Throwing Four More Bad Ones Before You Go Home
Okay. You cut a bowl off the wheel last lesson. Maybe it's sitting on a board right now looking pretty decent, maybe it's a little lopsided. Either way, you're done thinking about that one.
This lesson is short on new information and long on repetition, because repetition is the actual lesson. You're going to wire off that bowl, wedge up more clay, and throw four more. Not four good ones. Four more, period.
Why four, why now
Here's the opinion, and I'll just say it straight: ugly first pots are correct. Nobody needs one careful, precious bowl on their first day. You need volume. Your hands learn faster than your head does, and the only way to get your hands there is to make them do the centering-opening-pulling-shaping sequence enough times that it stops being four separate decisions and starts being one motion.
So today isn't "make a better bowl than last time." Today is "make the same bowl five more times and stop being precious about any single one of them."
The actual steps, again, faster
You know this sequence now, so I'll go quick.
- Wedge your next ball of clay. Same as before, spiral or ram's head, whatever you learned, get the air out.
- Center it. Don't rush this. I know I just told you to go fast overall, but centering is still the one place you're not allowed to cut corners. A bowl on off-center clay wobbles the whole way through and you'll fight it for ten minutes instead of thirty seconds.
- Open it with your thumbs, plain method, the one we learned a couple lessons back. Not the magic ring. I'm still bad at that one, we've established this.
- Set your floor thickness, check it with the wire or your fingernail.
- First pull, second pull, third pull if you need it, keeping your hands wet the whole way.
- Open it wider for the bowl shape.
- Shape the curve from the inside.
- Clean the rim.
- Wire it off.
That's the whole lesson. Do that four more times before you leave.
What changes on pot number three
Somewhere around your third or fourth repetition today, something's going to click that didn't click on your first bowl ever. Maybe it's the centering going faster. Maybe it's your hands staying wet without you having to remind yourself. You won't necessarily notice it happening in the moment. You'll notice it after, when you look at bowl four next to bowl one and they don't look like they came from the same person.
Don't get attached to any of these. Some are going to collapse. One might tear on the pull and you'll just ball it up and start over, which is fine, that's what the clay is for. If a wall gets too thin and blows out, that's information, not failure. Cut it in half sometime and look at the wall thickness where it went wrong. You'll learn more from the cross-section than from staring at the outside wondering what happened.
A thing I noticed once, doing this same repetitive stuff
I had a run like this myself, a long time ago, where I lined up a row of bowls on the drying rack by the studio window to dry overnight. Came back the next afternoon and the light was coming through low, that late-day angle we get a lot of out here, and it lit up the whole row of them from the side. Just plain bowls, some good, some lopsided, all a little dusty from drying. I took a picture of it on my phone. Never did anything with it, never posted it anywhere. It's just sitting in my camera roll. Bryan found it scrolling through one day and asked why I never showed anybody.
I didn't have a great answer. I think I just liked that it was a row of attempts. Not one good bowl I was proud of. A whole shelf of the work it takes to get anywhere. That's kind of what today is. You're building your own version of that shelf.
A caution, because it's real
Your hands are going to be wet and pruny by the end of four bowls, especially if you're running the wetter side like I teach. That's normal. But if the studio's dry air out here is getting to you, or your knuckles are cracking, put some lotion on before you leave, not during, clay and lotion don't mix. And if your wrists or forearms are aching rather than just tired, that's your body telling you to slow the pulls down, not muscle through it. Bad wrist mechanics repeated four times in a row is how people get hurt doing something that's supposed to be low-risk.
Before next time
Leave your four bowls on the board to firm up, don't touch them again today. Next time we start trimming, which is the part everyone wants to skip and the part that actually finishes the piece.