Making Things, Part II: Trimming

Yes sir, the long-awaited second installment in my Making Things series is now here. Today I trimmed, not the piece from the first entry, which has been bisqued already, but a series of three that I made yesterday.

For trimming, I use the kickwheel rather than the electric wheel, because I never go very fast and I find the kickwheel gives me better control.  There are concentric circles on the wheel to help you begin to center the piece, without which the trimming will be uneven. I place the piece rim-down on the wheel and anchor it with lumps of clay.

I spin the wheel and touch a pin tool to the top of the piece (really the bottom) to tell me if it's centered. If the circle is perfectly concentric with the circular edge of the piece, but if it's not - and it never is; see photo below - I stop the wheel and push the piece a little in the direction that the drawn circle is closest to the edge of the piece. (If that doesn't make sense, think of it as northwest in the picture below)

Then I trim some more and draw the circle again. This time the piece is centered.

I take clay off the bottom and sides to even the thickness, using one of the tools displayed in the first Making Things entry. Normally I would add a foot but since I'm not glazing these pieces it isn't necessary. Here's a trimmed piece. I should smooth out the horizontal lines visible on the sides; I'll try and accomplish that by burnishing.

I impress my honu stamp into the bottom like a boss. (Unfortunately, one of the three pieces had a bottom that was too thin, so the act of stamping made the bottom cave in. So I lost that one. Very sad.)

Here is what the trimmings look like as they fall from the piece. They are much too fragile to keep or fire, which is a pity, since I enjoy their curly shape, but such is life. 

- Next up: Burnishing! -

Brainwave

This is the recent Japanese Sendai Earthquake. It is tragic and horrible in every possible way and I have no intention of being flippant about it. This is a serious entry. I have had an idea.

I need something to do with me pieces after I've made them. I had already decided to sell them on Etsy (if anybody would buy them) but now I have a better idea. I've been reading a great deal about artists selling their work and donating the proceeds to Japan. I don't know if I can call myself an artist, but I do know that the earliest pit-fired pottery comes from Japan and China, and it seems fitting to me to take any proceeds from the sale of my work and forward them to helping the Japanese people rebuild their infrastructure and culture. 

It's not much, but it's something, and perhaps it will convince more people to buy my work, thereby taking it off my hands which needs to happen anyway, as I don't want to saddle my parents with a house full of strange vessels when I head to college, and it will also give me a new and better goal, an incentive to stay on schedule with my project, if you will.

I feel sort of odd posting this on here because it sounds somewhat pompous to say the above to a wide audience, like "Look at me and how righteous and good I am", but in another way this is just a journal, written by me and for me, and I've had an idea which I think is a good one, and one which I believe should be recorded.

Reactions to "Two Tramps in Mud Time" and "Practicing"

We all have to complete this assignment, akin to a first-semester journal entry, detailing our reactions to two readings. One is a poem by Robert Frost, whom I greatly admire, and one is a random piece of Internet detritus which breaks off abruptly in the middle of a sentence. They both deal with work, which I imagine is why we have to read them, because we are all doing projects which involve work.

Profound eh? I thought so.

So: "Practicing" appears to have been written for one of the teach-yourself-to-play-guitar websites with which the Internet is so thickly packed that it is impossible to swing a virtual cat without hitting eight or nine of them. The author has a lot of deep wisdom to share about pushing oneself outside of one's comfort zone if one wants to improve at whatever one is working on. I don't really scoff at this. It seems obvious enough, but when I look at my life I see that it really is an easy thing to forget. It's odd, when everything about our world and our species is driven by change, that individuals instinctually don't want any part in advancing that change on a small scale. With a few exceptions, we don't like practice; we want immediate gratification - the final product now, without any of the work. But without the work, the final product cannot exist. So we force ourselves to practice whatever it is we're doing - in my particular case, the skills involved in wheel-throwing - and we are better for it.

I agree with the article's message as a whole, and I think it is sad but true that we need constant reminding to step outside our comfort zones or we won't do it. One thing the article says, though, I do not understand at all: "I can't tell you how many times I've practiced a particular lick or technique for an hour straight with minimal improvement that day, but the next day almost as soon as I tried it, it seemed to flow more easily." I wish I had ever felt this. Ceramics is a crapshoot, if you will - I have good days and bad days at the wheel, days where I can make anything I want and days when the clay seems to hate me and ends up as a useless lump. In my other life as an athlete, this is true as well. So maybe if I want to experience what the author of this article is describing, I need more practice.

Now I come to "Two Tramps in Mud Time". I very much enjoyed this poem, which is written in Robert Frost's characteristic simple, sweet style. But I think I am supposed to be relating these reading to my project, so I won't spend time quoting lines I like, but go straight to responding to the passage I am sure Ms. Gergely had in mind for us:

   But yield who will to their separation
   My object in living is to unite
   My avocation and my vocation
   As my two eyes make one in sight.

Oh, how nice that sounds, to be able to do what you love as your job, and not relegate it to the realm of "hobby", only to be dragged out of the closet on alternate Sundays. I wish it applied to me. But unfortunately, the things I love best are things that would make me no money at all. Ceramics is a solid example. In truth, that's most of the reason why I took WISE, so I could devote a whole semester to my avocation before going off to college and studying for a vocation which must, for me, be different.

Forms

A bonus entry, because I just thought of this. I know in my entries regarding the Louvre and the Freer/Sackler galleries I did a lot of "Look at this picture! Look at these forms! They're so nice, and I shall emulate them" type stuff. And here's a thing about me: I'm not much of one for sketching, at least not for sketching ceramics before I make them. I can draw okay, but I prefer to just get an idea in my head of what the piece will look like, and then make it. Call me lazy but it almost always works out.

For this project, though, it being so life-changing and all-important and all, I think I had better set some guidelines for what my pieces are going to look like, and put them all in one place so that you, esteemed reader, don't have to go hunting through all my entries and potentially get fed up enough to dock my grade.

So, I am going to make relatively small pieces, as a general rule under the 6-inch in height mark, and I would like them to have small bases and then flare out near the top and then taper in again to a narrow opening (and I haven't ruled out tiny handles like the Naqada ceramics from the Louvre have, but I haven't ruled them in either). My pieces are not going to be tall or thin or have long necks or rims that taper in and then flare out again, like many vases. The exact shape will vary but as a rule they will be reasonably short and squat, with small openings.

So there you have it - no sketches, I wouldn't go that far - but better than nothing. Now let us see if I can stick to my plan.

Mentor Meeting 3/14

Meeting with Jocelyn is difficult because her room is nine times out of ten a chaotic menagerie of students actually in her class, students skipping other classes, students with free periods, past students, prospective students, and God only knows who else. And me. Today she was also trying to work on some item on the computer, so I came in quietly and noticed two plaster bats replete with just-pugged wet clay, so I spread it on the other two bats and caused it to dry, and then wedged it, so I can throw tomorrow, which means I can put up the highly anticipated Making Things: Part II entry on Wednesday, when I trim, and also a bonus Making Things, part III entry, in which I explain the process of burnishing.

My first piece is out of the bisque kiln, which I had burnished with the flat side of a paintbrush handle prior to firing; Jocelyn suggests a metal spoon next time, because it makes the lines of contact less noticeable, but the burnishing I did was still visible - more on that at a later date.

The rest of our meeting went more or less like this:

J: "Are you doing okay?"
Self: "Yup."
J: "On schedule?"
Self: "Yup."
J: "Okay!"
Self: "Bye!"

It's true, you see. I know Ms. Gergely wants my head on a silver platter, but the thing is, my journal is behind, and there have been some unfortunate mix-ups about the whole coming-to-class thing, but my project is proceeding pretty much apace. I'm wheel-throwing tomorrow, trimming Wednesday, burnishing and maybe adding designs the rest of the week, and then doing it all over again until I have a suitable number of pieces, which should be soon. We are well into the month of March but the snow is still thick on the ground at my house, which means no digging as of yet. And talking of digging, Jocelyn and I did discuss materials to add to my pieces in firings, but I'll put that in the "Materials" entry, for which you should stay tuned.

Class Meeting 3/14

Well, hell.

We were harangued by our teacher at some length this fine Monday morning about how behind we all are in our projects. She is entirely justified in this, if my progress is anything to go by. Some of my current shortcomings are as follows:
-I have missed the past 3 classes.
-I have not had a mentor meeting for the past 2 weeks.
-I am 8 (count them, 8) journal entries behind schedule.
In brief, I suck.

I hope it isn't too late to fix my grade, which is certainly abysmal at this point in time. I am certain I can fix my project, though. Here is how.

-I have missed the past two Mondays, the day when class meets and I meet with Jocelyn, once due to illness and once due to a snow day. Though it is through my own stupidity that I have not made up classwork from those Mondays, it is also fact that I was absolutely unable to meet with Jocelyn any other day, because of my job at the rink - which is now closed, and over. So now I have two more free periods every day to devote to WISE, and believe me, I will. (I met with Jocelyn today; entry to follow close upon the heels of this one.)

To prove my undying devotion to my blog, my project, and this infinitely estimable class, here is a list of journal entries I will be posting in the very near future, hopefully before the week is out (in no particular order):

1. This one
2. Mentor meeting 3/14
3. Summary of item captions from the Freer and Sackler galleries (no, I haven't forgotten!!)
4. Making things, part II: Trimming
5. Making things, part III: Burnishing
6. History of clay and early kilns (research fun!)
7. List of materials I need for firings and possible resources
8. Information gleaned from a book I have recently acquired, The Complete Potter
9. Response to readings we received in class today: "Practicing" and "Two Tramps in Mud Time"
10. Response to Hannah Amsili's 2005 WISE journal, which I also received today.

Making Things, part I

So I have pretty nice fingernails. They grow long without cracking and taper at the ends and I like them. But today I cut them off because I'm finally back in the studio, making things instead of looking at other peoples' things. And it feels good. So here is my first entry about my own pieces, and it's going to be a how-to, because I don't know who's reading this but unless you're Jocelyn I think it's a safe bet that you don't know everything I'm about to show you. 

When I tear clay off the block, or squish somebody else's failed piece for reuse, it looks like this. 

This is not pretty; I don't like it; I can't use it. I have to wedge it, which is a process much like kneading bread dough. Wedging, when done correctly, presses out all the air bubbles in the clay and aligns the microscopic clay particles, which are actually cylindrical, so they go the same direction, which is good. If I use a plaster board as a wedging surface, it also removes excess moisture from the clay; if the clay is exactly the right amount wet, I use a canvas board, which leaves the moisture content alone. 

When the clay is wedged, it looks like this: 

Here, I've cut the clay in half, so you can see that there are no air bubbles remaining. (Air bubbles wreak havoc in wheel throwing.)

Below is what the clay would look like if it wasn't wedged sufficiently. The small dark spots are air bubbles. Small but deadly.

Now I form my air-bubble-free clay into a ball and I'm ready to throw. Below are the tools I personally like to use. From left to right: metal rib, for smoothing the outside of the piece; wooden rib tool #1, for trimming excess clay from the base; pin tool, for evening out the rim (or puncturing air bubbles); wooden rib tool #2, for I don't know exactly what--I use it to clean extra clay off the wheel between pieces; sponge, for doing what sponges do; and wire cutter (a cutter made out of wire, not something that cuts wire) for getting the piece off the wheel when it's finished. 

 I don't actually know why wheel throwing is called "throwing." My best guess is because of the very first step, which is throwing the ball of clay down onto the wheel really hard so that it sticks, as illustrated below. That's an electric wheel; you press the foot pedal at right to make it spin. There are also wheels which have to be kicked, but they don't go fast enough for my taste.

Add water. (This is more of an explanation of what I do than a lesson on wheel-throwing, so I'll just say that this part is called centering and centering is vital, and not explain how to do it, because I don't really know how to explain it.) The clay is spinning very fast under your hands; the objective is to feel as though it wasn't moving at all; that way you know it's perfectly centered. The clay below is centered.

I push my thumbs slowly down into the very middle of the centered clay to open the form, like so. I also begin to slow the wheel down a little at this point.

Then I push my thumbs outward, still very slowly, to make the floor of the piece. I compress the floor with my thumb and/or fingers.

Then I start pulling up the walls of the piece with my right hand, thumb inside and fingers outside. The piece stays wet the whole time or my fingers will skid and the piece will come off-center. I use the sponge to get the water out of the middle--if it remains there while the piece dries it's likely to crack. I compress the rim with my fingertips.

I use the longer wooden rib tool to scrape some of the excess clay from the bottom while the wheel is moving. Then, because this is a pretty small piece and doesn't require much shaping, I'm done.

The walls of the piece should be an even thickness all the way up. The floor should be a little thicker if I'm planning to trim it (make a foot).

I'm not using that piece, obviously, so I squish it up and form it into an arch and put it on the wedging board with other peoples'. Apparently the arch shape helps the clay dry faster.

I used somebody else's clay arch to make the piece below, which I did keep, and which is now drying in the damp box. Part II of the "making things" entry is going to be the trimming part, which has fewer stages but is still important. I'm going to try to trim this piece tomorrow; it's winter and the air is dry so it should be ready, but I don't know.

By the way, my wee honu stamp came out of the bisque kiln, which means the clay is completely dry and cannot be reused, ever, even if I wanted to. If I glazed it, that would be a second firing. Classy picture, right, with the sun and everything? I know.