Pottery: the first fortnight

I’m two weeks into my beginner wheel throwing classes.

Since doing the trial class at Ceramiques Elsternwick, I’ve been thinking about clay. Moving to a new country is a good kickstart to try something new, so I signed up for the ceramic classes at Northwestern University.

We’re taking it slow, learning all the details over the course of several weeks. Learning about technique has meant throwing instinct out the window and focusing on what my fingers are doing and the effect my fingers have on the clay. I can’t shut my mind off and let the wheel run because I won’t learn much that way.

We’re throwing cylinders for now and spending a lot of time wedging clay and cleaning up our messes.

I didn’t take a photo of the third pot I ever made. My fingers were covered in clay and I wasn’t keen on fishing my phone out of my bag. It was an okay looking cylinder - but I wasn’t paying for classes to learn how to make okay looking cylinders. I decided not to keep the cylinder but keep pushing at the walls to see what would happen. The cylinder fell apart, and I dropped it into the clay reclaim bin.

It went downhill from there.

The fourth pot I made wasn’t a pot. I couldn’t get it centered at all. It was a misshapen blob on the wheel.

In the second class, I spent most of my time drenching abandoned bisqueware in glazes (we’ll see what they turn into next week!). I put the last half hour of the class into mangling some more clay into a wobble. That was my fifth pot.

Last Friday, the water in my apartment building was shut off for a few hours for some pipe repairs. That forced me out of the house, so I went on an excursion on my little blue bike. I had lunch on the grounds of Grosse Point Lighthouse, with the abandoned Harley Clarke Mansion at my back and a broad view of Lake Michigan in front of my eyes.

Then I went to the ceramic studio to practice some wheel throwing.

Here are pots six to eight, from right to left.

On pot six, I centred the ball of clay, created an indent in the middle with my thumb, then tried to open up the base of the pot. That was as far as I got before the clay went awry (it was my fault really).

On pot seven, I opened up the base of the pot, then went a bit too far out and wrinkled the pot’s burgeoning walls.

On pot eight, I opened up the base of the pot, and began bringing the walls of the pot upwards. It began to look like a cylinder… up until I poked a hole into the walls.

At this point I had the epiphany that I could re-wedge the clay and reuse it. Clay slop does get recycled into new clay, but it still costs $12 to buy a bag of clay. So I had a wedging break, and took the opportunity to water myself as well.

Pot nine was a cylinder, an actual cylinder. It was also a completely uncentred cylinder. One part of the wall was taller than the rest and the walls were too thin. I tried to trim the top edge with a needle tool with zero luck and even less skill. Then I squished the walls while taking it off the wheel. Here lies a cylinder with an extremely jagged top edge.

Pot number ten heralded the return to my ability to make “okay” cylinders! Here is an okay cylinder:

It’s definitely an okay cylinder. I didn’t centre the clay well enough so one side of the wall is much thinner than the other.

On pot eleven I fixed the centering problem but encountered a bulky base problem. Even though I made the top of the cylinder decent looking, I didn’t spend enough time bringing clay upwards. The result was a bulge at the bottom of the cylinder that I didn’t notice until after I had sliced the pot off the wheel.

On pot twelve I focused on keeping the amount of clay in the walls evenly distributed. But then a new problem presented itself. I had made one section of the wall thinner, and because it was thinner, it was also taller. I could fix it by making the other sections equally thin, and thus equally tall… but how to do that eluded me. So I turned the thin section into a spout.

If I don’t accidentally destroy this pot in the next month, it can become the gravy boat for my Thanksgiving table.

It’s genuine progress, and I am genuinely excited!