Monday, May 25, 2009

gearing up for round three

The clay is already for firing number 3. Christy made the first pots of the cycle this afternoon.

Christy continues her thankless job of earning the money to keep us going, pretty much full time between two different jobs. She is starting to make pots now in her "off" time. I'm going to continue working on the house for at least one more week. After which I'll switch over to making pots full time until our firing in the beginning of July.
We pull our clay up from outside as soon as it's not too sticky. We then bring it in and put it up in arches to let it dry slowly in our humid studio. This seems to give us reasonably consistent clay. Here's what 750lbs of dry material looks like after it becomes workable clay:
Out of curiosity does anybody know a good rule of thumb for how much workable clay you can expect to get out of.... say 750lbs of dry material? I didn't have the gumption to weight it all out.
New for this firing is our clay box:

We had used Rubbermaid containers for the first firings, but they weren't up to handling all the weight. We got this crate from Kohler when we picked up our shelves last year. Seems like a good use for it.
Joe

3 comments:

Zachary and Jennifer said...

The arched clay reminds me of some sort sea serpent. :-)

The walkway looks great.

Jennifer

Alex Solla said...

Rule of thumb for most throwing bodies is that clay is 1/3 water weight, or thought of another way... 750# should give you (depending on how wet or dry you throw) somewhere between 900-1100#.

Looks beautiful. Nice mud!

Anonymous said...

how exciting... i was curious too to how much the 750 would weigh but i see alex has answered that