay. This is the process of preparing the clay to go on the wheel. I am going to be working on this board here. It's called the wedging board. This is simply a piece of wood that's wrapped around with Canvas. You can also wedged directly on the table. But I recommend wedging on a porous surface because if I went directly on his table of the play would most likely stick to the table. So if you don't have something like this and you don't have a porous table, you could just throw a piece of cloth that on, that also works. Okay, so when you're starting to wedge, you want to start with your hands on either side of the plane facing one another like you would clap. And then with the bottom part of your hand, you want to push down and forward. Don't want to push too far down, just make it a little bit more flat. And then with the tips of your fingers, you lift it up on its edge. Put your hands again so that this bottom part with your hand is right on the top. And you push it down and forward. List again, reposition the hands, push down and forward. So each time we're turning our risks, you can see my risks are burning as I'm working the clay. So it's less pushing the clay, more turning and twisting the claim. And this is the shape that we're going for here. So you can see on the edges that I'm getting a bit of a spiral effect. This is because I'm turning the clay into itself and mixing the clay. And then you're also getting a bit of overlap down here. This is called a ram's head version of wedging. There's a couple of different types of wedging. So you want to keep doing that for about ten times. If you find that you're folding the clay instead of pushing the clay into itself. That means you're pushing it too flat. You really don't want to make the clay to flat. And then also, if you're finding that your piece of pie is getting longer and longer and longer like a sausage. Probably that means your hands are on top of the clay. You need to keep them on the two sides to keep that clay together. So instead of your hands facing towards you, they should be facing towards each other as you're working. So you want to do about ten in either direction. So I did already about ten. Now I want to roll it up towards myself, put it on its edge, and do ten more. So this will get our clay very thoroughly finished and ready to go. So once you've done ten, you can set your clay assigned and work on the rest of them. So the reason we wedge is for a couple of reasons. One is to mix the claim. I'm using recycled clay right now. So it's really important that I'm mixed the play well. And secondly, we're removing the air bubbles in the clay. This is why you don't want to be folding the clay as you're wedging it is because you're just adding air into it. Air will weaken the clay. We just really want a very solid piece of bone with no air in it. 5. Wheel Basics: So here's our wheel. I'm using a simple arc, a 55, but whenever you have access to is great. I know a lot of people don't have potter's wheels at home. There's a lot of places that have community ceramics, do videos where you can take classes or become a member. So definitely look around in your area for what might be available to you. So for my wheel, the answer which is on the bottom right side. So for right-handed people, the wheel should be turning counterclockwise. If you're left-handed, post pills have a switch where you can switch it to the opposite way. Basically, if you're left-handed, you want to do everything mirror what I'm doing here. So everything I'm doing with my hand do with your left hand? I'm right handed, so I'm going to do at the right-handed way, but definitely find out what works best for you and your body. So if you're right-handed, you want to have your wheel underneath your right foot? And then underneath my left foot, I like to stick a brick. This is totally optional. I prefer it because then it keeps my legs on the same height. So I feel a lot more stable that way. With the paddle, you want to make sure your entire foot is on the panel. With most wheels, you have to actually push down with your heel to take to turn it off. It will just keep going. You take your foot off so you have to push down with your heel in order to turn off the wheel. So make sure you keep your whole foot on it while you're throwing. You want to make sure that you're keeping your back straight. All of your angles should be at right angles. So your knees should be banned at right angles. You should be sitting flat. You'd like to be sitting parallel to the ground and your back straight. When you do lean forward, you should be pivoting at your hips and not crunching over the wheel. Otherwise you end up with back problems. So make sure you're keeping your back straight as much as possible as you're throwing. 6. Centering: So first, you want to coat your wheel with just a little bit of water. Just run a wet sponge over the surface. You don't want any pools of water. Just wanted a little bit wet. And then take your first piece of clay. And what I like to do is kinda pound one side into a more circular shape. Well, you don't want to do is attach it to the wheel in a spot that will have a hole in it, because then you end up with a hole in the bottom of your pot. So best to round out one side of your clay before you attach that to the wheel. And now I just want to give it a little throw just to make sure it sticks. If it's not in the center of the wheel, you can always move it. And if you're not sure it's dark enough, you can give it a few parts from the top. Make sure it's really whilst stuck here. Okay? So the first step is to start bringing everything to the center. So I'm just going to very slowly turned my We'll put it on its slowest setting. And then with the bottoms of my hands, I'm going to start counting it into a cone shape. Just like that. It doesn't have to be perfect. Next step we're going to go into actually making it perfect. So the next step is called centering. And this is where things get a little tricky because you have to do a few things at once. Now. Now we're going to introduce water. And from this point on, you should always have a nice coating of water on your clay. So we should always feel very slippery beneath your hands. If at anytime you starting to feel a bit sticky, just add a little bit of water. You always want to keep it up, slippery underneath your fingers. So that's step number one. You want to add the water. Number two is this left hand is going to be our inward pressure. So what I'm doing, I'm pushing from this bottom part of my left hand. I'm pushing straight from my elbow into the bottom, into the centre of the clay. So you should have a straight line from your elbow into the centre of the clay. Then right behind my elbow. I like to put my leg to secure it and give me extra strength. So this is gonna give me a lot of strength to push the clay inward. While that's happening. I'm going to keep the sponge in my right hand and push down with my right hand. So I'm going to push with this fleshy part of my hand here. This knuckle here where my finger turns into my hand. This part should be right in the middle of the clay. So I'm going to just push with both. So all three of these things are happening at the same time now, I'm squeezing my sponge to let out some water. I'm pushing with my left hand and with my right hand until we get this shape here. So this is the centered shape. Now, I know it's centered. Well, I can put my finger anywhere around the pot and if I close my eyes, I don't feel it moving at all. Okay. So give me like it should be all together as one piece in the center. So the speed is your friend right now. So you really want to be going pretty fast on the wheel. If you're going too slow, you're just going to have to work harder with your hands. So definitely use the speed you can crank it up all the way to full speed if you want. Definitely be going more than half speed. Then if you're still struggling to get it into center, this does take a lot of practice. But another thing that you can do is kind of oscillate between up and down. So you can push more with your left hand and less with your right hand. So it will go up and then push more with your right hand and less with your left hand so it goes down. So this is kind of a trick that you can use to like kinda wiggle it into position. If you're still struggling, you need to check your form. So always make sure that there's a straight line between the centre of the clay, the bottom of your left hand, your elbow, and then somehow you're securing the elbow. So it doesn't matter where you secretly, although some people do, they're neither side can even embrace it against your ribcage. Doesn't matter. Your body is yours and totally different from everyone else's. So you have to find what works for you. Then. For your right hand, you want to check again that this part of your hand is flat, is parallel with the wheel. The center of the clay is right where this knuckle is and that you are relaxed. And it also like to rest my right elbow on my right leg as well for extra support. You shouldn't be pushing very hard now. You should just be relaxed and exhale into the form. 7. Making & Opening the Hole: The next step, once our pieces completely centered, you can get rid of our sponge. Now we need to make the hole. So I'm going to leave my left hand in the exact same position, but I'm not going to push anymore. This is just resting here. And it's here to support my right hand because my right hand is going to float above the clay and attach itself to my left hand or left hand will stabilize my right hand. And then I can start pushing down and center. So I like to do is start a little bit out of the center and push down and forward. So whenever at an angle so that the turning of the wheel finds my center for me. And then it just kinda brings my finger down. Anytime you need extra water, just grab some extra water. You don't want the clay to be sticky right now. And then once you feel like you're about half centimeter from the bottom. So you sort of get a feeling for when you're close to the bottom as you work. But you can, there's two ways you could check. So one thing you can use, you can just put one finger on the inside, one finger on the outside. And you can feel the difference between the bottom of your pot and the bottom of the wheel. Dollars and you can do is use your needle tool, sticker needle to straight through the pot until it hits the wheel. Slide your finger up, and then remove it and you can see how much space you have. This hole that you make is so small that it's just going to heal itself. Yeah. So that's another way you can check. You get a feeling for it pretty soon. So we've centered and we've made our whole, the next step is to open up the hole. So we're going to start with a very simple cylinder with our first form. The most basic shape that's the root of many other shapes. So what I want is a flat bottom cylinder has straight sides and a flat bottom. So when I open up the bottom, I want to open up parallel to the wheel head. So I have a flat bottom, so I want to open straight out. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to still leave my left-hand exactly where it was. It's still stabilizing my right hand. Put my finger right back in the hole and I'm going to start pulling the wall towards my left hand. I'm just pushing with this swamp part of my finger into my left hand until it's wide enough. And then I can go over with my finger and smooth out the bottom. 8. Pulling Up the Wall: So now we're going to do what's called the polling. So this whole time I've been working on the left side, I'm going to switch over to the right side of the pot. Now I have to be a lot more delicate with my pressure. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to hook my thumbs together and I'm going to use my two middle fingers. You can also use your two fingers, doesn't matter. Definitely use two fingers though. These two are going to sit opposite each other with the clay in-between. Notice I'm resting my elbow on my leg here. This is really important for stability. Now, I'm going to squeeze a little bit, squeeze my fingers together a little bit at the bottom. And when I do that, I'm creating this dent with this bump above it. So there's this bump here that I need to stay underneath. And I'm going to stay underneath that bump and I'm just going to slowly just give enough pressure to bring it upwards. We're not squeezing the clay. We're pulling the clay out. That's why it's called pooling. So that was one poll. I'm going to add a little bit of water again, clean off my fingers and squeeze. Paul. Squeeze. So the key is to find the perfect amount of pressure that you are not squeezing through the clay and making a hole in your clay. But you're not also giving too little pressure that you slipped right over that bump. So you just have to be able to read your clay. And it's a lot of practice at this point. So the next step will be to use this wooden knife here. So a lot of people end up with this extra clay at the bottom. If you don't have this, that's great. You can skip this step. But if you do, you want to use your wooden knife to cut that off so you can start with the tip of it. You always want to push that straight down with a cylinder. We're just trying to continue this line. And I'm going to hold it until I can feel the wheel head. And I turned my knife the other way and just scoop all that extra clay off. So we're just removing the extra clay. Next step would be, this is optional, but if you want to have a really smooth walls, you can use a rib at this stage. So now we just want to smooth out the walls. I'm going to stick my hand inside my pot and push the wall of my pot into the rib to make sure everything is nice and smooth. It adds a nice finished. Last two steps are always finish with is to remove the extra water in the bottom of my pot. I don't know if you can see, but there's a little pool of water down there and I just want to remove that because that could cause cracking later on. So we'll just stick my sponge inside and scoop all that extra water out. I want to turn the wheel as I do this so I don't get marks from the sponge. And then always the last thing I do is compress the rim once more because the rim is always the part that gets messed up as you're doing everything else. So it's always a little thing I want to fix the last I just removed. I want to make sure there's no extra slip. And just kinda make sure it's a nice soft edge. So now we can cut it off. So for that we'll use our wire tool. Now you want to hold it at either end and then wrap it around until your thumbs are just either side of your pot. You don't want to cut it when it's a way loose like this because you just don't have much control over it. So wrap it around your fingers until your thumbs are on either side. Push your thumbs into the wheel, turn the wheel slowly, and just drag it underneath. Then you can just push it to the edge, get your hand underneath it. But it doesn't. So after you've found your first pod, you just want to sponge off the wheel head. You can leave this a little bit of clay in the middle, that's totally fine. But what you don't want is too much extra slip on the wheel head. So all of this watery stuff, this is called slip. This just messes you up so you want to remove all that with your sponge and then you can just throw your next piece right down. So again, I'm going to pat the bottom so it's a bit rounded. And then I'll just throw it right down in the middle. Switch it over if it's not centered. And then if it's feeling a little loose, you can always give a few more paths from the top. 9. Drying Properly & Next Steps: So another reason why you make several pieces at once is because sometimes things don't always go according to plan. But that's totally fine. You can just wedge this piece up, let it dry out a little bit, and then it can go straight back onto the wheels so there's no waste in clay. So now you can imagine how much 500 grams of clay can make. So these will still shrink about 10%. And there'll be smaller too, if you end up with thicker walls or larger if you have thinner walls. So you can leave them as they are and just leave it as a cup. You can imagine we can also put a handle on and make it into a mug or put a hole in it and make it into a planter. But all that stuff will happen on the next step when we get to the leather hard stage. So we need to let these pieces dry out a little bit before we trim the foot. So what you can do is just let them sit out overnight or they can be stored up to a week if you put plastic over them. Drying time is affected by your local time ID, the airflow in the room, and how much water you put into your pot when you were throwing. So it's best to just keep an eye on your pods and check the moisture level instead of relying on a specific length of drying time. So I'm just going to leave these to dry up in the air tonight because I want to trim them tomorrow. By the way, guys, this is the reality. Working with clay, cleaning, lots and lots of bleeding. 10. Getting Ready to Trim: So these pods have been drying for 24 hours and they're ready to trim. I know this because they are quite firm and strong now, but there's still a little bit wet. So if you can see, I can bend the room a little bit. Can also test the edges when it's, when you're able to grab some clay that's like crumbling off but not like squishing off when it starts to get a little crumbly. That's what you're looking for. Now, what you guys didn't see is before I left the studio yesterday, I flipped all the pots over. You do want to flip them over as soon as they're strong enough to support themselves for you to not mess them up as you're flipping them. So all sides, the pot can get air and not just the rim. So if you'd let them like this, the bottom would stay really, really wet. But if you flip them over, then the bottom panel so dry out with the rest of it. So now these pots are ready to be trimmed. Now, I'll use our trimming tool that we mentioned at the beginning. I like to use this loop tool. I'll keep a little bit of water nearby for cleaning mostly. And then I want to grab some extra clay. This is how we can secure the pot to the wheel. So let's get going. So all the settings for the wheel is the same. You still have a brick under one foot, your pedal under one foot. Turn it on. And for right-handed people, it should turn counterclockwise. 11. Trimming: Once again, I'm going to coat the we is that just a little bit of water? This helps the pot to stick. Now, the first step is centering the pod on the wheel head. So first I'm just going to look down and kind of visually center it. And then I'm going to let the wheel turn, put my finger sort of towards the bottom. I'm going to feel for any sort of bumps. So you want the world to be turning really slowly at this point. And I can sort of feel like bump, bump. You sort of get a rhythm to it. And then you want to stop it where it's bumping and push it away from there. So the goal here now is to just get the pop perfectly in the center of the wheel. So if you're struggling to just feel when the pot is off center, you can also use a needle tool to market. So what you wanna do is again, turn the wheel as slow as you can, and then slowly bring the needle tool closer and closer to the pot so that it will leave a mark wherever it's too much in one direction. So my mark is right here. So that means I need to move it away from where I made the mark. Now try again. Almost completely centered, just a little bit more direction. And what you want to keep doing this until it's the needle tool is touching the pot all the way around, then you know, it's centered. So you always want to check the centering close to the bottom of the potter. Now, top of the pot. Because this is the most important part for centering and we want to make sure that this bottom of your pot is centered and not up here because it's handmade, so it might still be a little bit wonky. So let's take this entering towards the bottom of your FOBT. Alright, so now we want to secure it with some clay. So I like to make three little sausages with my client. Little bugs is what we call them. Just push them down into the we'll add careful you don't push them into the pot because you can still mess up your pot when you're doing that. So I push them down into the widowhood that helps to secure your pot. Now we can start trimming. So I always use this loop tool, except if I'm doing like edges or something and then I use this edge one. But definitely you want to start with a loop tone. First thing you wanna do is to start removing the extra bits. So notice how I'm holding this tool. I'm holding it like you would peel a carrot. I'm not holding it way out here and gouging the clay. I'm just basically holding it straight up and down along the side and peeling the clay off. Now what you want to see are these little these things coming off here. That's the goal. If you're getting a powder coming off, that usually means that the pot is too dry. If you're getting too much client once coming off, that will mean that place too wet. You want these kind of long ribbons of play. I like to do one for like evening out of the whole plot first to just kinda see where I'm at. And then I can sort of decide if I want to put a foot on it or something. So what you can do is you can do something like this and kind of leave it like this. Or you can add raised foot. Maybe I will try on this one to do that. We have enough clay. So you need to have a thick enough bottom in order to do a foot. So if you definitely wanna do a foot, you want to add like just leave a little bit of extra clay at the bottom. So remember when I said, you want to leave about a half centimeter play at the bottom. You can leave more than that if you want a bigger foot. So you can see I switched over to my cornered trimming tool here. So I can get in and make a nice sharp corner there. What can help is if you have a mirror, you can stick this up so you can see your pot while you're trimming. Because it's kinda hard to judge the shape from the top of it. So once I have the side finished, all go into the ring foot. So what I wanna do now is clean out the middle of this so that I have a nice ring where the pot will sit on. So when you're checking to see how much clay you have left, you can kind of tap it and listen to how hollow the sound is. So the lower the sound, the more clay there is. Can hear here. It's kind of a higher, a higher tone. And down here it's lower. So that means I have more clay here than I have here. So I'm gonna keep trimming here. That means I have enough to keep going. With Germany's can go basically as fast as you feel comfortable. Really important with throwing and centering that you use the speed of the wheel to kind of guide you. But with trimming, you can just go at your own speed however you feel comfortable. I do faster or slower depending on my mood. I just like to go over the ring once more to make sure it's nice and smooth. And the shape that we want. So last but not least, I like to burnish the edges a little bit to smooth them out and it gets rid of this trimming lines. So I like to use the back of my thumbnail. You can all see these are good for this. I just dip it in a little bit of water and then I just drag my thumbnail along. And that really smooths out. All these lines. Unlike a ribosome, can get into these tiny little cracks. Your fingernail. You can see we have a nice silky smooth finish. Now. We have our cute little tumbler here. This should feel a lot better than when you first trimmed it because it should feel a bit lighter that you've gotten rid of all that extra clay. And hopefully you have a nice balanced piece. And then we can just let it dry out. At this point, you would want to also add a handle or any other additional things that you want to add an apostle carve into it. I'll cover these topics in a different video, but for now we'll just stick with the very simple cylinder. 12. Signing & Drying: So now we just need to sign them and then they're done. So I usually use a pencil for this, but you can use your needle tool or anything else that you have lying around. Just lying right on the edge. I signed on the ring here because this middle part is going to get covered in glaze and you won't see it. So now that our pot is trimmed and signed, I'm going to let them dry out for about a week. How long you need to wait depends, again on your climate and how thick your pots are. But you just want to make sure that your pot is completely dried out before you put it into the calendar. 13. Bisque Firing: So it's been two days and now the kilns cool enough to unload our paths. Here's our pieces. So maybe you can see that the clay has changed color a little bit. It's now called the disk where now it's completely changed chemically so it can never go back to what it once was. But now we're ready to glaze it. So we fire our Bisk where to 900 degrees Celsius. And this square is not fully fired clay, so it's still quite porous. You can hear that it's if you pour water in this, it's going to just go completely through. It's like it's not a finished piece of ceramic at all. But the whole reason we put our assignments into b square is so that you can apply the glaze because it absorbs the glaze really well. If you don't want to apply glaze ceramics, you can actually just put them straight through to the final fire and you can skip this step. 14. Glazing: So now I need to choose my glaze. Now we have, the glaze is organized by the different clades that we have. So I chose the white clay and I think I'm gonna go with bright yellow glaze for this fun. That'll be fun. So friggin lazy. There's a bunch of different ways of glazing, but I like to use these tongs here. So that's what I'm going to show you. You also want obviously some glaze and a bucket of water with a little sponge and also a sturdy thick. Okay. So you wanna make sure guys really, really well. So this is a powder glaze that I mixed in with water. It's a pre-made commercial glaze, but it comes in a dried powder form. So you want to stir it for a good long while until you don't have any chunky bits left. All the glaze needs to be dissolved in the water. So when you're glazing, you always want to be tidy as you're working. Try not to get splatters everywhere because you don't want to be breathing it in. So try and keep the glaze contained and then you can wipe it up with a sponge. The tones. You want to hold your fingers where the three points are, and your thumb where the one-point is. So many digits are the three points. And then you want the three points to be on the outside of your cup. I find that holding the tongs this way gives you the most amount of flexibility with it and it feels most comfortable in your hand. So you want to I'm going to the bucket a little bit just so I can get more depth through it. But if you have a full bucket, then you don't have to do this. And then I want to go in from the side. If I go in from the top, it's going to just make a big group. You want to go in from the side so you don't splash unique ways. So I'll go in and then turn it upright to get the rest. Hold it 123 and out again. Give it a little shake to get off the extra plays. You can see maybe how fast the glaze is drying, where it's darker yellow that's still wet, but here is already dry. This is because the big square is so porous, so it just soaks in all back wastewater. I'm just going to glaze the second one as well, not you. So where are the tongs were touching? You do end up with these marks. So you can just, when the glaze is dry, just kind of smooth those over with your finger. Remember the glaze is now just a powder on the surface so you can smash it around. Always clean up as you're working. Especially when phrases. So last thing that you need to do is wipe the bottoms of your pots. Any part that's going to touch the table when I said it down needs to be on glazed. So because this part is elevated from the table, I don't actually need to remove the middle part, but I need to remove this whole ring here. So I'm just going to take a wet sponge and just wipe off the glaze. If you leave the glaze on the bottom, it will stick to the killing shelves. Because in the kingdom, the glaze will liquefy and it will just kind of stick to whatever it is touching. So that's why we need to remove the glaze. I don't worry too much about the grease inside my signature. I find that that's like such a little amount that it's okay. Using a sponge is good for this because not only do you get the bottom, but you also get a few millimeters around the edge. And because of gravity in the calendar glaze always wants to sink downward. So it's always good to have that few action millimeters of space just for security. So you don't lose your pot to the kiln shelf. So now our pots are ready to go back into the Qin. So once they're glaze, you kinda don't want to touch them as much as possible. Some people will try and smooth out any drips and whatnot. I don't really worry about that stuff because you can the more you touched the pot, no more glaze powder is coming off on your fingers. So you really just want to be delicate now, but on the kiln shelf and be done with it. 15. Final Fire: Our final fire, we fire to 1250 degrees, and then our piece will be finished. So unlike the best killed when you're firing ugly spark pieces can't touch each other, otherwise they'll stick together and be there forever. So now for the next layer on and when the kilns completely full, then I'll fire up for two days and are ready for unloading. 16. Our Final Results!: We caught is finished. Here we go. So you can see the color has changed quite a bit from the glazing color. This now the final color and this is how it will look. The clay is totally petrified, so that means they play has melted together and it's become waterproof. And now we have a dishwasher, your microwave oven safe, it's ready to use. Finally, we have our beautiful pot. So I hope that this class was helpful for you guys. You can find me over on YouTube and Instagram at powder to the people. I have a lot more free content and pottery tutorials over there. And I would love it if you guys send me pictures of your finished parts. That'll be awesome. So I hope you have a creative week. My friends.