Pottery: How to Make a Double-Walled Vessel

How to Make a Double-Walled Vessel? - as part of the expert series by GeoBeats. Double-walled vessels are useful for a couple of things. Mainly, creating very thick walled vessels that are not extremely heavy, so they are a little bit more light weight. So we will start off centering our clay. And we will open. Ok, when I open I want to make sure that my doughnut of clay here is nice and thick. So I am going to kind of flatten this out, compress it down. Make sure there is not a super undercut here. So I am going to kind of put some clay down. So my nice straight up and down walls, nice and flat. And now I am ready to break my walls. So I am going to take my fingers, start right in the middle of my doughnut and push down. And you are going to use a lot of water. And I like to kind of hook my fingers like this, because the clay is going to want to fly out. This thumb here, is kind of holding the clay up. Make sure it does not get away from me. Like that. Crest the clay. And now we have our two walls. We can start doing our pulls. I would suggest doing the inside wall first. It is going to be a little easier to work with that way. We are going to finger pull up. And then we are coming in on the outside wall. What I am going to do is make sure I have got all the moisture out of there. I do not want to trap a giant puddle inside there. Compress the clay. Compress the top. Do the same for here. Shape my inside. And now to create the illusion that this is an extremely thick pot. But have, not have the same weight. I am going to take my inside one. I am going to bend this over. Ever so gently. And I will take this one. And we will cup it in. Make sure it is nice and moist. Until we can connect. Like that. Now I am going to take a rib, compress. Make sure that is nice and sealed. Like so. And now what I have done is created an air pocket. And what I am going to do now is take a blow torch and heat up the air on the inside of the pocket. And what that is going to do is expand it a little bit and it is going to kind of balloon out slightly and it is a nice way to kind of open up your form a little bit more natural rather than rigidly, because it is not going to open up exactly perfectly. When you are doing this you want to be careful not to heat it up too much otherwise it will pop and rupture your piece. So just a little bit on there. I like to have my thumb on there, because if my thumb starts getting hot I know I am heating it up just a little bit too much. This is also going to make sure that there is no air pockets trapped on the folded over clay as well. So we will open up everything in there. Finish it off like this. And now that you do have air pockets in there, you can really play around with the clay in a way that you most likely have not been able to before because it is going to be very flexible. Very meluable. And you can start kind of doing all sorts of new, fun and interesting things to it. So that is a double-walled vessel.