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So to trim this tea pot base I'm going to use these trimming tools right here that I
showed you earlier. The idea of what we are going to do is create a foot for the bottom
of the tea pot and what we are going to do is create a lip around the edge and this is
so that there is a completely flat surface on the bottom of the pot. If we were to put
it on a slightly uneven surface the pot would have a tendency not to sit flat so by creating
a foot around the edge we take away some of the surface area from the base of the pot.
So the first thing to take into account is how much clay you have on the bottom of your
pot and how much clay is in the walls and I'm going to start with this tool shaping
the outside edge here of my foot. The clay is ready to be trimmed because it is not sticking
to itself. If you start trimming it and the clay spirals off and sticks to your pot you
are not ready to trim yet. You can really take some clay out of the base if you want
to make it smaller. Let's see how that is now. This is kind of a rounded tea pot so
I'm going to go ahead and make a smaller base on it, blend that into the rest of the form,
like so and now for this one I am going to create a slightly rounded foot and on other
ones we have stuck with this shape but I'm just going to simply round out the edge of
the foot like so. Define the edge to fit like so. So now I've trimmed an outside foot for this
teapot as you can see and now we are going to go inside and create the inside of the
foot and for that I'm going to go over and use, well I could use either one, but I'm
going to use this one here and I'm going to flatten out the base to get any uneven surface
off of there and as you can see I'm just holding the tool steady and drawing it across the
base of the teapot like so. If I want a more flat surface I would simply use the flat edge
of this tool. So there we have a nice flat surface and now I'm going to go ahead ad create
the foot. I'm going to use my rounded edge and draw it across like so. Again your main concern is going to be to
feel, if it feels like it is getting soft don't cut any more out. Define the edge of
it, take the flat part of my tool and simply round out the bottom. So there we have a nice
looking foot on the base here and maybe we'll put some little definitions in it. So as you
can see now we have a nicely formed foot on this teapot and I'll show you we can take
this off of here now without the clay sticking to the pot, as you can see we didn't stick
it to the actual vessel and the next thing we are going to do is trim some of the various
pieces that go into the pot before we assemble everything.