Weighing Materials for Making Pottery Clay

Video Transcript

"Now we need to weigh out all of the materials that we're going to use to make the clay body with. Now the recipe that we're using is simple and it's based on parts of one hundred, that total one hundred. So it's easy to either scale down or scale up depending on how much you actually need to mix. For the purposes of demonstration, I'm just going to mix this small, say twenty pound batch, so I'm going to get my weighing container. I have a large scale here, though that can accommodate a significant amount of material if I wanted to scale this up and make, say, two hundred, five hundred, eight hundred pounds, one thousand pounds at a time it would be easy to do because the recipe is parts of one hundred. Another thing to know here before I start is that all of these bags are pretty well labeled, but some of the materials that we use don't come in such brightly colored, well-labeled bags, they're pretty plain, browned wrapper kinds of packages and it's useful to write the material, the name of the material in several places on the outside of the bag so that you're never unsure of what the material is and I actual always take a piece of paper and write the name of the material and put it in the bag too, because they all look the same. We've got white powder here, and that's pretty much it. So if you lose track of which material is which, that can really screw you up. Don't forget your respirator. So I'm going to weigh the container and I'm going to add that amount to the total of the material that I want so this weights about a quarter pound so I'm going to set the scale at eight and a quarter pound if I'm going to make a twenty pound batch. That would be four parts of gold art times two makes eight plus a quarter pound for the container. Then I just ladle my material into the container keeping an eye on the needle of the scale. Until it tips past and then I'll just remove a little bit and dial it in to exactly the right weight. Then you are going to repeat this for each kind of material and you're going to ladle your weighed out materials into another container and I am going to use this five gallon bucket and I show you why in just a minute. I'm going to dump this gently so as not to create a huge cloud of dust in my face. And repeat the weighing process for every material that you have to go into the recipe. Now it's important to note that as I've gone through the process of weighing out all my materials I've crossed them off my list as I've been progressing. Like I said before, all of these materials look the same. If you go away and take a coffee break and come back and forget where you were it's impossible to know what you've already put in the bucket and what you haven't. Now granted this is a pretty simple recipe so it doesn't have that many ingredients, if you are dealing with something more complex and you get lost and you have to start all over, you may just have to scrap what you've already done and start from scratch and that's just a waste of materials so. Make yourself a checklist and cross things off the list as you go."