Dry Mixing Materials for Pottery Clay

Video Transcript

"Now that we have our material all weighed out, we need to mix the dry materials before we add any water. The reason we need to do that is so that we can homogenize and thoroughly distribute all the different kinds of materials that we put into the bucket before we add the water. If we just add the water now it will solidify and kind of in strata -- in layers -- and it will be really difficult to thoroughly mix and get all those materials blended once we add the water. So we want to mix it thoroughly first. There are a couple of different ways to do this. Behind me is a commercial clay mixer. This can be used to mix clay wet or dry. The drawbacks to using this machine are that it's expensive and not everybody has one, and that if you use it to mix the dry material it's going to make a big cloud of dust. So, as an alternative we're going to use the five-gallon bucket because with the five-gallon bucket and a tight fitting lid we can seal the material up inside the bucket and for a small batch we can just shake it up. Or, we can potentially roll it back and forth across the floor. It would work better if there wasn't a handle in the way. Shake it up in order to homogenize this material. Now, if I was going to create a larger batch we could do the same thing using this large barrel. A barrel like this that has a tightly locking lid, roll it back and forth, you could do this with several hundred pounds of material rolling it back and forth across the floor. Those are easy, dustless ways to mix the dry material. Once the dry material has been thoroughly mixed inside the bucket we want to slake it down in water so that it becomes completely saturated with water. I'm not concerned at the moment with exactly how much water I'm going to put in it because we're going to actually add more than we need and we're going to add it slowly so that it doesn't send dust up in our face. You're going to have to let this sit for a while, while the water percolates down into the material. It's okay if it ends up a little bit chunky but it's the easiest way to let it, to get it to be the right consistency is just to let it sit for a while. So, I'm going to add some water and let it sit potentially overnight and come back to it and we'll mix it up then once its thoroughly saturated."