Week one of First Time Potter is about clay preparation, Hand Building and the basics on Wheel Throwing. The clay has to go through a process called Wedging before they can be used. This, essentially, means you knead the lump of clay to remove air bubbles trapped inside the clay. There is a special way to do this so that you don't end up introducing air into the clay instead. Air expand when heated and any air bubble trapped inside your piece will explode during the firing process and might ruin you piece and all your hard work would go to waste.
Hand Building is taking a piece of wedged clay and making pieces without the wheel. You can use moulds, pinching, coils, etc. etc. So, all the pieces in the picture above is from Hand Bulding. The piece at the 12 o'clock position is a coil pot. What you do with a coil pot is to roll out your piece of clay into a long piece of "snake" and coil it around and around. You can choose to smooth out the sides or leave the lines so you see the coil. These pieces are left to harden to a leather state, the bisk fired, glazed and then fired again. The coil pot was fired in Celadon, (clockwise) the next piece is in a color called Temoku, then Red Iron and the last rectangular one has Aviva Blue on the outside.
Week 1 also saw me trying to center a lump of clay on the wheel. Centering is perhaps the foundation move of any wheel throwing projects. If you can't center your lump of clay, your piece will end up having uneven walls. If the clay wobbles bad enough, you might end up wearing your work. LOL. None of my wheel throwing pieces were presentable from Week One. Ekkk!
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