Head spinning, hands shaking, pottery making

Lots of water, hands flopping against clay, spinning tables, slib everywhere. 

Today I tried my luck at pottery. 

After watching some YouTube videos, I was ready to try my luck at centering, and making something hollow. 

Moving a lump of clay to the center of a spinning wooden plate by repetitively turning it into a vertical tube and back into a sphere-orb shape, is about the most difficult thing I experienced so far during this expedition. It comes with extreme precision. You have to place your hand exactly right, put in the right force at the right place, not make it too high or too flat, and at all times keep the whole thing symmetrical. If done right, you can put your hands against the clay and you wont feel the clay is moving in circles in your hands... Get the picture? 

So after spending about twenty minutes trying to get my blob in the right spot, and eventually asking Challing (is that how to spell his name..?) to do it for me, which takes him less then 5 minutes.., I could make a hole in the blob. However this is not a push-your-thumb-in-till-you-hit-the-bottom kind of hole, it is an act of pushing your finger down, trying to stay in the center, and keeping your hollow blob stable with the other hand. Also included: guessing how close you are to the wooden plate. 

So, when you have this hollow thing, and after you tried to make the hole cylindrical instead of conical, you can start by making your work higher by pushing on the in- and outside of the clay, slowly moving upwards with your hand. This way you force the clay to go upwards. After each round of moving upwards, you have to flatten the top and make the whole thing narrower. Repeat a few times until required height is reached. 

At this point, the ten minutes of fun start before you make a mistake and everything collapses! YAY!! 

No just kidding, this part is actually the nice part, here you can give your hollow tube some wider and tighter parts, give it a foot or a neck, whatever you want. However there is the danger of making you thing too thin, or too thick at the top, or asymmetrical, and the whole thing starts to wobble, and parts break off (if you are lucky) or the whole thing collapses (if you are unlucky). The breaking off of parts is also the main reason most of the things I made are so small.. The danger lies mostly in wanting too much, when you have something pretty nice, but you just want to make it a little thinner, or a higher, or just make this part look a little more smooth. That is usually when gravity kicks in and the whole thing becomes a slimy blob again. 

So even though the whole process is very difficult, and tricky, and time consuming, and wet, I managed to create these three miniature pots, which I am very very proud of.