Sugar Creek Clay

This clay has special meaning for my dad’s side of the family. My dad lives on the old home place where he and his brothers and sisters grew up. Sugar Creek, where this clay is found, runs through the old farm.

Located under a limestone deposit, it has to be sieved fine to avoid lime pop. However, it vitrifies at extremely low temperatures. At cone 03 (almost) it has only has 2.5% porosity (3 hour boil 21 hr soak). Previous tests showed less than 1% porosity at cone 02. A true terra cotta color at cone 03, it darkens to dark red at cone 02.

While this sounds like a perfect clay, it is sticky and has a high drying shrinkage. If I let it dry enough to where it’s not sticky, the drying shrinkage is reduced to a respectable amount, however, at that point, it’s pretty stiff. I have enough problems with my joints without trying to throw a stiff clay. I’ve a few tricks for drying drying clays with high shrinkage so I’m continuing to experiment.

The bowl is glazed (also fired to almost cone 03) is a local material (51%) glaze that I mixed up and tested on one piece at cone 5.5, it was beautiful, so I glazed several pieces and tried to push to a full cone 6. All the pieces with this glaze blistered. I wondered how low it would go so I glazed this piece to test. I was pretty surprised to find it melted so well. The bumps in the bowl are not bloating. They are from harder lumps in the clay and were present during throwing (which is why this piece is a test).