Jody Stouffer & Brian Wohleben – Lee County High School

Take a wine bottle and roll and tape a piece of newspaper around the outside.

Repeat this a second time so that there are two separate layers of newspaper taped around the wine bottle.

Using a slab roller, roll out a flat piece of clay that is long enough to wrap around the wine bottle. If a slab roller is not available, stacked yard sticks and a rolling pin will work too.

Using a box or rectangle cut out of mat board, impress a rectangular shape in your clay.

Using a pizza cutter or other cutting tool, cut out the rectangle. Save the excess clay for later use in the project.

Roll the clay around the wine bottle to assure the clay is long enough. If it is too long, excess clay can be cut off.

Score and slip both ends where the clay will be touching before enclosing the clay cylinder to assure for a good seal.

Connect the two ends of clay to create a clay cylinder.

Using a clay tool or your fingers, smooth out where the clay was connected to create a seamless clay cylinder.

Take the excess clay from earlier in the project, wedge it up and roll it out. This will be used to for the bottom of your face jug.

Using a needle tool or other clay cutting tool, cut a circle out around the base of the cylinder. Save the excess clay to be used in constructing the face of the face jug.

After scoring and slipping the clay circle and the bottom of the cylinder, attach the circle to create the bottom of the jug. Blending of the seam can completed with a clay tool or your fingers. A final blending with a damp sponge should create a smooth finish. You do not want any lines showing that the bottom was added on. This is also a good time to have your students put their name on the bottom of their work.

You are now ready to start constructing the face. According to traditional face jug potters, the nose is the best place to start. There is no right or wrong way to make a nose, it is however the potter wants it to look.

Remind students to score and slip all additions to their face jug unless you are using extremely moist clay. Students may use a clay tool or their fingers to completely blend in all lines. A final blending with a damp sponge will create a smooth finish. Golden Rule to Blending Completely blend out attachment lines. You should not be able to tell that facial features were added on, they should look like they has always been there.

Using your thumbs, create two indentions for the eye sockets. Roll out two clay balls for the eyes. Anytime you are making a pair of something, create them both at the same time so that they are of similar size and proportion.

Slip and score the eye balls into place. Coils can be rolled out and attached to create an upper and lower eye lid. In this example, only an upper eye lid is created. Completely blend in the side of the coil that touches the face. This creates a more interesting eye feature and helps the eye balls stay attached.

Using a pointed clay tool a dot can be added in the middle of the eye ball to create a pupil. This often helps to bring your face jug to life. Additional coils can be added above the eyelids to create eye brows. Using a needle tool, incise the clay to create the texture of hair. Try to incise in the direction that real eyebrows grow.

In a side angle cut, you can see that the bevel edge must align perfectly with air passage way in order for the whistle work.

If you have performed all of the steps correctly, you should now have a working whistle. If it doesn’t work, look through the next section for trouble shooting.

Bevel hole is too big and bevel is non existent. This whistle will probably need to have the bevel hole filled in and redone.

Here clay is obstructing the air passageway. This can be fixed by reinserting the popsicle stick through the air passage way and removing any excess clay with the dow stick. Sometimes the front inside wall needs to be rerolled and flattened.

In this side cut view, the whistle is not working because the bevel is angled incorrectly, pointing down too far.

In this side cut view, the bevel is angled pointing up too high. These problems can be resolved by reinserting the popsicle stick through the mouthpiece and re-rolling the bevel with your dow stick.