Cleaning Natural Clay for Making Pottery

Video Transcript

"In this segment we're going to take a look at how to clean and process the naturally occurring clay that we dug out of the ground. Now, it's got leaves, and twigs, and rocks, and crap in it. Despite trying to be careful about getting that stuff in it, it's in the ground so it's going to be in the clay. And, what we want to do is to pick out as much of that material as possible ahead of time and then break the clay up into small pieces and lay it out here, in the sun, to dry out. And then once it's dried, I'll show you how to get as much of the remaining material out of it as possible. Now I've taken the clay that I had laid out in the sun, it's dried out completely now and now I can find some more of the twigs and leaves and things that were in it and pick those out. And then, in order to release all of the crap that's bound up inside the clay, there's rocks and twigs and things still stuck in it, I'm going to just lay the plastic over it and pulverize it as much as possible. I want to break it up so that I have small, fine pieces and then I'm going to run it through a screen, so let's pound it up. OKay, now you can see that I've crushed up the clay as much as possible, here, and that allows me to pick out some of the other stuff that was stuck inside the bigger chunks. And, what that also allows me to do, now, I'm going to run it through a screen. I have this hardware cloth mesh that is nailed to a frame, here. This is a, each slot here is a quarter of an inch or so. So, it's going to allow some large particles to pass through, but it'll keep the largest particles out. And, then I have a smaller screen that's more like an eighth inch, or even slightly smaller. And you can even go with regular window screen, metal window screen, on a frame to sieve out the larger particles so that we get as much of the, as many of the pebbles and things out as possible. So, I'm going to screen some of this. This is a dusty activity, again, I'm going to put the respirator back on and just working over the plastic still, I'm just going to scoop this stuff through and work it through. (Screening demo) And, rocks, twigs, things, get screened out. So, now I've got some finer dust here and I'm going to work it through the finer screen. Let's make a new pile. And now I can see the small tiny twigs and pebbles and things that are getting screened out, and I've got a much finer powdered dust that resembles more like what we started with when we were mixing out of the raw materials to mix the clay from scratch. Now what we're going to do with our raw clay is just what we did before. We're going to take it and dump it into this bucket, here, and add water to it, but we're going to add even more water this time. And then what we want to do is mix it up really well with the mixer and this is going to float off, I can already see it, that float off some of the organic materials that are in there. Little bits of pulverized leaves and things like that are going to come to the surface and we can pour that off. You can also blend it up really well and run it through the fine screen again, or it may pass through an even finer screen more easily now that it's wet and that some of the majority of the large particles have been removed from it. And then after that, the process is pretty much the same as before. We're going to lay it out on the plaster bats and let some of that excess moisture get sucked into the plaster and evaporate off the surface and get it to a nice workable consistency. And then, we'll go and test it and make sure that it works right."