What To Do with Clay in Your Backyard 

That's awesome! I hope you have fun experimenting with your backyard clay! Let me know if you have any questions as you go about it--I'll be happy to help if I can.

I've found the same thing to be true! Thanks for bringing it up

Wearing a respirator would fix that!

This is an especially useful tip for dry processing, because it gives time for every clay particle to be hydrated, which really improves plasticity.

When you said wet clay. I’m assuming you meant you added water to the dry clay? I’m new at this and I know that sounds crazy to ask but… lol. How much water did you add? Just a little at a time? Thank you in advance. Your response spoke to me because we have an antique grist mill. If hubby will let me put clay in it that sounded like a fun project with the family. lol. I don’t know if he will want to risk clay, even though it’s dry in the mill though. Thank you!

Where in North Dakota? I just found maps of clay in southwest North Dakota.

Window screen is like 8 mesh, I think. Gets out huge stuff that's problematic, but leaves grit for grog.

You can add stains to white porcelain to make it all kinds of colors. But a red clay can only get darker by adding materials. You can add a red clay to a buff clay to get a lighter red, but the iron oxide in red clay will always come through.

Try the wet method, and let it sit in the bucket long enough for things to start settling out. The heaviest stuff settles first, which is usually rocks and sand, and the organic stuff like twigs and leaves float. Skim the top off and discard, then pour out the middle section until you start to see large particles or stuff at the bottom, and leave that behind in the bucket. What you poured off will be mostly clay. Any dirt in it will burn out harmlessly, though if there's too much it will make the clay harder to work with. If that's the case, just try to get another sample with less dirt.

One day (or decade) I want to try to test this for myself. But I've used wild clay immediately after processing. It's great, but of course that isn't compared to how much better it might be after aging it for a year. But also, the clays I've been digging don't suffer from a lack of plasticity.

@@tinkerandthink Yeah testing it might be the way to go. I felt inspired and went on a clay hunt in our local forests today and collected a few promising samples. The variety of clay in such a small area was amazing, I found grey and reddish/brownish clay, some had large iron oxide veins inside and others were heavily saturated with sand. In addition to looking close to rivers and landslides, I found that looking inside the roots of trees that fell over, was a promising technique. The rain washed the dirt and the sand out of the roots, leaving only the clay inside, which is not as soluble and sticks better to itself. It's also way more dry and less messy to handle then dug up clay. I'm not sure if this could be a valid technique in Idaho or elsewhere, but here in northern Germany where the root plates of fallen beech and oak trees, which are frequently defeated by the storms from the east and west coast, tower up as high as a man, it's a very reliable way of sourcing clay samples.

It really depends on the clay and the firing process. This particular clay has a good variety of particle sizes already, so I don't add anything. I also don't use this clay for pit-fires or raku, where sand would help reduce thermal shock issues.

Same basic idea, I think. But definitely do a wet sieve process through a very fine mesh (100 mesh) so you don't end up with rocks in your soap. And use a white clay, not something with lots of color that would indicate iron or other minerals, which could leave that color behind on your skin.

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By inert material do you mean organics, like grass and stuff? I've found that the wet method is better at removing those, like you said. The dry method is good for hydrating pure clay, but not as effective or efficient for filtering less pure clay. If you need to filter your clay, I'd just stick with the wet method. It also hydrates the clay better and more homogeneously, which improves plasticity. But the organic stuff won't hurt the clay. It'll just burn out. That will mean the fired clay has some texture and some voids, making it more porous that it would otherwise be. That may not be what you want, but it isn't bad.

Don't sweat the inert matter, grind it all up, you have to add temper anyway.

As long as you have time to spare. Overnight can be acceptable, but more than a week is better. I've had some clay sit around for months, and it does seem to be noticeably improved, especially if you're using the dry method. The longer it sits, the more fully hydrated it becomes.

I'm working on one. Stay tuned!

@@tinkerandthink ❤

Dry evenly. Cover with cotton fabric or a paper bag to slow down and even out drying. Adding grog helps, too. Most wild clay I've found has some sand already because it isn't pure, and that helps. If a wild clay always cracks no matter what, and shrinks a lot while drying, it might be bentonite, which is great to add in small percentages to other clays but doesn't work by itself.