{"id":664,"date":"2011-10-30T20:57:02","date_gmt":"2011-10-30T11:57:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/karatsupots.com\/wordpress\/?p=664"},"modified":"2011-10-30T20:57:02","modified_gmt":"2011-10-30T11:57:02","slug":"slab-and-paddle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/karatsupots.com\/wordpress\/2011\/10\/slab-and-paddle.html","title":{"rendered":"Slab and Paddle"},"content":{"rendered":"

These last two summers in Korea got me interested in some variations on coil and paddle techniques. The Korean onggi coil and paddle is very good for quickly making large jars. The south west region of\u00a0 Joellanamdo has a variation on this which uses slabs rather than coils. The slabs are slapped out on the floor in a very even thickness, then added to the pot and paddled. One of the demonstrators of this technique said that if you could slap out an even slab of clay, that was 90% of the battle.<\/p>\n

One thing they don’t tell you is the importance of a suitable clay, and the hardness of the clay. It’s hard. Like slap it down on the floor and it doesn’t stick hard. Stretching it out requires a pretty plastic clay, which is somewhat hard to come by in my neck of the woods. However, when I was cleaning out the studio a couple of days back I uncovered some white clay from Seto that I had ordered a few years back for making Oribe ware. I mixed that 50\/50 with some Karatsu clay and got something that while not ideal, is somewhat suitable for onggi work.<\/p>\n

In the pictures below I slapped out 3 slabs and made a tall jar. If you make all of the slabs first, the construction process goes fairly quickly. It took me about 40 minutes to make the jar. The craftsmen I saw in Korea could make the same jar in 10-15 minutes. This jar is about 50cm tall.<\/p>\n