Technique

Almost all of our pots are wheel-thrown.

Making Plates

Here are some pictures from making the side plates for a large dinner service early this year.

Two stages in making the shape of the top surface are shown below:-

1 Spreading out the clay to the correct size for the bowl of the plate

2 Forming the rim and bending it down

3 Finally, the newly-thrown plates drying on the rack (set of 8 plus 2 spares, in case of accidents)

(NB, the bulbous thing in the background is nothing to do with the dinner service! It is a lamp base commissioned by someone else.)

The next stage will be to turn the plates over and when they are a little dryer (about as hard as cheddar cheese), to shape the underneath, complete with the foot ring.

Here we are, turning the base of one next day.

In the foreground are

• (on the left) one that is as it was thrown on the wheel the day before, and
• (to the right) one where the shape has been finished

  The one I am working on has had the centre excavated to leave it the right thickness. I am actually trimming the rough stuff off the outside of the base to make a smooth transition between the rim and the foot ring.

  The problems at this stage are things like :

  - keeping the rim flat and parallel to the base
  - making the base even, thin enough and not too thin
  - making the foot ring the same size on all of them

  As a final check, I weigh them and make sure they are not too different from each other.

This set of small plates had gone pretty well so far. Now they have to dry for several days and they can be put in for their first firing.

And here they are at the biscuit stage :

. . . and finally some of them finished . . . (The reason there are only seven out of the ten here is that I couldn't get the whole dinner service into the kiln at once, and had to fiddle about quite a bit to get it all done in two firings. These are part of the output of the first batch.)

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