Conditioning Pottery Clay

Video Transcript

"Now that we've gone through all these steps of mixing our clay and we have our pugged or wedged finish product, we need to make sure that it has the working properties that we're looking for. Ideally, primarily, that the plasticity. And we can check this by rolling a coil between our palms like so and kind of wrapping it around your finger. If that conforms to the shape of your finger nicely, and doesn't just snap or break, then it has a good amount of plasticity and you're ready to go on and try using other techniques. If it does snap, it may either be a little too dry or it may could benefit from some conditioning, meaning that the clay needs to sit and age for a little while before it's used. Now that promotes some, perhaps, bacterial growth and some just allowing the particles to thoroughly absorb and gel with the water that they're mixed up in now. To store the clay, regardless of whether you're going to age it or you just need to keep it at the ideal moisture content until you use it, you want to wrap it up in a thick plastic bag, ideally four to six mil plastic bags and wrap it up extremely tight, tucking the ends in so that no air can get in at all. What I often do too if I'm going to use my clay more immediately is put it into a garbage bag lined trash can with a tight-fitting lid, store it in a cool dark place, and let it age for a little while. You're going to have to experiment with your clay and see how much aging it takes. If you're using primarily recycled materials, which we were going to talk about a little bit more in a little bit here, you may not need to age your clay for as long because it may have more of those properties already. It may not have, may not be as short after the recycling process, as if you just mixed it up from scratch. But, aging can be key to good working properties for the clay. There are stories of traditional Japanese potters using clay that was made by the previous generation. And, making clay during their lifetime to be passed on to the next generation because the quality of the clay was said to be so much better. Obviously we don't have generations to wait to use the clay we just mixed, but suffice it to say that it can often benefit from a little bit of conditioning."