Hi! I’m Jane Cullum from Manassas Clay and I’m showing you how to throw a pot on the wheel. Now I’m going to trim the leather-hard cylinder. This is my leather hard pot. You can tell it’s really hard because I can’t distort the rim and if I turn it over, the bottom is not sticky. This is the perfect condition for trimming the pot. And first of all, you want to feel the inside and feel that extra clay in the corner. It’s necessary for throwing the pot but we can get rid of it and make the pot, the cylinder more ascetically pleasing and make it lighter too.

So I’m going to re-center this on the wheel head and turn the wheel on slow, and use my wooden knife, and hold it up here about an inch down from the top or from the base in and where it touches. I’m going to stop the wheel and move it in over. And then put it here. Now do you see where it touches? Move it over just a little bit. And I move it back and forth until it’s as good as it’ll get. And that seems to be in pretty good position.

Now I’m going to use some wads of clay and hold the pot in place. Put them down gently and then push straight down so you don’t move your pot. And now we’re going to use the wheel like a leaf. I have my two tools. This is the pair of trimmer and then this is the loop tool. I’m going to start out with the pair trimmer and rest three fingers from my left hand here on the top gently and hold the pair of trimmer so that I can use it right at three o’clock and with the wheel go pretty fast, I can trim off that extra little bit of clay.

Now the bottom’s pretty level so I’m not going to mess with that. Now I’m going to use the loop tool and take off a little notch of clay. Next, I’m going to go over the areas that I cut with my wooden knife and smooth it back down and then I’m going to design it. Now we’ve got the trimmed pot but it’s still not a mug. Next I’ll add the handles that will turn it into a mug.