David Voorhees is a professional potter from North Carolina who works with porcelain. He presents an online workshop (Porcelain tips for wheel pottery) at TeachinArt online school of art and demonstrates in the e-course how to do spiral wedging.

For those of you who do not know what wedging is in clay terms, it is to remove all air bubbles or air pockets from the clay. Any air trapped in the clay, makes the centering of the clay on a potters wheel so much more difficult and if an air pocket is trapped inside clay and you fire it in the kiln, it can explode. Wedging helps to spread moisture evenly throughout the clay which helps with easier centering on the wheel. Even if you do not use a potter's wheel and only work with hand building, then wedging is just as important. Many potters have experienced the shock when they opened the electric kiln and see that one of their pots (with air trapped air inside) exploded and messed up all the surrounding pots.

The spiral wedging technique is handy when you have to wedge or knead large clay batches. It is also called the Japanese wedging or kneading. Some potters only use the spiral method. We will post later other wedging techniques.

Links
Online art workshops (e-courses)
Demonstrations, tips & techniques
Art instructors
Preview e-courses

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#wedgingclay #spiralwedging #teachinart #teachingartist #ceramicschool #potteryschool #kneadingclay

David Voorhees is a functional potter from North Carolina with over 40 years experience in ceramics. He is the instructor of the online workshop Porcelain Tips For Wheel Pottery at TeachinArt.

Several potters have problems with opening and pulling up consistent cylinders or bowl forms. Some of the problems are uneven walls with too much thickness at the bottom, uneven rims, and slumping clay.

These are all common problems associated with skill development and learning to use porcelain on the wheel. Porcelain does require a bit more of us as craftsmen. It needs to be prepared better and we need to limit the amount of time it is allowed to be fully wet during forming.

Here are my suggestions for those experiencing these common problems:

• Wedge well, but don’t dry the clay out too much. Keep it covered! (see how to do Spiral wedging, as well as the Bulls head wedging)
• Center the best you can, using enough water to keep the clay uniformly slippery.
• Move directly into opening and compressing the bottom.
• For cylinders, make a pronounced corner on the inside.
• First pull; aim for uniform thickness with slight taper. Don’t worry about an uneven rim as the clay is being further centered with the wall pulling.
• Second pull: raise the clay most of the way, you likely will double the height with this pull. Again, aim for a slight taper in wall thickness. If your rim is uneven, trim it now with a needle tool and round and smooth.
• Continue to raise and shape but use less water as it gets thinner. This stage is where ribs and sponges help. Try wet trimming the “skirt” of clay on the outside base before using ribs.
• Work in a series to build skills: 6 cylinders or bowl of the same size and shape or several bowls with each slightly larger (weigh them out). As you advance you can throw to a pointer stick. A chopstick in a wad of clay works well. When you have a form that you like, set the pointer ¼” off of the rim. Then work toward making the other like the model pot. Later, you can take weights and measurements so that you know how to produce consistent items. I use 420 grams of clay to make mugs thrown to 4 ¼” tall by 3 ¾” wide at the rim.
• Work toward following a step-by-step procedure as you work on a series of pots.  Ask yourself what is working and what is not,  then repeat the successful sequence and eliminate the steps that don’t help you. The more that you can develop your own sequence for forming an item like a mug, the quicker that you will make them. This will lessen the stress on the clay.
• As you master the smaller items like mugs, then you can extend your size range or complexity range. An advanced series may be something like a set of dinner plates, a graduated canister set with lids or a tea set.  Most of the skills that you need will be served by mastering the basic elements that I am covering in my online workshop Porcelain Tips For Wheel Pottery.

Links:
Online workshops at TeachinArt
Art instructors at TeachinArt
Preview the e-courses presented at the art school
Demonstrations & tips by our instructors and other artists and crafter's

Tags:
#potterytips #wheelthrown #wheelthrownporcelain #wheelthrowingtips #ceramicschool #teachinart #wedgingclay #wedging

Antoinette Badenhorst explains the bulls head wedging technique in her online workshop Understanding Porcelain.
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Wedging clay is a hot topic to discuss among potters. Some believe that spiral wedging is the best way for preparing the clay, while others will not even think about moving away from the bull's head or ram's head wedging technique. Some ceramic artists even differ about the spelling of the wedging technique - is it bullshead, or maybe bull's head or even just bulls head - and the same argument is used for the ramshead method. Then we also have other techniques like slam wedging and there may be more, but we will discuss that later.

Some ceramic scholars learn that a chunk or block of clay is cut into two pieces with the shape of a wedge. The top one is lifted from the lower one, turned over and slammed onto the wedge that remained on the wedging table. This process is repeated until there are no more air pockets in the clay. The wedging process helps to get the clay uniform in plasticity, texture and color. Roughly 20 wedging's or kneading is enough to prepare the clay. 

Other links:
How to do spiral wedging (David Voorhees)
How to center clay on the pottery wheel (Antoinette Badenhorst)
Demonstrations, tips & techniques
E-course (online workshops)

#claywedging #wedgingclay #wedgeclay #potterytips #teachinart