Hello, my name is Dan Elvichesky and I'm your ceramic instructor. Tomorrow when you come to class I want to have you be prepared a little bit for what we're going to do so I'm putting together a video to give you a hand. The first thing in the video is going to cover is wedging the clay. So make sure you pay attention to that. Next we'll cover your position at the wheel. I want you to look at that carefully a couple of times and then we're going to cover centering a piece of clay. Now look at these things a couple of times over and it'll make tomorrow way easier in class and maybe we'll even get to make something. Alright, see you soon. Alright, well the first thing we do when we want to center a piece of clay on a wheel is that we have to do what's called wedging. Wedging is getting all the air bubbles out. We pick up a piece, something about that size of that fat grade here and we throw it on the old table, we start moving it around just trying to get all those air bubbles out of it and you just kind of squish it around and it'll go good. Some people don't wedge but I think if you don't do that you're going to get an air bubble in your piece and it always comes at the most unopportunetime. However, so that's beginning to feel good there and it's just a rocking and a rocking and just rocking and pushing it in there and getting all those little air bubbles filled in. Alright, I think we're ready to go to the wheel where a piece of clay can't even shut. Once you're up to the wheel, it's very important that how you sit at this wheel because what I want to use our body to help us move this clay at the center, we have big arms or something like that, we might be able to just grab this and do it in the place but most of us aren't that way and we really just have to use our body. So what we're going to do is we're going to make sure that we've got ourselves up to the wheel and looking at it this way, you're right in here. You're going to want to tuck this out right in after your hip here because this one here and this one here on this hip here. So this is going to give you something to hold on to and this is going to give you the lead origin. And what we're going to do is we're going to lean forward and use that forward motion to help us work work clay. And once we get going, I'll let you see that in a closer look. Okay, so now we're at the wheel. Just sitting here and you're in a good position, you're looking good, you're all lined up over the top of this thing. Here's the guy. He's already had an all his crush done. He hit it around all the progress he missed and I don't know why. He kind of wanted to make it round and she was too excited. And now this wheel is really nice because it's got these greenings on it on it. So kind of give just an idea where to center. Some people like to throw it down, you don't even want to get smacked. I'm not that accurate. I always miss the mark when I do that. I will put it over on this side here and it's really tough to get something into this center when it's out here. So I'm looking, I see exactly where the center this is. I'm going to place it right there. And what I need to do is I just give it a couple of little holes and that usually I probably could do it. Don't do it that hard. Okay, now let's turn our wheel on. And I always have to have water. Water is really an important thing with this, without the water and nothing more. This is going to make it slippery enough so that it goes slightly in there. Okay, now we get the water with the wheel going. And when you want to center, I think you want sort of a medium fast wheel, not too fast, but you just got to be warm up. Okay, so I've got my hands in there, got my hands in there. And I've got a slowly moving on this. Using my hands, using the ball of your hands. I'm using ball of your hands. I'm not using my fingers. A lot of beginners like to give it a great voice. It's just too much for your hands. So we're just going to nice and easy. Push in, move on on each side, and we get the stench coming out here. So this is looking good. I'm going to get my spoon. Take it. And so now, if you use my spoon, we get a little bit of water and we get some water on here. We're going to bring it up. This is what's called combing. And we bring it nice and easy. We got this funny top on here. So what really centers the clean, is not just pushing up right down, it's bringing it down. When I bring it down, I'm going to come down at the top. I have my hands in a B shape. We just need to link them together. And you can want to keep it wet. And you don't want to just lean your body in here. And so I'm leaning from the top. But I'm angering my side here. So it's actually doing pretty good center. I'm going to put this up here. Try to keep your thumb in the center there to bring it down. And there we go. That's pretty quick to move. We're going to bring it up one more time. Again, we're going to try to comb it. Now, a couple of things that happen when you comb it. One of the weird things is if you're pushing too hard on the outside, the inside will down. Let me let me get this down. I don't want to go for here now. It's called ball kingdom. And what happens will go, kingdom, if you get it to your center, it will down from the bottom here at the beginning. And then you're trying to pull it back up. Pulling it back up and make some sure, you're going to push it evenly. Because as long as it's slipping, you're not putting too much stress on it. But, roughly, if it gets too dry, what happens is you're putting so much strain on it, it's creating air bubbles inside because it's pulling and it's going to create air bubbles. And later when you try to throw a pot, you're going to hit those air bubbles and it's going to move your pot. So we got a ball kingdom. Now, a ball kingdom is a bummer because what happens is it puts in air pocket. And we try to keep the air bubbles out. So to get a visual ball kingdom, pretty much what we got to do is push the side band while not applying pressure to the side. So again, I will just start pulling this down and to prevent that, it will not be shaded always around and get this band of a motion. So now the next step, we want to take this to another step here. So once you think you got it, there's one method you can use to kind of really help you do this. What you do is close your eyes, take a deep breath and just keep your finger done. And now you should be able to feel that this is exactly the same thing. You'll feel that if there's any kind of little wobble or anything, you'll pick it up and you'll just be as long dry as it goes. Alright, I was asked the other day what does it mean to throw a pot? And I was thinking well, I wonder if it means taking the clan throwing it on the wheel or maybe throwing the thing away when it broke in or whatever. But as it turns out, throwing is something that happened a long time ago. And the reason that they did throwing is that they didn't have electricity. They didn't have a pedal to push on and have their wheel go around. So what they had to do is they would take a rope, they would wrap it around their wheel and then tie it to a heavy log or a rock. And then they would throw that and it would start to spin the wheel spinning. That's where throwing comes from. Has nothing to do with pottery today. Today we're peddling. We don't throw. See you in last amount.