I Broke A Bowl to See My Progress

A few weeks ago, I threw this bowl (below) as part of my practice of "throwing off the hump." Throwing off the hump saves time in that you wedge a large piece of clay, rather than several smaller pieces, and you throw a succession of small pieces (e.g., bowls, mugs), cutting each off the large hump as you go. I looked around for a video on someone else's website to show what "throwing off the hump" is, but I couldn't find one that wasn't trying to sell something. So, if you want to see the technique, I suggest doing your own search and choosing one you like.

I've been throwing off the hump as a way to practice throwing many pieces one after the other that I then cut off and recycle. It's a useful technique for when I'm good enough to sell pieces, so that I can throw half a dozen bowls off one wedged piece of clay.

I kept this one sample to practice trimming, since I don't need a single rice bowl. As I said to my teacher, I either need eight of these or zero. So, after letting it dry enough to trim, I gave it a foot, which you can see in the right bottom of the photo. I can honestly say I'm very comfortable with my trimming skills. I think the feet that I give my pieces goes with their shapes and that I can mirror the inside of the form with the outside bottom well. It also lets me know that my pieces must be fairly well centered, or trimming them would be difficult.

However, what I did not realize is that "S" cracks are very common in throwing off the hump because you don't have the wheel or bat directly under the bottom of your piece to help with compression. I learned yesterday that I need to use a wooden tool to put the compression in after trimming. I must not have been paying attention the first lesson for trimming, because I hadn't even known to use something after trimming to push the grog back in for months, but since learning that, I've been using a soft rubber "kidney" because it makes such a lovely smoothness or a sharp metal kidney to give it nearly a burnish. It turns out that this isn't enough to compress the bottom. So, this bowl had a tiny crack in it after it finished drying.

Since I had never intended to fire it, my teacher helped me break it so that we could see my progress in evenness. Here it is:



As you can see, it is perfectly even. My joy upon seeing that was huge. I am progressing. This would have been a beautiful rice bowl.