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O.k. so now we're ready to trim the base of this bowl and I'm going to use these two tools
here; these are trimming tools that I showed you earlier. And as you can see the base is
nice and smooth this is because we drew the wire underneath it, and allowed the bowl to
spin at the same time. So the idea of; of, of creating a foot or a base for a bowl or;
or any piece of ceramics is that we're, we're; we're going to create a ring around the edge
or a ring anywhere to cut down on the surface area on the base, this is so that the; the
piece of ceramics will sit nicely on uneven surfaces. So the first thing I'm going to
do is take this tool here and trim the edge; it's important to know how much clay you have
in there and I know that I left about half an inch on the bottom of this pot. If you
really want to know and you're not sure; you can take a pin tool and poke it down through,
and see when it; say, see when the resistance starts however I know what the depth is and
it's; and and it's, it; it's just important for you because if you cut through the pot
obviously you, you'll; you're going to loose a piece. So here we; here we, here we go;
I'm going to start on the outside edge here, as you can see the clay is ready to be trimmed
because it's not sticking to itself; it's simply coiling off like that. I can also trim
the bottom base of the bowl; sometimes with bowls you want to leave some clay in here
and, and you want to take it off later so I'll trim this off. The reason you'd leave
clay in there is to throw a wider bowl you'd want some strength in here but you can; you
can thin it out later like this. Because we have it on center this will match our original;
this will match our original throwing patent. So now I'm going to cut into; create a foot,
now you can see we have a nice shape there on this edge; I'm just going to give it a
little definition like so. And now I'm going to work across the top. Now remember I have
half an inch in here so the first thing I'm going to do is just flatten it out, make sure
that everything is smoothed off; there we go. Now I'm going to take the larger edge
of this tool and run down, and actually take off a nice big chunk of clay. Sometimes this
is where this other tool comes in, it's nice to use this one now; it's less cumbersome
and I can actually run it down the inside, and pull off a nice piece of clay on the inside
edge like that and run it down again. You can see in here the clay's a little bit wetter
and it's starting to stick to the surface; you want to get rid of it. O.k. now as you
can see I'm creating a nice foot with a base on the inside here. Now you can do these in
a variety of different ways; you can round them out, you can smooth out the inside; maybe
take your larger tool and smooth it all out if that's what you're looking for. I sometimes
just like to smooth it like that; take a tool like this and just simply put a little, a
little squiggle into it; it just kind of looks nice. And then we have a foot on the base
of this bowl and we're going to turn it over in the same way by putting a bat onto it,
and flipping it; it may be a good idea to leave it like this for a while; while it dries.
But this is pretty much trimmed up; in the next section I'm just going to be giving you
a few more tips on how to finish it up and make sure that it's ready to go into the kiln,
and we'll be talking about that next.