Wet Mixing Materials for Pottery Clay

Video Transcript

"Now that I've let this material sit and soak in the bucket for awhile, I need to mix it up and homogenize the material as best I can. I want to work in any of the pockets of material that are still dry, and try and churn it up as much as possible and get rid of as many lumps as I can. I'm going to do that using this paddle mixer on this drill here. This is the kind of thing that you can buy at the home improvement store for mixing up drywall mud or paint or something like that. And on a pretty powerful drill, it'll make pretty short work of churning up this goop into a thick consistency and work out as many of the lumps as we can. Now this material is mixed up and it's kind of the consistency of like, cake frosting or something like that. It's not real liquidy, but it's not a solid usable consistency like we need to throw on the wheel or to do any kind of ceramic process with that involves manipulating firm clay. So, what we're going to do now is take this material and slake it out onto these plaster bats here. So we could've used that large mixer that I showed you before, and probably mixed the clay to a consistency that was a little more, a little closer to to the consistency that we wanted to be in order to be usable as a clay body. But, again, not everybody has that kind of mixer. An alternative to those large mixers are, I've seen used, I've seen bread mixers used, large, industrial bread mixers, or possibly mortar mixers, so those may be some low budget alternatives to the expensive clay mixer. Or you could just use this method. But since we had to add excess water in order to get it to a throughly homogenized consistency here, like I said we're going to have to slake it out onto these plaster bats now to eliminate some of that excess moisture. So I'm just going to take the slop and lay it out, and what I want to get is a relatively even thickness, several inches thick or so, about three inches thick. Or no thicker. And if you do this frequently, you're going to have to let the plaster dry out in between batches because it will become saturated with water, and what the plaster is doing is porous so it's pulling that excess moisture out of the clay and some of the excess moisture is also evaporating off the surface and it's going to become stiffer and eventually, depending on the ambient temperature and humidity and that sort of thing, it will become a good, stiff, usable consistency that we can then prepare for use on the potter's wheel or using hand building techniques, or whatever we have planned for our clay body in the end. So now that our clay has lost a significant amount of the moisture that it had in it, you can see it's much, much stiffer, almost a usable consistency, but we still need to go through several more steps in order to process it into a usable material. Primarily, we're going to need to process it so that we can eliminate some of the lumps and chunks that may still exist in it. It needs to be a completely homogeneous consistency, otherwise lumps and chunks and discrepancies in the consistency will really have an adverse effect on the finished product when we go to use it on the wheel or something like that."