What is up guys, I'm John the Potter, welcome to the studio so good to have you in here today. I have a super exciting video for you guys. So probably almost two years ago now, I made one of the videos that is most important if you're learning pottery and that's how to center. So I did five keys to centering clay and so I'll put that in the link up here if you want to go watch it. But it's been viewed like over a hundred thousand times and I get messages from people like that video really help them center. So I thought it's time to do an updated how to center but with a little bit of a twist, I want to do how to center large pieces of clay. Because if you're starting out, you know, I throw a ton of one to two pound like up and down and up and down and it's you don't need a lot of strength and it's much easier to center smaller pieces of clay than it is like a large five pound seven pound eight pound piece of clay. So I thought it would be helpful if I got on the wheel and showed you guys what I'm thinking about when I'm centering like a large piece of clay so you guys can throw those giant bowls or giant bases or just get into throwing bigger stuff because it's super fun to get to that stuff. So before we get on the wheel, I just wanted to mention a few things. We have a bunch of restocks coming up. We're going to do one a month. That's when we sell pots and you guys can buy them and we super appreciated it keeps the business going and supporting my family. That's one of the main sources of our income nowadays. So September, October, November, December, we have this list of the restocks coming up. So if you guys want to buy any pots, we'll have like at least 100 pots going up for each of those. We're going totally eco-friendly on JTP. So that means solar panels to fire our electric kilns and eco-friendly packaging. We have a bunch of videos coming out on that coming up soon, which is super exciting. And we wrote a book. So if you're a beginner potter, we have a book coming out on October 20th called Practical Pottery. So there's a link in the description and we'll be talking a lot about all that stuff in the future. Right now, we want to get into five steps to centering giant pieces of clay. You guys ready for it? Alright, let's do it. Alright, so we got a block of 25 pounds of clay right here. So step one is to wedge. So you get your ball of clay and it's super, super, super important to wedge it up really, really well. The bigger the piece of clay, I'd say the more important it is that you get it really well wedged. Like when I take a pound of clay off the block and throw it on to throw a mug, I never really wedge it. But anytime I throw a two, three, four plus pounds of clay, I always wedge because I find that the more I wedge, the easier it is to get it centered. And then to the subsequent process of throwing it is also easier. So we got to wedge this guy up. So we're going to cut that block off. That's maybe about a third. So this will be, ooh, that's like eight pounds right there. And we're going to wedge it. And it's always like this clay is probably sitting there for a little while. So getting it started can be a little tough. But I always like to wedge in one direction for a little while and just compressing that clay into itself and then turn it, kind of start going into a different area. There's a lot of different styles of wedging. This is just the one that's always that I've always done. So I probably wedge this up now for five, six minutes, probably 50 times or ish. I don't know. A lot of people ask, how many times you wedge? I don't really count. But you know, it's a good, a good bit. So that's step one. And the wedge wedge, step two is to make this into a ball. Super important that this gets into a ball. If you, a couple of reasons you want it to be in a really nice shape ball, when you throw it down, you want the clay to be able to spread out and then cover that bottom evenly. So there's no air bubbles. So it doesn't trap like right now, like this little, see that little spot right there. And if I throw it on the bat, on the wheel, then that's going to trap a little air underneath there. And it'll just be annoying later. Sometimes it's fine. Sometimes it'll cause problems. All right. So now, now we're going to get on the wheel. Ready? Shhh. And we're going to get it a little bit wet. You want to just kind of damp. You don't want it too wet because it'll, the clay will slide around on there. But you have to have a little bit wet or else it won't stick to that dry bat. So I like to get it wet and then make sure it's like pretty dry, like no sitting water. Step three is to throw it down as close to the center as possible. If you get this giant piece of clay and you like throw it over here, it's going to be really difficult to get it back in the center after that. So we want to make sure we start as close to center as possible. Okay. Ready? Shhh. Boom! See that even wasn't that close to center. Dang it, John. But we'll try it anyway. Dang, that was not that close to center. You could, I should probably just not even throw it down, just kind of like set it down and we'll try it anyway. Okay. That'll be all right. Next thing you want to do is make sure that you have plenty of water and that you're using the water because you see how my hands just slide nice. Nice and easy. It's going to be really difficult to center. So you've got to make sure you use plenty of water. Small pieces of clay you can center like in one kind of motion, right? You're going to center it down with larger pieces of clay like this. Oops, I got a little hair in there. I should have put my hair up. You kind of have to start at the bottom and then squeeze it up and the bottom may not get centered until like one of the last, I'm just taking a little of that excess off from my terrible throw down which wasn't in the center. Right? So the bottom you can see isn't really centered but we're going to bring it up and then center the top. So right now that center piece is really centered but down here is still not centered. So we'll go down to the base again. Bring it up. So you're also coning up and coning down kind of like you do when you center clay. Then you can bring it back down, try and keeping it cool right in the center. And you can see I got a little excess clay there on the base that I don't, I'm not going to get that center until I might as well just get it out of there which that's not really, shouldn't have that but anyway. So then I'm going to do it again, start from the base, bring it up. Then I take that right hand, bring it down a little bit and every time I do that it feels like it gets a little bit closer to center, the whole piece. If you need help, you know, certainly this is more of an advanced. You want to start centering other pieces of clay, smaller pieces of clay. But I can feel that I'm pretty close to the center on the outside. Use kind of play with from the top, you know, using that right hand on the top, using that left hand around the outside. And that's basically it. And then step five would be to start with the piece in a reflection of what you want to make. So if you're going to make a big wide platter, then you're going to start with your clay more flat, right? So you're going to flatten it. It's going to be a shallower base, wider base. But if you're going to make like a big tall base or something like that, then you can keep it a little bit more like it is right now where we go down in the middle. So I think I'm just going to make a little bowl, not a little bowl, it's going to be a big bowl. 7 pound bowl, not too bad. So time you do it you're probably gonna be pretty terrible at it but maybe the 50th time that you do it you'll be like this isn't so bad I can do that so you know if you've only ever thrown one or two pounds it's maybe try throwing three pounds maybe try throwing four five if you have any comments questions concerns let me know in the comments as always I super appreciate all you guys and checking out the videos we're gonna try to be making way more videos I took kind of a break from both making and videos but now we are gonna get back into it so as always let me know if you want to see any videos subscribe like share comment all the things we'll see you guys in the next video