Wheel Pottery: Part I

It's been a long long time since I've been able to put up a post, so I imagine that in the following days I'll be posting often. I have a complicated relationship with blogs. Sometimes I'm all over my blog like a fat man on a jelly doughnut. Other times blogging gets pushed to the back burner and I forget I write one. Enough of that.

As many of you know, I've been working a lot with clay and wheel pottery this semester. I'm aboslutely in love with working on the wheel. I'm not even that great at it, but the small triumphs are incredibly rewarding and both beginner and veteran potters know how to take pleasure in the small miracles and accidents that come with practice practice practice. Here's a list of what I like about clay:

1. It seems to me that no matter what skill level of the potter, you've got to have a sense of humor and be able to let go. This is fragile business. Anything can go wrong. More things go wrong that right, but when something does go right, even mildly right, it's mistake driven beauty.

For example. In my practicing I managed to turn out a thimble size cylinder (some of you have seen this masterpiece) from a six pound hunk of clay. Six pounds is a lot of anything--three pants sizes, a very good size rump roast, two average size cantaloupes.

I wedge and wedge this clay by rocking and kneeding it back and forth to get all of the air bubbles out before the clay ever touches the wheel. If there's an air bubble, even a tiny one, say the size of a Zippo flint, not only will that create havoc while trying to lift the walls of a cylinder, but after all my work of doing that, whatever I make will probably explode in the kiln and take everybody's work with it. Fussy-wussy was a hunky of clay.

After wedging, I shape the clay into a large pear form so that when I throw it onto the wheelhead the hunk stays level and as centered as possible before the wheel rotates. I wet the six pound pear with a squeeze of water from my sponge. This is the beginning of my making a pitcher on the wheel. Call it the very beginning of working on the wheel with this pear that, utlimately, enjoys being pear-sized and was, by nature, designed to remain stationary. My task is to manipulate this clay into a functional pot.

I brace my elbows onto my thighs and kick on the speed pedal with my left foot. As the clay begins to move I press this clay down with all of my weight. Not doing this means that the clay launches off the wheel. I have had a three pound hunk of clay launch off the wheel, which resulted in a son of a bitch and scramble to retrieve said clay.

While the clay is moving at about five miles per hour, I center the clay. Centering is a real sonofabitch. That's right. The type of sonofabitch that requires the running of words together. With the clay moving at top speed I cup my left hand around the hunk lean in with all of my strength and flex to keep my body from moving. Clay can boss you around. A hunk can move your whole upper body if you don't brace because the clay is now an extension of you body, an extension moving five mile per hour.

Once the clay is centerd I cone up the compact mound by placing my hands on either side and squeezing so the clay has nowhere to go but up. I lift the clay up to about nine inches. I do this because I'm stretching the clay in preparation to make a cylinder that's roughly 14 inches tall.
I've got to keep this "coned-up" clay centered all the while. If the clay becomes uncentered, you go back and center and center, otherwise you'll get a wicked wobble and the pot will fall over.

Still at top speed I press the coned-up clay down with the palm of my right hand while keeping the thing centered with my left. I do this gradually so not to knock the thing out of whack and control the speed with my left foot on the speed pedal.

At this point, I center the whole hunk with the wheel going as fast as it can go. Once that's good to go, I brace my elbow on my thighs and us the index and middle fingers from both my left and right hands to make a bowl in the clay. I dig softly while stretching the walls out, pulling softly at 4 o'clock. I check the bottom of the pot then compress by pushing down softly with the tips of my fingers. With the bottom good to go, I compress the lip rim to keep the clay center and switch off the speed pedal.

From here on out, I'll go manual and kick the wheel with my right foot to keep control of the speed. This is truly the beginning of where everything that can go wrong will go wrong because the ultimate goal is to get this clay to get up off its ass and up in the air by raising wall.

I stick my left hand into the bowl and with my right hand on the outside I press in on the outside of the wall with two fingers and lift. This is a delicate process because the clay doesn't want to be bossed around. It will want to wobble, so I keep my whole body brace and flexed while hands lift those wall to about four inches. After that pull, I center the clay again by compressing the lip rim. From here on out I will repeat this process by pulling the walls until I'm up to my elbow in the pot's bidness and kicking the wheel to a speed not too fast and not too slow so I don't run out of speed in the middle of pulling up a wall.

With a cylinder fourteen inches tall, it's time to start bending the clay so I can get the shoulder of a pitcher. The clay does not like this one bit. I put my hand inside the moving pot and slowly raise just like doing a pull, but stretching as I go up.

The clay is wobblinging now and wanting to cling to my arm. It clings to my arm and a ripple in the pitcher. I try to fix the ripple by stretching out the wall again. Nope. Another ripple. This is the pitcher that didn't even turn into a vase. SO, I cut off the top and try all of the above, again. Nope. I cut off a little more. I'm mug size now, trying to create the body of a mug. Nope. The Mug gets smaller and smaller and smaller. The mug is now a thimble.