Recap: August Clay Club at Motyl Pottery

Thanks to Tori Motyl for hosting Clay Club! Several people took Tori up on her offer to participate in a barrel firing. She walked us through the setup and loading of the barrel and told us about the process of the firing. (She's been using Alternative Kilns & Firing Techniques by James C Watkins and Paul Andrew Wandless as a reference.) Because of a threat of rain during Clay Club, Tori is doing the firing today and she'll remove the pieces on Friday. Look for photos of the finished pieces here on the blog.

Tori also shared her experimentation with digging her own clay. Inspired by Michael Hunt and Naomi Dalglish of Bandana Pottery, and with encouragement from Andy Palmer, she dug up some dirt/clay from beside her driveway to try. She walked us through the process of wetting this clay in buckets, sieving it, and removing excess water by drying it on a bedsheet tacked onto a wooden frame. The clay you see on the bedsheet in the photos has been there 2-3 days; Tori estimated that it would need another couple days to get to the right level of moisture. She has had great initial success: in some of the photos Tori is holding a lovely small pot made from this clay. She fired it successively to cone 04, cone 6 and finally cone 10 to see how high it could be fired, and you can see that it held up very well.

September Clay Club will be at Mars Hill University. Look for more details about that soon, and thanks to Shane Mickey for hosting us next month!

Thanks again to Tori, and to everyone - including John Britt - who came!