Drain Tips for a Pottery Studio

Series Summary

Making pottery is the art of creating earthenware vessels from clay. The process involves shaping a vessel, by hand or with tools, and cooking it in a kiln. Mankind has been making pottery since the times we first learned about fire. Ancient civilizations used pottery for all sorts of things, from storing oil, wine, and other foodstuffs, to holding papyrus scrolls, the organs of dead god-kings, perfumes, and various religious offerings. Because pottery is durable and lasts long after its creator is gone, it has helped us to learn about entire groups of people that we might have otherwise never known; these hand-crafted objects tell stories, not only from their complex structural designs, but also the carefully wrought stories painted on their surfaces, a sort of iconography of a time and place in history.

In this free video clip series this clay expert will be addressing the art of pottery forming and molding the clay with your hands. She will include several examples of natural hand movements you can use to create life in your pieces as well as several creative ideas for new and interesting designs no one has thought of yet. This will make each piece you make special and unique. You will learn tricks for scoring edges of clay, attaching them and even how to apply handles to a pouring bowl. Take a look at these great videos and go play in the mud!

Video Transcript

"So I want to talk for a second about what to do with your throwing water. Once you've thrown for all day and you've got some pretty muddy water going, the bottom of this bucket is going to have a sludge on it. You do not want this going down your drain. So, I have got a really simple way of keeping this part of the clay out of my drain. What I do is I just keep a couple of buckets here, and I'll take the sponge out of my water and I'll mix that sludge into the water, so that it'll come out of the bottom of the bucket, mostly. And then once it's mixed up, I'll go ahead and pour it into one of my buckets. Now my bucket's ready for clean water for my next throwing. Now after a few days or hours or however long it takes, the clay will start to settle and the water will rise to the top of the bucket, so you can keep using your bucket over and over by just tipping it and letting the water runoff. You can see that everything that's running off is just clear water. And this bucket is almost full. But that gives me a little more space to add. And now once you've done this for a while and you've drained off the water several times, once you get to the point where you can't add in anything else, I take that off and I let the bucket dry. And you can either reuse that clay if you have a pug mill or if you really like wedging, or you can do what I do which is I let that dry completely, knock it out of the bucket into the trashcan and put the bucket back in the sink."