Pottery, continued

So, it's been a while, but I didn't want to leave you in the lurch. (Where is this "lurch?")

I was describing the intricacies of pottery, with its bats and wheels and facial accidents, etc. I believe I'd just gotten to the point of creating a lump on my second night. Discouraging, but I learned a lot. I learned how to make a lump and, more importantly, how NOT to make a lump. Valuable information.

Second night, we ventured into bowls. But let me take a moment here to ponder the existence of the "bylinder." Initially, I thought this was an official pottery category, such as the platter, the bowl, the cylinder. (Those more astute readers are already onto something, I know.) For instance, Doug came over to Chris and commented on his nice bylinder. Chris smiled, all proud and puffed up. It only took a few seconds for him to make the connection. "Wait, what's a bylinder?" A bylinder, as you might imagine, is a combination bowl/cylinder. But it was a damned nice one.

Apparently, cylinders have a propensity for working their way into being bowls. It's like they secretly want to be bowls, but their parents are pressuring them to go to cylinder school, like their grandfather. You see, because of something called "physics," which a very nice woman in Bellport, NY tried, in vain, to teach me about in 1984, clay naturally wants to fling itself toward the outer-most regions of your wheel. Your job, should you choose to accept it, is to keep the freakin' stuff from doing that, by pushing on it with your left palm as it spins. A lot. Hard. Harder.

So, enough of bylinders. You get the idea.

That second night, I made four bowls. I was unaware of how proficient I was becoming at making bowls until the fourth night, when we had to pull out all the stuff we'd made and I had all these bowls. I like bowls. My goal was to make a bowl. So I was happy.

Third night, we made plates and platters. Difference? Apprarently, one is a platter. Two are plates. This begged the question, on the way to our third night of pottery, "Is plate just the plural of platter?" Can you say, "Please hand me that platter?" and if there are five of them, can you say, "Please hand me that stack of plate?" Like gander or mice? Is there no such word as "platters?" Alas, these questions were not answered.

But I made a damned good platter (I made only one, you see). Platters are more difficult than they sound. You figure, how hard can it be to make a flat disk? Just smush some clay onto the wheel, right? But no! Everything starts with a cylinder. If you can imagine turning your coffee mug into your dinner plate (platter?), you're beginning to understand how hard this is.

First you make your cylinder, but you make it with a wide bottom. Then you have to sort of coax the sides down by pushing with the flat part of your finger, from the inside, against (and over) another finger located on the outside. You keep doing this until the point JUST BEFORE the whole thing collapses onto the wheel. Of course, someone asked the question, during the demonstration, "How do you know when that is?" The answer? "You don't. I do."

Well, I was nervous and yes, I did push the limits a bit. But I had the edge of that platter almost horizontal, and it didn't collapse. I was impressed with myself. I made a platter. I even put little lines (decorations... adornments... flourishes...) in my platter.

So, the fourth class we learned how to trim our pottery. They are dried out, not kiln dried, just kind of leathery. And we grab one and have to center it on the wheel. I hate this part. I heard other people say they hate this part which, of course, instilled in me a sense of challenge in that I would vow not to hate this part and would make this the thing I became expert at. But no, I hate this part. It's all trial and error, heavy on the error.

You stick your thing (whatever... cylinder, bowl, platter) on the assumed center of the wheel. And then you spin the thing ever so slowly while holding your finger as still as possible to see where the pot hits your finger. Then you stop and nudge the pot just a little bit. And you do it again. And again. And again. And again. Until you're convinced you're just pushing the thing back and forth across the wheel and accomplishing nothing. This results in the "It's close enough" philosophy, which I readily adopted.

You also have to decide where to put the foot. Didn't know mugs had feet, did you? Me neither. There's a formula based on some pythagorean geometrical theorum, no doubt involving derivatives and hypotenuses and probably even amortized interest over several years, that I won't get into, but you eventually find a location for the foot. And you start trimming away everything that isn't feet. You're trimming off the bottom of your pot. It's upside-down on the wheel. Almost made the mistake of marking the location of my foot and then trimming it right off. But you have to trim inside the foot and then outside the foot and then lots of trimming from the foot along the side of your pot, toward the top which is really the bottom right now 'cause it's upside-down, remember.

At some point, and I might hate this part even more than the centering part, you take the thing off the wheel by unsticking some of the wet clay you used to stick it on. You look at it. You turn it over, back and forth very quickly, to compare the inside shape with the outside shape, to decide whether you need to trim more. And if you're new at this, you need to trim more. I would say, if you've never done this before, don't even take it off the wheel. Just keep trimming until you're convinced you're about to bore holes in the thing.

Then you try to stick it back on in the EXACT SAME PLACE it was before. Ha! I believe this is physically impossible. (I think I remember that nice woman in 1984 telling me this is impossible. I'm pretty sure we did a pottery lab.) But I got close. More trimming, blah, blah, blah (see first post).

Voila! It's an ugly cup!

I chose to trim the thing I liked least. Figured it was good to practice on. But it meant my first trimming experience was very unfulfilling.

We ran out of time, and I didn't get to trim anything else that night. And the night of the fifth class, we got some pretty nasty weather so we had to skip it. There's only one class left, in which we're supposed to glaze our pieces, assuming they've all been trimmed. So, we'll need to trim while others are glazing. Kind of a bummer. But we'll make up a class and, eventually, bring home all these mugs and bowls and plate.

Oh, and one bylinder.