The Best Way to Improve Your Wild Clay 

Great relationship advice. Thanks Andy.

Thank you Andy for facilitating the knowledge of an art from the past I hope your teachings bring you happiness like your videos have brought me and the knowledge to spread this to others

Just what I needed to hear today! Thank you!

Glad you're back, I have recently found you, and spent the last few weeks diving into your archive of videos! Thank you for making them, they have been so helpful in plating with the clay I have locally. Thank you! From Niagara region in Ontario, Canada. The clay here is from the dry creek sides, on the Niagara escarpment along the Bruce Trail. It is grey, but when fired in the fire pit outside turns orange-ish :)

Thanks, Andy! I've been working with a lot of wild clay in the past few weeks. Got that corn grinder in the mail. Thanks for all your help and inspiration, and good luck on your trail!

Andy, You are a treasure. You have more teaching skill than anyone I’ve seen! And you’re willing to share what you know instead of preaching. I’m going back to our little lake near Yuma and find more clay thanks to you.

Hi Andy, ty for your videos. The info. you're sharing really is helpful.

Thank you so much for putting up a video like this!! Very helpful!!

Thanks, I found some clay right near my house but have been having some problems with it. I was starting to think was me but now I know not all clay is equal. Time to go hunting.

Thank you Andy, I always appreciate your knowledge.

Good to see you back in action...great video...I may have found a clay that needs no temper, fires well and has a wonderful buff color...one test pot attests to that....ever good Thanks

Great video... I'm a soils technician myself seen a lot of clays and even recognized some of the areas in your videos. I'm currently working just outside of Black Mesa right across the street from you probably know but we have a bunch of there dark brown clay in our road excavation going to give it a try. Seems like it probably works for the ancients!

Nice to see a you are back at it.

As everytime....very good content. I love the way you do it !

Sometimes we find a clay and we want to bend it to work for our ideas instead of using the clay for its own properties. Like a red clay high in iron that we try to fire to cone 6. It is a waste of time to fix it... make some nice pots and sculptute at cone 05, and find another clay if you want stoneware!

I want to apologize..things used to be easy for me to pick up. Guess I have gotten lazy and mean in my old age. I didn’t want to do the leg work/mistakes and am jealous of your knowledge. I did do a few positive things today..finally found some clay, don’t know how good yet. I started a small kiln, after 3 start ups that weren’t right. You put a lot of information out thank you 🙏 oh btw.. your pottery is beautiful

11:10-11:30 is good relationship advice andy!

Thanks Andy, solid information to consider. I hope your travels are going well:) Cheers Ps: loved your Romsn kiln video over at wild clay facebook.

Great stuff. Here in the UK, we don't have the same ease of access to places to dig clay, but I hope it's still possible. I'm a complete beginner and finding your videos very helpful, thanks.

HI, I did read through comments before posting a questions, because this vid title indicates the discussion will be about poor quality clay. If I had the clay that you are all talking about I would feel like a queen. You're all talking about clay that has TOO much plasticity. What happens when there is the opposite? I have too much sand in my clay. Hardly NO PLASTICICITY! I have lost all hope at this point because no one is talking about this. The temper, naturally. I found poor clay quality that has sand it it that won't filter out using a coffee filter like the other clay I collect two weeks ago did. I dont know what else to do. I put it through the seive a millions times until I got out the gravel and pebbles. Now it's a mix of sand and clay and I cannot separate them! So, I had to combine my paper meche & flour (and elmer's glue) clay to function.

I’ve been scouring the internet for answers… I should have known you would be the most help

So what happens if you blend the floppy first claypit stuff with the short 2nd claypit stuff ? Have you tried adding bentonite cat litter for plasticity, or a little paper pulp, they often can make quite a difference. Levigation and elutration can be speeded up by using aluminium sulphate, and a dash of milk as a flocculant (or comercial polyanionic flocculant and aluminium sulphate ) to drop the clay floc out of the water, so you can skip some of the more teedious dewatering steps.

Great video!👍

Hi Andy, first of all, thanks for your videos and effort to do it! I have, close to the place I live, a reddish clay just like this one you show and I'd really wanna work with it, not for any attachment but just for local resources. I'm grinding it, watering, ..., and then I'd like to use a certain cloth mesh to remove the excess of water. coming from silk screen arts we have several different polyesters meshes(treads by inch). in case you know about, which would work better because i don't think cotton is a good choice, please let me know. thanks again, Haro

Summers are brutal down there. Stay in the cool!

As always, your videos are enjoyable to watch! (Keep up the good work!!) You might make another episode that delves into more depth about the technologies to modify properties of clays one may like for one reason, but need to modify for another (though the effects of changing temper amount is covered partially in this one), especially given that the various cultures we are trying to emulate tended to choose different clays and tempers for different types of pottery (e.g. cooking vs. decorated) based on suitability of structure and aesthetics for the intended use of the final product. Some examples could be tied in with discussion of the archaeological examples.

Hi Andy love your channel! I’ve been getting into harvesting wild clay. I have been using iron oxides to color my clay by kneading them in, could this also double as a temper?? Thanks!!

I have a great deal of clay choice where I live. There are white clays full of sand, and purple clays at high elevation. While I have made small figures and things with the purple clay I have never fired it. I am wondering if there is any safer way to fire without adding sand because I don't want to change the color. I understand that there is more risk in not cutting the clay, but I was wondering there were ways to reduce that risk. Like firing it gradually or letting it dry longer?

Thanks so much for sharing your expertise. I usually work with metal and enamel, so I’m wandering outside my lane here, but I’d like to try my hand at making some basic ollas for irrigation this summer. My kiln is too small to fire a vessel this large, so I’ll be attempting to pit fire. Any advice on what type of porous clay would work well for this application?

I am a beginner and I have picked up some East Tennessee Red Dirt next to the lake. I wet it and it becomes tacky and moldable. My question is how much do I need to process it or is it ready to add Tempur and began to make simple pottery? I would like to teach my Grandchildren.

If I process my own clay from dirt how do I know how much temper to add.

I don't have transportation so I can't look anywhere else but immediately around where I live and the clay cracks too much as I'm molding it, is there something I could do to it to make it more workable?

But i really enjoyed this so im subscribing.

I can't wait for the ground to thaw so I can get out there and find me some clay. There's LOTS of it around here, in fact we have a county called Clay. lol I think I can find me some good stuff.

I have a question why is my clay start popping when I put on fire?

Thanks Andy. I'm throwing out 3 buckets of my home clay. It's crap. How do I know. Well, I started working clay by using commercial "Wally's" and I rate it as a Cadillac. I just used my first wild clay spoken of by some in our Ancient Potters group (Pima Brown). I rate it as a Chevrolet. My home clay rates more like an old skateboard with metal wheels. Just not worth it. I do have one clay here on my proterty to try. Its hard like a rock and in very flat pieces. I'll break it up, grind it and do a wet test like you show here. If it's the same... I'll be looking for new clay around here when the snow and frozen water leaves the ground. How would you rate Pima Brown compared to the clay you mention here? Also how do you rate Industrial Park clay. I'm looking for a way to take my very limited experience and associate it with good or great clay. Thanks Andy.

i wonder if you put 10# of each in the cement mixer, what would come out?

Perhaps a stupid question to someone in the middle of the desert... But have you worked with marine clay or know of anyone who has/does? I keep finding this lovely blue clay on the beaches of florida, but I can't find anyone on the internet talking about it much at all. Only one PDF of a study that seems to give it a poor evaluation, and my own experiments have been unsuccessful.

Hello.. thank you for your work.. I am in the middle of moving to the Benson area and am really looking forward to living in Arizona and learning clay! Was the first clay you tested good or bad? Thank you..blessings!

All the clay I bring home from the wild comes in huge compressed clumps from the brook.

What is your class name so I can join

How could i find clay from a forest

I was trying to wet process some local clay and it isn’t really settling so I have basically no clear water on the top to pour off even after 24 hours of rest any suggestions??

Can you legally take the clay? Have you looked into this? What is common practice?

Not sure if this video is actually about clay or advice about how to find the right woman ;)

To me, the font looked like it said “wild Gay” and clicked instantly. The top comment said she was divorcing her husband and I thought found gold. 😅

Three dislikers are afraid to get their hands dirty.

Ok, im divorcing my husband.

I'm not sure what the purpose of this video was. You took over twelve minutes to tell us to move on and not use substandard clay, not how to improve what we have like the title suggests. For some of us, the reason we do this is to discover how ancient potters who lived in the area we live used what they had, and didn't have the luxury of getting into their pickup truck and driving around looking for a better source.

Did not answer the question at all