Ceramics & Pottery: Drying Time

Video Transcript

" Hi! My name is Vincent Sansone and I am the Head of the Ceramics Department here at Crealde School of Art in Winter Park. Today for Expert Village I am going to talk to you about how you can tell when your pot is ready to put in the kiln to be fired, so you need to make sure that it is dry before you actually try to fire the pot. You can tell here that this pot that I just made a little while ago has still got a sheen to it, it is still fairly soft. I can still make my fingerprints show up on it, so there is going to be quite a bit of time before that is dry enough to put in the kiln. Now this pot I made yesterday is fairly large, but it has begun drying already. It is a little bit lighter in color here on the rim and here is a couple of pots here that are bone dry here at the top, but still have enough moisture in the bottom of them, so that the clay is still fairly dark. Depending on how thick the clay is and how the weather conditions are, the pots will dry faster. Usually here at the school if we load something in before it is completely dry we turn the kiln on low overnight to make sure that everything is dry before we start turning the temperature up of the kiln, that way we do not have things blow up in the kiln from moisture turning into steam and expanding too quickly."