How To Make Clay At Home (It's Just Dirt)

most people buy their clay at the store but let's face it it's just dirt in fact most of us probably walk past perfectly good clay on our way to the store to buy clay in this video i'm going to discuss three ways that you can make your own clay at home using dirt and then i'm going to talk about when those different methods are best used to start with let's define clay if we bring up google and look at the technical definition of clay it is sediment with particles smaller than silt typically less than 0.00016 inch so looking at that definition we realize that not all dirt will work the same for making clay while some dirt has a lot of clay in it other dirts have almost no clay at all in them which is why some of the how to make clay from dirt videos here on youtube show people struggling so much to make clay take for example that video by the king of random that's had so many views he started out with a bucket full of dirt and he turned that into a handful of clay that's because he didn't use dirt that had a lot of clay in it let me show you what i mean dirt that has a lot of clay has certain properties that we can recognize when it's wet we might recognize that dirt sticky or plastic properties as being similar to clay but when it's dry we might look for tire tracks that stand up that stay in place for long periods because that clay is holding it in place we might also look for that crackled texture in the dirt showing that that clay is expansive it expands when it's wet it contracts when it's dry which is a property of clay so when we see that crackled texture that tells us that there's a large percentage of clay in that dirt so today i'm going to collect dirt from three different locations around town and then i'm going to take them back to my studio and i'm going to show you how we can test those to know whether they have a large percentage of clay or not and then know whether these are really suitable for making clay out of i want to remind you that staring at the internet all day is not good for you go out exploring and find some clay and while you're at it have an adventure like i'm having here okay i've got my three samples of dirt from different places around town now i need to determine just how much clay or how much impurities are in it so i know how best to process it so i'm going to grind them up a little bit i'm just going to powder them using my hands on the workbench here and then i'm going to get them wet once i get that dirt wetted i can kind of feel how clay-like it is how well it sticks to itself how plastic it is or just how gritty it is and that will help me determine just how much processing i have to go through to get it ready to use so with dirt sample number one this is really high in clay you can feel it's sticking to itself really well it's not even sticky on my hands it's got a nice texture to it it's really plastic if you remember i picked this up in a place where people drove cars and parked and such and so there was quite a bit of pieces of plants and gravel and stuff in there so i think i'm going to pass this through a screen just to kind of clean out some of the larger material but i think the amount of smaller material is just fine that it has so i shouldn't have to remove a lot of silt or anything because it is quite plastic i think it's going to work okay for dirt sample number two again this is a really pure clay this feels really nice in my hands got a nice texture to it it doesn't seem to have any pieces of dried plant material or rocks or anything in it so with number two i'm just gonna dry process it because it doesn't need a lot of purification now my third dirt sample this stuff is really gritty you can see that it's got a lot of gravel and sand in it probably silt as well it just it doesn't even stick together very well and so this needs a lot of purification to separate the clay from the silt and sand that's in it and so with this dirt i'm going to use the levigation process to purify it so let's get started purifying these dirts into usable clay so a sample number one here i'm just going to screen this so i'm going to put it in a bucket and i'm going to add water and i'm going to mix it up so that it's nice and thin and so the dirt and the water mixed together there's no lumps in it and then once it's mixed up good i'm just going to pour it through a piece of screen now i have this nice strainer screen that i'm using here you can get strainers like this off the internet and i'll put links to where you can get some of these kind of things in the doobly-doo but it doesn't even have to be this fancy you can just use an old piece of window screen or you can go to the local hardware store and just buy a chunk of screen and so i just pour it through the screen and then you know add a little extra water if it kind of gets gummed up to clean it out at this point now we have this liquid clay and we have to get a lot of that water out of it before we can use it so at this point i'll let this sit for an hour or so to let that clay settle to the bottom of the bucket and then once it's settled i can just pour off the clear water from the top so even after i've poured this water off the clay still has too much water in it for me to use this clay for making pottery or anything else so i'm going to pour this into an old pillowcase i have and then i can just take that pillowcase and set it outside in the sun and let it dry out until it's the right consistency now for clay number two i'm just dry processing this and this is the easiest and fastest most efficient way of processing clay this is when you have dirt that is pretty much pure clay and you really don't have to take anything out of it i'm just using the cement in my driveway and a rock to just pound this up but you can use anything if you don't want to sit on the ground you can do this on a countertop just put a piece of plywood or a piece of flagstone or even like a paver brick put something down so that you're not smashing it directly on your countertop and then just use a brick or a rock or something to just gently kind of pound it into a powder and most clay isn't that hard it's pretty easy to turn into a powder and it doesn't have to be perfectly like flour fine if i did clay that's too wet to grind like this i'll just let it sit out in a covered area so it doesn't get rained on for a couple of weeks and let it dry out so for sample number three i'm going to levigate this clay levigation is just the process of using gravity to sort those different sized particles that are in this dirt so i put water over the dirt and i mix it all up reach in and make sure you've got all the lumps broken up so it's all mixed up with the water and then let it sit for a minute not long a minute or two is fine and then the larger particles that sand and silt will settle to the bottom of the bucket and then you can pour off that liquid clay from the top and you're going to keep doing this adding more water mixing letting it set for a minute and then pour off that liquid clay do this three four five times until you get mostly just grit in the original bucket at this point your second bucket is pretty much pure liquid clay so again we're going to let this set for a while so that the clay can settle to the bottom it might take an hour to you might wait overnight when you come back you'll have a layer of pure water at the top that you can then pour off now you've got that liquid clay at the bottom still way too watery to use for craft projects now i'm going to take these bricks and set them out on my patio and then i'm going to take this piece of cotton cloth and i'm going to set in it and i'm going to pour the clay into this little trough that i've made moisture will leak through the bottom of that cloth and moisture will evaporate off the top and by the end of the day it should be good [Music] [Music] [Music] okay so i've got my clay made but i'm still not ready to use it before i can make pottery there's still another step so here's the problem with clay all clay shrinks when it dries if it dries unevenly and therefore shrinks unevenly it will crack and break as it dries so to encourage even drying the clay has to have temper added to it temper is defined as any non-plastic material added to the clay body so the clay itself is plastic it's moldable right we need something that's not plastic in store-bought clay that temper is usually grog it's just clay that is fired and then ground up into a powder and put into it in wild clay it can be grog we can purchase grog we can make our own grog but sometimes easier is sand because it's pretty universally available you can go any place in the world and find sand others other things you could use volcanic ash is really good because it's fine and it's inert in a firing diatomaceous earth is also very fine and inert if we want to use this we have to add about 20 it's a good round ballpark number of non-plastic material so i have this sand that i collected recently and i'm going to add about 20 to these clay bodies the other thing is i haven't mixed up my dry processed clay yet and the reason is it's a lot easier to add that 20 sand to it dry than it is to add that 20 percent to it wet when i'm adding to wet clay it's more difficult to measure it's more difficult to mix it throughout i have to knead it throughout but when it's dry it's easy to just stir it around and mix that sand through it so i'm going to be adding the sand to these clay bodies so they're ready to use for making pottery [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so now that you know how to make clay from dirt you're probably going to need to know how to find clay out in nature near your home well that's another subject for a different day but fortunately for you i've already made that video and here it is so go check that one out right now thanks for watching i'll catch you next time [Music] you

Channel: Andy Ward's Ancient Pottery

Views: 2,836,491

Keywords: clay, andy ward, wild clay, find clay, native clay, process clay, how to make clay, make clay, make clay at home, clay at home, make clay from dirt, how to make clay from dirt, clay from dirt

Id: ca20JkKFAcE

Length: 12min 17sec (737 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 06 2022