Now that we've secured our foam to our bat, let's take it over to our wheel. And we're going to put a couple of centering rings on here with a sharpie marker. And this can help in lining up our vessels and moving into this centering position. This will help to finish off our foam bat. Okay, now we have a bowl over here to trim. Now as always be aware that clay has that molecular memory you want to be very careful removing your bowl from this bat use both hands and flip it very gently or if it's large or then you can handle comfortably.

Take your bat Place it on top of your bowl and simply flip it from bat to bat. And again, this is always a very gentle technique. When moving your pieces around, it'll definitely limit the amount of stress with on them. Find my holes, we secure your bet the wheel head. And now we are ready to use our phone back. Now phone bats work better with wider forms or more open forms that are going to cover a lot of surface area.

They don't work great for tall forms or small forms like cups because there's not enough surface area to create that, that friction on it and really hold a piece into place. Okay, now I know my room is slightly distorted. So this is going to help equal that out. But first we have to center it up moving into our resyncing position. But fingers on top, extending that right index finger and feel it touching here, not the other. Give it a little scoop too.

Okay, another little scoot. And there we go. That's looking pretty good. Now the key with using a foam bat is our little Gatorade cap right here. This is a very handy tool because when trimming on the phone back, you can't secure it down with those lugs that clay like we could before. So you're going to want to keep a nice downward pressure so a little Gatorade cap, or even a slightly bigger lid will give you a little nice smooth area for your fingers to slide along while distributing the pressure that you're using throughout the piece.

Brighter color the better. I recommend not using a clear lid because that can get lost pretty quickly with your tools. Now we're ready to move into our trimming position, downward pressure with our fingers, laying that left them over behind contact with my right hand and I'm going to continue to trim and clean up the surface Always trimming the outside first. Create a nice undercut my shed on this foot I think today There we go. Once we've cleaned up that outside, we're ready to move to the inside depot detail line in their forefoot. I like this separation line, a little detail line on the foot.

It gives the glades a spot to break to and as you're waxing the bottoms it gives you an area to go off of in having a slight undercut here or flared out foot can give you a spot to grab that bowl whether you know you're washing the dishes or during the glazing process. It gives a nice little finger catch to pick it up. Once we've finished the outside, we can remove our lid, but I'm still going to keep some downward pressure on here as long as I can. And that'll help keep this from jumping off. Another tip when using a foam bat is try not to take too much off at once because again, you don't have those clay loves to really lock it into position. So if your tool gouges in it can pop you off center pretty quickly using some downward pressure, I'm gonna establish the width of my foot right there.

Then moving to the inside and working out removing our clay shed these nice clean ribbons of clay coming off just like normal. Fine tuning our shape. Okay, we're looking pretty good. These two lines should line up the outsides and he echoing the shape on the inside. I mean, not to our eyes. Alright, I think we're just about there.

Now in this section, we're also going to start talking about ribs. And we're going to talk about shaping with ribs in just a minute. But this metal rib can also be used for cleaning up belts on your surface, but also for scraping and removing clay, especially on these more organic shapes. Sometimes these these different tools, it's a little bit tougher to get in there and really follow the undulations of the form. So with this metal tool kit has a little more give to it. So I'm going to bend it slightly using the sharp edge and I'm going to run that along the surface.

And as you can see, that's removing some of the clay that perhaps was a little bit more difficult, a little trickier to get to with that trimming tool. You see I'm focusing in this area right here, but there's some undulations and some uneven spots where I distorted this shape and this metal tool, this metal ribs allow me to follow some of those uneven areas and clean it up. Now that I've removed them, I'm going to come in here with my damp sponge again, remove those hairs The grip from the clay those hard lines from the trimming tool. I'm going to come back to my metal rib again. laying it flush with the piece I'm going to compress this rounded edge onto the surface and that's really going to help smooth out some of those heavier grog areas and can continue that. That nice fluid touch of the piece.

That was we we were able to create during the throwing and forming process. Press the foot, compressing down any of this grog or sand that may be in the clay body. Lastly, I'm going to soften up any hard edges sign and we are done. Very gentle hole in our bowl. nice clean foot, where we use that metal rib to smooth out all that grog and grip from it gave a nice fluid fill This is a nice functional bowl right here and again it has these undulations this organic fill, so it should be, should be fun to use. Next we're going to talk about ribs.