How to Dig Your Own Clay

[Applause] [Music] so I thought it was high time I dig my own clay in my backyard what I looked for was hard weedless dirt clods that I could pick up with my hand fortunately I had just dug a hole for another reason and had a pile of dirt and threw it in the bucket and add some water I'm not convinced you need a special type of clay or rather a special type of soil to get clay from your backyard how I'm doing it you should be able to get some sort of clay regardless of how much is actually in your soil so you see here I break up the clods of dirt and I let them sit and my dog inspects and I come back making sure that it's all broken up once I see that the clumps are gone I'll come back I'll add some more water and then we'll mix it before pouring off as much of the suspended clay as we can [Music] so once I've completely agitated the mix I set up a second clean bucket with a colander and I pour off as much of the suspension as I can leaving behind the larger rocks and sand at the bottom of the first bucket so I've left this bucket sit for a day a day and a half and it's starting to clarify already you'll see here I've pour off as much as I can most of the clay is stuck in the bottom of the bucket and it doesn't really matter if you leave some of the water in you can see at this point that the clay that is remaining it's quite fine and smooth the next step is to pour this mix into an old pillowcase getting as much out as I can from the bottom of the bucket and this is where this clay will spend the next few days realistically a couple weeks sitting around sometimes drying in the Sun sometimes I'll put it in a wet box but after a couple days it's condensed down to a fairly manageable damp lump it's difficult to show in the video what the clay feels like but at this point it's firming up rolling it around and patting it down helps continue to dry it so I'm going to try throwing this clay in two different ways the first is simply by itself so this is a hundred percent of the backyard clay [Music] I didn't know what to expect and throwing this clay honestly I didn't think that it was going to be much different than the clay I throw with every day it was surprisingly different it's very soft it kind of has a dry skin to it and it almost feels like the insides of the walls these cups are filled with pudding or something it it moves funny and it definitely was difficult to achieve any sort of reasonably thin wall thickness you can see how at one point I try to use a torch to stiffen the wall thinking that that might help allow me to pull it up a little bit more and thin it out and it just didn't get much better the second way I wanted to use this play was marbling it with my regular white studio clay B mix so you see I do that and then we take it to the wheel now this blend of clay through much easier than using 100% backyard clay it seemed to be a little bit more stiff and a little less water now jiggly you know you'll notice while I'm throwing that these the brown slipcovers the marbling it's not obvious that this is a brown and white mix it'll become more obvious when we take a rib to it and scrape away the top coat and it'll become even better when you trim it the next day [Laughter] [Music] so here it is fresh off the wheel after taking a metal rib to it and here are the two pieces a few days later after they've gone through their bisque I'm going to give each of them a coating of clear kind of a milky clear on the first one only on the inside and then on the marbled piece all all rim dip it and bring it out over on the outside so we can see what it looks like and here they are done I am really surprised with the color of the clay I'm noticing on the inside you might not be able to see it on the camera but there is some crazing which means the fitment between that clay and my normal glaze is not perfect but this marbling looked great definitely gonna be this again I did have a crack on the bottom I'm not sure what that was from but overall they hold water they look good I think that's the success [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Justins Makery

Views: 388,475

Rating: 4.9019561 out of 5

Keywords: clay, pottery, pottery wheel, ceramic, art, education

Id: k4ckjXzqOS4

Length: 9min 32sec (572 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 16 2018