From Local Earth to Finished Pottery – Part 6
In the previous part, I showed how the clay is dewatered after sieving. Now we move on to mixing and testing. First, the water content of the clay is determined by drying a small sample …
Category: Testing
From Local Earth to Finished Pottery – Part 4
This is the silty material after it has been sieved and most of the clay has been poured off. It hasn’t been fully washed yet, so there’s still some clay mixed in. At this stage, …
Processing the Black Water Trough of clay
Some of you may remember me posting about a huge water trough full of clay I got when we did the foundation for our shop. I’ve used this clay for years by processing out more …
Reclaim Test and adding 5% EPK to black tub clay
Adding 5% EPK to the bucket of the black tub clay that already had 22% neph sye added did indeed jump the absorption from 1.5% to over 3%. The test tile was less shiny after …
Well some progress…and some disappointment…
Yesterday, I completed a cone 6 firing with mixed results. The clay from the big tub, which tested at 1.5% absorption but looked shiny, slumped badly. I had been afraid of that. I conducted a …
Moving back to cone 6
After trying working with my deep red clay at cone 9/10, I am moving back to cone 6. At least for the time being. I knew when I moved to cone 9/10 that I might …
More working with the silty clay
This is the batch I dug a few days ago and processed half of it to see if I can recreate the accidental perfect batch. I posted a few days ago. I kept it a …
100% Local Clay Body
This clay comes from an odd low spot, on top of a hill on our land. Right out of the ground, it’s very silty and not plastic enough to throw, fires to above cone 8. …
Light Clay Body Test #1
This body uses one of my lighter colored clays. It’s probably more than 50% sand right out of the ground, however, it’s very easy to process, settles out of a slurry wonderfully, and de-waters quickly. …
Clay Body Test using Red Clay and Neph Sye
I haven’t been very good at keeping track of my clay tests recently. I need to blog about these as a way of keeping up with what tests I’ve run and what needs to be …