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O.k. so what I'm going to demonstrate how to throw is a plate and the first step of
throwing a plate is getting a piece of clay, and preparing it to be put onto the wheel.
What I have here is a wire tool and I'm going to use this to cut my clay; take out your
lump, get an approximate size that you want; plate doesn't take that much clay so I'm just
going to take a small piece off of there, now I'm going to wedge the clay. Wedging is
important to extract any air bubbles that might be in the clay; as you can see there
is very little air in the clay if any, this has come from a factory so it's been put through
a pug mill which extracts most of the air. However wedging is important, you can see
I have a funny shape of clay here to be put on a wheel. If I was to try to center this
it would be very difficult. So centering; wedging also helps you prepare the clay in
the right shape for the wheel and I'll show you what I'm doing, I'm simply pushing in
on the sides and pushing it down onto the wedging table. This wedging table is a piece
of plaster that's covered in a piece of fabric; this is good for clay because it draws the
moisture down into the plaster so that the clay won't stick to the surface that we're
wedging it on. So there we go; if this was a piece of recycled clay or something I might
do this 30 40 50 times to ensure that there is no air left in the clay. And there we go,
you can see what I've done is; is put a nice circular motion, a nice circular pattern in
there which is going to help us when it gets time to go to the wheel. Want to pat it down;
make a nice even shaped bowl out of it, this is going to make it easier when we get to
the wheel. So there we have our lump of clay prepared and ready to throw a plate. Next
we're going to move to the wheel and I'm going to show you how to throw this plate next.