# MyClay — full text
A micro blog about clay: wheel throwing, hand building, glazing, firing schedules, polymer and air-dry clay. Short posts that answer one question properly.
Source: https://myclay.online
Posts: 47
Generated: 2026-08-29T23:07:49.311Z
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# How to Make Slip for Pottery (Three Recipes, Five Minutes)
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/how-to-make-slip-for-pottery
Published: 2026-08-27
Category: Slip and decoration
Tags: Slip, Pottery basics, Technique, Beginners
Summary: Break dry clay into small pieces, cover with water until it slakes down, then blend to the thickness you need: thick cream for joining, single cream for decorating, pourable for casting.
Slip is clay suspended in water. That is the entire definition, and it is worth holding onto, because most confusion about slip comes from treating it as a special material rather than as your clay with more water in it.
> **From the studio:** For months I made slip by adding water to wet clay and wondering why it stayed lumpy no matter how long I blended it. The day someone told me to use bone dry trimmings instead, the whole thing collapsed into smooth sludge overnight with no effort at all. It is the single most useful five-second piece of advice I have been given.
What changes between uses is only the consistency and, sometimes, what you add to it.
## The one rule that governs everything
**Make slip from the same clay body as the piece it will touch.**
Every clay body has its own shrinkage rate. A slip made from a different body shrinks by a different percentage as it dries and fires, and that difference shows up as a crack around your handle or a flake of decoration lifting off a bowl. Keep a labelled bucket of scrap for each body you use.
## Start with bone dry scrap, not wet clay
Trimmings, failed pots, dust from the bottom of the bag — anything bone dry. Dry clay is full of open pores, so water rushes in and the piece collapses into mud on its own. This is called slaking, and it does the hard work for you.
Wet clay has no open pores. Dropped in water it stays a lump for hours and then blends into something stubbornly lumpy.
## The method
1. **Break the dry clay small.** Thumbnail-sized pieces or smaller. Put them in a bucket or a large yoghurt tub.
2. **Cover with water and walk away.** Add just enough water to submerge everything. Leave it for a few hours, or overnight for larger lumps. Do not stir yet — stirring early traps dry cores inside wet balls.
3. **Come back to sludge.** The clay will have collapsed. Pour off any clear water sitting on top.
4. **Blend.** A stick blender is the fastest route and gives the smoothest result. Whisking by hand works. So does a drill with a paint-mixing paddle for bigger batches.
5. **Sieve if you want it smooth.** An 80-mesh kitchen sieve catches grog, grit and unblended lumps. Skip this for joining slip; do it for anything you will paint or pour.
6. **Adjust the consistency.** Too thin means waiting — leave it uncovered, or pour it onto a plaster bat for an hour. Too thick means adding water a splash at a time.
## The three consistencies
### Joining slip — thick double cream
For attaching handles, spouts, feet and slab seams. It should hold a peak briefly when you lift the spoon and not run off a vertical surface.
[Score both faces](/blog/score-and-slip-joins) deeply first. Slip on unscored clay is lubricant, not glue.
For a stronger join, add a spoonful of vinegar per cup of slip. The acid flocculates the clay, which makes the slip noticeably tackier. This is the cheap version of the studio recipe known as magic water.
### Decorating slip — single cream
For brushing, trailing, dipping and sponging onto [leather-hard](/blog/clay-stages-leather-hard-bone-dry) work. It should coat the back of a spoon in an even layer and drip off slowly.
Apply to leather-hard clay, never bone dry. Bone dry clay drinks the water instantly, swells locally, and cracks the surface off.
### Casting slip — pourable
For filling plaster moulds. This one is not simply thinner: adding water alone makes a slip that carries too much water into the mould and produces weak, warped castings.
Instead, casting slip is deflocculated. A tiny quantity of sodium silicate or Darvan — a fraction of a percent by weight — makes the clay particles repel each other, so the slip pours like single cream at a much lower water content. Add it drop by drop; overdoing it makes the slip gel and it is difficult to recover.
If you are not casting into plaster, you do not need deflocculant, and you are better off without it.
## Colouring slip
Blend stains or oxides into a white or buff slip: roughly 5 to 10 percent commercial stain by dry weight for a strong colour, or 1 to 3 percent of an oxide such as red iron oxide or cobalt carbonate, which go a long way. Mix a test batch, brush it onto a scrap tile, fire it, and write the percentage on the back. Wet slip tells you almost nothing about the fired colour.
## Reclaiming clay is the same process
Slip is also the middle stage of clay recycling. Slake all your scrap down to a thick slurry, pour it onto a plaster bat or a canvas-lined board, and let it stiffen to throwing consistency over a day or two. Wedge it, and it is clay again. Nothing needs to be thrown away in a pottery studio except plaster and fired ware.
## Common problems
**Lumps that will not blend** — the clay was not fully dry, or not fully slaked. Give it another day under water before blending again.
**Slip cracks off as it dries** — it went onto clay that was too dry, or it was applied too thickly. Aim for the thickness of a coat of paint, and work on soft leather-hard clay.
**Join fails anyway** — the two parts were at different moisture levels. Slip cannot fix a moisture mismatch; only matching the stiffness of both parts can.
**A skin forms on stored slip** — normal. Stir it back in, or sieve if it has gone leathery.
## Where to go next
The join itself has its own rules, and [score and slip joins](/blog/score-and-slip-joins) covers them. If you want colour rather than glue, [how to make coloured slip](/blog/how-to-make-colored-slip) gives working percentages. And for the definition and the wider vocabulary, see [what is slip in pottery](/blog/what-is-slip-in-pottery).
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# What Is Slip in Pottery? A Plain Explanation
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/what-is-slip-in-pottery
Published: 2026-08-25
Category: Slip and decoration
Tags: Slip, Pottery basics, Beginners
Summary: Slip is liquid clay. Thick slip joins parts together, medium slip decorates leather-hard surfaces, and thin deflocculated slip is poured into plaster moulds to cast shapes.
In pottery, **slip is clay suspended in water**. That is all. It ranges from a thick paste to something as runny as milk, and its job changes with its thickness.
> **From the studio:** The moment slip stopped being mysterious for me was noticing the grey film on my own hands after an hour at the wheel. That is slip. It is not a product you buy or a special formula — it is the material you are already covered in.
If you have ever wet your hands while throwing and ended up with a slick grey coating on your fingers, you have made slip by accident. That coating is exactly the material, and it is why the term shows up so often in pottery instructions without ever being properly defined.
## The three jobs slip does
### 1. Slip as glue
Thick slip is the adhesive that joins one piece of clay to another: a handle to a mug, a spout to a teapot, two slabs into a box.
The full instruction is "score and slip". You crosshatch both surfaces with a needle tool, wet both with slip, and press them together until a bead of clay squeezes out around the seam. The scoring gives the join mechanical grip and surface area; the slip fills those grooves with clay particles.
Slip alone, on smooth unscored clay, is a lubricant. Parts joined that way separate as they dry.
### 2. Slip as paint
Medium slip, roughly the thickness of single cream, is a decorating material. Because it is clay, it fires to a matt surface in the colour of whatever clay or stain it was made from — a white slip over a red body, a black slip under a clear glaze, coloured slips trailed across a plate.
Slip decoration is applied to **[leather-hard](/blog/clay-stages-leather-hard-bone-dry)** clay, not to dry clay or bisque. Techniques with names worth knowing:
- **Slip trailing** — piped from a bottle, like icing a cake.
- **Sgraffito** — a coat of contrasting slip, scratched through when it has firmed up to reveal the clay beneath.
- **Mishima** — lines carved into the clay, filled with slip, then scraped flush.
- **Marbling and feathering** — two wet slips combed together while both are fluid.
### 3. Slip as a casting material
Thin slip is poured into plaster moulds. The plaster pulls water out of the slip, a layer of clay builds up against the mould wall, and after a few minutes the excess is poured back out, leaving a hollow shell. This is how nearly all identical, mass-produced ceramics are made.
Casting slip is not simply watered-down clay. It contains a deflocculant — a small quantity of sodium silicate or a proprietary equivalent — that makes the clay particles repel each other. That lets the slip pour freely while carrying far less water, which is what keeps castings from warping and cracking.
## What slip is not
**It is not glaze.** [Glaze contains a flux](/blog/what-is-ceramic-glaze-made-of) that melts it into glass in the kiln. Slip has no flux; it stays a matt clay surface unless you put a glaze over it.
**It is not a repair for dry cracks.** Slip on bone dry clay shrinks far more than the clay it is sitting on, so a slip-filled crack in dry work usually reopens.
**It is not universal glue.** It only reliably bonds clay at similar moisture levels — ideally both parts at soft leather-hard.
## Making it
Take bone dry scraps of the same clay body, cover them with water, and leave them for a few hours until they collapse. Blend smooth, sieve if you want it fine, and adjust the water until it is as thick as you need. Match the clay body to your piece, since two different bodies shrink by different amounts and will separate at the seam.
## Where the word comes from, and where else it appears
The word predates the studio; it comes from Middle English for something thin and semi-liquid, related to slime and slop. In art writing more generally, "slip" almost always still means this liquid clay, and "a slip" as a countable noun means a particular mixture — a white slip, an iron slip, a casting slip.
You may also hear **slurry**, which is looser and can describe any wet mixture, and **magic water**, which is water with sodium silicate and soda ash added to make joins tackier. Neither is a different material in any deep sense. It is still clay and water.
## Making a small batch in ten minutes
Since most people arrive at this term because an instruction told them to use slip, here is the shortest possible route to having some.
1. Collect a handful of **bone dry scraps** of the same clay you are working in — trimmings, a broken pot, dust from the bottom of the bag.
2. Break them small and drop them into a cup or a yoghurt pot.
3. **Cover with water** and leave them. Thumbnail-sized pieces collapse within an hour; larger lumps want overnight.
4. Pour off any clear water sitting on top.
5. **Stir or blend** to a thick, smooth cream. A fork works for a small batch.
That is joining slip. For decorating slip, add a little more water and pass it through a kitchen sieve.
Two details that matter more than the method: it must come from the **same clay body** as the piece, because different bodies shrink differently and separate at the seam. And it keeps indefinitely in a sealed jar — it may develop a smell after a few weeks, which is bacterial and actually improves how it handles.
## Where to go next
To actually make some, follow [how to make slip for pottery](/blog/how-to-make-slip-for-pottery). For its most common use, [score and slip joins](/blog/score-and-slip-joins) is the practical post. And if you are trying to work out how slip differs from glaze, [what is ceramic glaze made of](/blog/what-is-ceramic-glaze-made-of) draws the line clearly.
---
# How to Make Coloured Slip for Pottery
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/how-to-make-colored-slip
Published: 2026-08-24
Category: Slip and decoration
Tags: Slip, Glazing, Technique
Summary: Start with a white or buff slip, add 5 to 10 percent commercial stain or 1 to 3 percent oxide by dry weight, sieve, and fire a test tile before committing. Wet colour tells you nothing about fired colour.
Coloured slip is the cheapest decoration in ceramics. You already have the clay, and a small pot of stain will colour litres of it.
> **From the studio:** My first black slip came out of the kiln a disappointing chocolate brown, because I had used iron oxide alone and trusted how dark it looked in the bucket. Wet colour tells you almost nothing. Now nothing gets used on real work until a tile with the recipe carved into the back has been through the kiln.
The catch is that you cannot judge the result by eye while it is wet. Raw cobalt carbonate is a dull grey powder that fires an intense blue; a slip that looks convincingly black in the bucket can fire a disappointing brown. Everything below is aimed at making that predictable.
## Start with the right base
Colour behaves like paint on paper: what is underneath changes what you see.
- **[White slip](/blog/how-to-make-slip-for-pottery)** — made from a white body, porcelain scrap or a ball clay and kaolin blend. Colours read true and bright.
- **Buff or red slip** — made from your ordinary stoneware or terracotta scrap. Colours mute and warm, and pale stains may barely register.
For anything other than earth tones, mix a white base and colour that. Keep a bucket of it.
The base slip must still shrink like the clay it goes on, so if you are decorating a stoneware pot with a porcelain slip, test it before making twenty of them.
## Weigh the dry ingredients, not the wet slip
This is the whole discipline. Percentages in ceramics are always by **dry weight of the batch**, so measuring into an already-wet bucket makes results impossible to repeat.
The reliable method:
1. Weigh out dry base slip ingredients, or work out the dry clay content of a batch you already have by weighing a sample, drying it fully and weighing it again.
2. Weigh the colourant as a percentage of that dry weight.
3. Blend, sieve through 80 mesh, and write the recipe on the container with masking tape.
## Working percentages
| Colourant | Amount by dry weight | Fires to |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Commercial stain | 5–10% | The colour on the jar, roughly |
| Red iron oxide | 2–8% | Tan through rust to near-black |
| Cobalt carbonate | 0.5–2% | Soft to intense blue |
| Copper carbonate | 2–5% | Green in oxidation |
| Manganese dioxide | 3–8% | Brown to purple-brown |
| Rutile | 3–8% | Cream, tan, variegation |
| Black stain | 8–12% | Black |
| Nickel oxide | 1–3% | Grey-green, muted |
Stains are more expensive than raw oxides but far more predictable, because they are already fired, ground and stabilised. If you want a specific colour rather than an interesting one, buy the stain.
## Making black slip
Black is the one people struggle with, because most single colourants give a very dark brown rather than a true black. Two approaches work:
- **A commercial black stain at 8 to 12 percent.** Simple, consistent, and the safest choice for functional work.
- **A blend of oxides** — a classic mix is roughly 4 parts red iron oxide, 2 parts manganese dioxide, 1 part cobalt carbonate, added at around 10 percent total. Deep and slightly variable.
Manganese releases fumes in the firing that you do not want to breathe. Ventilate the kiln properly, and be aware that heavy manganese slips are not a good choice for food surfaces.
## Mix it properly
Powdered colourants are much finer than clay and clump instantly in water. Blend the dry powder into a small quantity of water first to make a smooth paste, then stir that into the slip rather than tipping the powder into the bucket.
Then **sieve twice** through an 80-mesh screen. Unsieved colourant leaves speckles — which can be lovely, and is a disaster if you did not intend it.
Wear a mask while handling dry powders. Metal oxide dust is genuinely harmful, and the particles are small enough to stay airborne for a long time.
## Test before you commit
Make a test tile for every colour, and make it properly:
- Brush on one, two and three coats side by side, so you can see how the colour builds.
- Cover half the tile with your clear glaze and leave the other half bare.
- Fire to the cone you actually use.
- Write the recipe on the back **in underglaze pencil or by carving it into the clay** before firing. Pencil on bisque burns off.
Pin the tiles to a board. A wall of tested tiles is worth more than any recipe book, because it shows results in your kiln with your materials.
## Applying it
Coloured slip goes onto soft [leather-hard](/blog/clay-stages-leather-hard-bone-dry) clay. Too wet and it slides; too dry and it flakes off as the clay shrinks away underneath.
Two or three thin coats give more even coverage than one thick one, and letting the surface lose its shine between coats prevents lifting. If you plan to carve back through it — sgraffito — apply a slightly thicker layer and carve once the slip has firmed but the pot is still leather-hard.
## Applying it so the colour survives
Mixing a good slip and then applying it badly is the commonest way to waste the effort.
**Work at soft leather-hard.** Too wet and the slip slides and pools; too dry and the clay shrinks away underneath it and the slip flakes off as it dries.
**Build up thin coats.** Two or three thin applications give far more even coverage than one thick one. Let the surface lose its shine between coats — not dry, just no longer wet — or the second coat lifts the first.
**Match the shrinkage.** The slip should be made from the same clay body as the piece wherever possible. A porcelain slip on a stoneware pot is a shrinkage mismatch waiting to crack.
**Test the glaze over it.** A clear glaze can shift a slip colour noticeably, and a glaze containing zinc will bleach several stains outright. The half-glazed test tile described above tells you this before it matters.
**Decide about sgraffito early.** If you plan to carve back through the slip, apply a slightly thicker layer and carve while the slip has firmed but the pot is still leather-hard. Carving bone dry slip chips rather than cutting.
## Where to go next
Start with a good base slip — [how to make slip for pottery](/blog/how-to-make-slip-for-pottery) covers the consistencies. If you are layering a clear glaze on top, [how to glaze pottery at home](/blog/how-to-glaze-pottery-at-home) explains thickness control. And for the chemistry behind why some stains burn out at higher cones, see [what is ceramic glaze made of](/blog/what-is-ceramic-glaze-made-of).
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# What Is Ceramic Glaze Made Of? The Three Ingredients
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/what-is-ceramic-glaze-made-of
Published: 2026-08-22
Category: Glazing
Tags: Glazing, Materials, Firing
Summary: Glaze is glass. Silica forms the glass, a flux lowers its melting point into kiln range, and alumina stops it running off the pot. Colourants and opacifiers are added on top of that trio.
A ceramic glaze is a thin coat of glass bonded to a clay surface. Understanding it means understanding three ingredients, because almost every glaze recipe ever written is a different balance of the same trio.
> **From the studio:** Glaze stopped being magic for me the day I understood that it is three jobs, not fifty ingredients. Once you can look at a recipe and say which line is doing the melting and which is doing the stiffening, adjusting a glaze that runs or crawls becomes an ordinary problem rather than guesswork.
## 1. Silica — the glass
Silica, or silicon dioxide, is the glass former. It is the same material as window glass and beach sand, and it is what actually becomes the glassy surface.
The problem is that pure silica melts at around 1700 °C, far above any pottery kiln. On its own it is useless. Which is why every glaze contains the second ingredient.
## 2. Flux — the melter
A flux lowers the melting point of silica into the range your kiln can reach. It works by disrupting the silica structure so it liquefies far earlier.
Which flux is used depends on the temperature:
- **Low fire** (cone 06–04, about 1000 °C): boron compounds such as Gerstley borate or frits, plus sodium and potassium.
- **Mid fire** (cone 5–6, about 1200 °C): boron frits, along with feldspar, whiting (calcium carbonate) and sometimes lithium or strontium.
- **High fire** (cone 9–10, about 1280 °C): feldspar carries most of the load, with whiting, dolomite, magnesium and barium compounds.
Fluxes do far more than melt. They change colour response dramatically — the same copper gives green with a calcium flux and turquoise with a high-sodium one — and they change surface, from glossy to satin to matt.
## 3. Alumina — the stiffener
Silica plus flux alone would melt and run straight off the pot onto the kiln shelf. Alumina, usually supplied by clay in the recipe (kaolin or ball clay) and by feldspar, raises the viscosity of the melt so it stays where you put it.
Alumina also affects the surface. Push it up and the glaze becomes stiff and matt; drop it and the glaze goes glossy and mobile. It is the control that makes a glaze usable rather than merely meltable.
Feldspar is the workhorse ingredient because it supplies all three at once: silica, alumina and flux in one mineral. Many high-fire glazes are essentially feldspar with adjustments.
## What gets added on top
**Colourants** — metal oxides and commercial stains. Small percentages of iron, cobalt, copper, manganese, chrome, rutile or nickel produce the entire palette. Cobalt at 1 percent is blue; iron at 8 percent in reduction can be a saturated black-brown that breaks rust at the edges.
**Opacifiers** — usually tin oxide or zircopax. These stay suspended rather than dissolving, scattering light and turning a transparent glaze white and opaque.
**Suspenders** — a small quantity of bentonite or a gum keeps the heavy particles from settling into concrete at the bottom of the bucket, and helps the raw glaze stick to the pot.
## Where the materials come from
Almost everything on a glaze recipe is a mined and processed rock or mineral: feldspar from granite quarries, whiting from limestone, silica from quartz sand, kaolin from decomposed granite deposits.
The exception is a **frit**, which is manufactured. Materials are melted together, quenched in water, and ground back to powder. Fritting does two useful things: it makes soluble materials insoluble, so they do not leach out in the bucket, and it renders some toxic materials, such as lead compounds, much less bioavailable.
## Why glazes are cone-specific
A glaze formulated for [cone 6](/blog/cone-6-vs-cone-10) fired at cone 10 will boil, run off the pot and quite possibly weld it to the shelf. The same glaze at cone 04 will be a dry, unmelted crust.
This is not a quality difference — it is chemistry. The flux package is chosen for a specific temperature window. There is no such thing as a general-purpose glaze that works across the range, which is why the cone rating on a jar of commercial glaze matters more than the colour on the label.
## The fit problem
Even a perfectly melted glaze can fail if its thermal expansion does not match the clay body underneath.
- **Crazing** — a fine network of cracks. The glaze contracted more than the body on cooling and is under tension. It looks intentional on some pots and it is a genuine hygiene problem on functional ware, since liquid enters the cracks.
- **Shivering** — flakes of glaze popping off, usually at rims and edges. The glaze contracted less than the body and is under compression. This is worse: the flakes are sharp and can end up in food.
Fit is adjusted by changing the silica and alumina content, or by choosing a different clay body. It is the reason a glaze that works beautifully on one body can fail on another.
## What you cannot do
You cannot make a ceramic glaze from household materials, and you cannot fire one in a domestic oven. Both are common searches, and both run into the same wall: the temperatures involved are between three and five times what a kitchen oven produces. Glazing means a kiln, whether it is yours or one you pay to use.
## Where to go next
To apply it, see [how to glaze pottery at home](/blog/how-to-glaze-pottery-at-home). To mix it from raw materials, [how to make ceramic glaze](/blog/how-to-make-ceramic-glaze) covers weighing, sieving and testing. And if a glaze is beading off your pots, [glaze crawling](/blog/glaze-crawling-causes-and-fixes) diagnoses it.
---
# How to Glaze Pottery at Home, Step by Step
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/how-to-glaze-pottery-at-home
Published: 2026-08-20
Category: Glazing
Tags: Glazing, Beginners, Technique, Firing
Summary: Wipe the bisque clean, stir the glaze thoroughly, apply an even coat about as thick as a postcard, wipe the foot completely bare, and fire to the cone on the glaze label.
Glazing is the step where a lot of otherwise good pots are lost, almost always for the same three reasons: a dirty surface, uneven thickness, or glaze left on the foot. Get those right and the rest is straightforward.
> **From the studio:** I once welded a bowl to a kiln shelf because I wiped the foot with a sponge I had not rinsed. The sponge was carrying enough glaze to bridge the gap. Now I rinse the sponge between every pot and run a dry finger round the foot as a final check, which takes about four seconds and has never failed me since.
You need a kiln for this. Glaze does not set, cure or dry hard — it melts, at somewhere between 1000 and 1280 °C. If you do not have a kiln, community studios will usually fire glazed work for a fee.
## Before you open the glaze
**Start with [bisque](/blog/clay-stages-leather-hard-bone-dry) ware.** Raw greenware dissolves the moment it hits a glaze bucket. Bisque is porous, which is exactly what makes dipping work: the pot sucks water out of the glaze and leaves an even deposit of glaze material behind.
**Clean it.** Wipe every surface with a barely damp sponge and let it dry. Skin oils from carrying bisque are a leading cause of [crawling](/blog/glaze-crawling-causes-and-fixes) — bare patches where the glaze pulled away from the clay.
**Sand sharp edges** with a fine mesh pad, then wipe again. Glaze thins at sharp edges and will show every rough spot.
**Wax the foot** if you have wax resist. Paint it on the bottom and 3 mm up the sides, and let it dry. It saves the wiping step later. Without wax, you will wipe the foot clean by hand afterwards — do it thoroughly, because any glaze on the base fuses the pot to the shelf.
## Preparing the glaze
**Stir it properly.** Glaze settles hard. The heavy fluxes sink to the bottom, so an unstirred bucket applies a different recipe from the top than from the middle. Stir for a good minute, reaching the bottom, until there is no sludge left.
**Check the consistency.** Dip a finger in: it should coat like single cream and you should just be able to see your fingerprint through it. Commercial jarred glazes usually arrive at working consistency; studio buckets often need a little water after sitting.
**Sieve it** through 80 mesh if it has been standing for weeks, or if you can feel lumps.
## Three ways to apply it
### Dipping — fastest and most even
Hold the pot with glaze tongs or your fingertips, submerge it in one smooth movement, count to two or three, and lift it out.
Speed of the dip matters less than consistency. A pot that goes in and out in one movement gets an even coat; one that hesitates halfway gets a line. Shake off the drips, and touch up the tong marks with a brush once the surface is dry.
Three seconds is a starting point on standard bisque, not a rule. Very porous bisque takes glaze fast — try two.
### Pouring — for insides and large pieces
Fill a jug, pour glaze into the pot, swirl it once to coat the interior, and pour it back out in one motion. Then pour over the outside while rotating the pot over the bucket, or dip the outside separately.
Glaze the inside first and let it dry before doing the outside. Doing it in the other order soaks the piece and the second coat will not adhere.
### Brushing — for jarred glazes and detail
Brushing glazes are formulated with gums that make them flow off a brush and stay put. Apply **three coats**, each in a different direction, letting each lose its shine before the next. One or two coats of a brushing glaze is the most common cause of a thin, dry, disappointing result.
Do not brush a dipping glaze. Without the gum it drags and streaks.
## Check the thickness
Scratch through with a fingernail on an inconspicuous spot. You want a clean line showing bisque with a definite edge. Too thin and the fired glaze will be patchy and dry; too thick and it will run, crawl or blister.
If it is too thin, let the piece dry completely and dip again briefly. If it is too thick, wash the whole thing off under a tap, let it dry, and start over. Glaze is entirely recoverable at this stage.
## The foot
**Every surface that touches the shelf must be bare clay.** Wipe the foot with a damp sponge, rinsing the sponge often, until nothing is left. Then run a dry finger around it to check.
If you used wax resist, the glaze will have beaded off, but still wipe — beads bridge the gap and fuse.
Leave 3 to 5 mm of unglazed clay above the foot on anything with a runny glaze. That margin is the difference between a pot you can lift off the shelf and a grinding job.
## Firing
Load with **at least 5 mm between pieces**, more for glazes that run. Glazed surfaces that touch in the kiln fuse permanently.
Fire to the cone on the glaze label, not the cone your clay is rated for, and never higher than the clay body's maximum. Use witness cones on the shelf if you can — a controller reads the thermocouple, not the actual heat work in that corner of the kiln.
Let the kiln cool on its own to below 100 °C before opening. Cracking the lid early gives you thermal shock and, on some glazes, a crazed surface that would otherwise have been fine.
## Where to go next
If the result came out patchy or beaded, [glaze crawling](/blog/glaze-crawling-causes-and-fixes) is the diagnostic post. To understand why the cone on the label matters so much, read [what is ceramic glaze made of](/blog/what-is-ceramic-glaze-made-of) and [cone 6 vs cone 10](/blog/cone-6-vs-cone-10). And if you are buying rather than mixing, [where to buy pottery glaze](/blog/where-to-buy-pottery-glaze) covers the formats.
---
# How to Make Ceramic Glaze From Raw Materials
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/how-to-make-ceramic-glaze
Published: 2026-08-18
Category: Glazing
Tags: Glazing, Materials, Technique
Summary: Weigh dry materials to a recipe by percentage, add water to roughly 80 percent of the dry weight, blend, sieve twice through 80 mesh, and fire test tiles before committing a batch to real pots.
Mixing glaze is weighing powders into water. It is not difficult, but it is unforgiving of sloppiness — a recipe is a set of ratios, and small errors compound into a glaze that behaves nothing like the one in the book.
> **From the studio:** The best habit I ever picked up was ticking off each line of the recipe with a pencil as it went into the bucket. I lost a 10 kg batch once to a doubled silica addition that I could not detect until the tiles came out dry and unmelted, and a pencil mark would have caught it in a second.
## What you need
- **A digital scale** to 1 g for a 5 kg batch, plus a jeweller's scale to 0.1 g for colourants.
- **Buckets with tight lids**, ideally in a size that leaves headroom for blending.
- **An 80-mesh sieve** and a stiff brush to push material through.
- **A respirator** rated for fine particulates — a paper dust mask is not adequate for silica.
- **A dedicated surface** you can wipe down wet.
## Safety first, because this part is real
Glaze materials are dry mineral powders. The main hazard is **silica dust**, which causes irreversible lung disease with long-term exposure. Barium, lithium, manganese and several colourants carry their own risks.
The rules are simple and non-negotiable:
- Wear a fitted respirator whenever a powder is open.
- Mix in a ventilated space, ideally not your kitchen.
- **Never sweep or dry-brush.** Sweeping puts settled dust back in the air. Wet-mop or use a HEPA vacuum.
- Wipe surfaces down wet at the end of every session.
- Keep food, drink and children out of the space.
None of this makes glaze mixing dangerous in itself. Ignoring it over years is what causes harm.
## Reading a recipe
A glaze recipe is written in percentages that add to 100. Colourants and additives sit outside that total and are written as "plus" amounts.
```
Satin White — [cone](/blog/cone-6-vs-cone-10) 6
Custer feldspar 40
Silica 22
Whiting 14
EPK kaolin 14
Talc 10
---
100
+ Zircopax 8
+ Bentonite 2
```
To make a batch, pick a total dry weight and treat percentages as grams. 5000 g total means 2000 g of feldspar, 1100 g of silica, and so on. That is the whole calculation.
## Mixing, step by step
1. **Weigh the water first.** Roughly 80 g of water per 100 g of dry material is a good starting point for a dipping glaze. Put it in the bucket before the powders — adding water to dry powder creates far more airborne dust.
2. **Weigh each material and add it.** Tick each line off the recipe as you go. Getting distracted and adding silica twice is the classic failure, and it is unrecoverable.
3. **Add bentonite differently.** It clumps stubbornly. Mix it dry with a scoop of another powder before it goes in.
4. **Let it slake for 10 minutes.** The clay materials need to absorb water before blending.
5. **Blend.** A drill with a paddle for large batches, a stick blender for small ones.
6. **Sieve twice** through 80 mesh, pushing material through with a brush. This is not optional — unsieved glaze gives speckles, pinholes and blisters.
7. **Adjust the water.** Aim for single cream, thin enough that you can just see your fingerprint through a coating on your finger. Add water in small increments; you cannot easily take it out.
8. **Label the bucket** with the recipe name, the cone and the date, in permanent marker.
## Test before you trust it
Dip test tiles, fire them to your cone, and look at them properly before glazing thirty pots.
A good test tile is **L-shaped or bent**, so it shows both a vertical and a horizontal surface. Vertical tells you whether the glaze runs; horizontal tells you how it pools. Dip one end twice to show the effect of double thickness.
Check for:
- **Running** — did it move down the vertical face?
- **[Crazing](/blog/glaze-crawling-causes-and-fixes)** — a fine crack network, visible when you rub ink into the surface and wipe it off.
- **Pinholes and blisters** — usually too thick, fired too fast, or unsieved.
- **Fit** — does it flake at the edges (shivering) or craze?
## Adjusting
- **Too glossy** — increase alumina, usually by adding kaolin, in 2 percent increments.
- **Too matt or dry** — the melt is insufficient; increase the flux or reduce silica slightly.
- **Crazing** — the glaze contracts more than the body. Increase silica or reduce the high-expansion fluxes (sodium and potassium).
- **Running** — increase alumina and silica, or apply it thinner.
Change one thing at a time, and record every change with its test tile. A binder of tiles with recipes on the back is the single most valuable thing in a glaze studio.
## Storage
Sealed buckets keep indefinitely. Glaze settles hard — a bucket untouched for six months will have a solid layer of flux at the bottom, so stir all the way down before every use. If a batch has dried out, add water and re-sieve rather than throwing it away. Nothing about a mixed glaze goes off.
## Where to get recipes worth mixing
A recipe is only as good as its testing, and there is a lot of untested material circulating.
**Published collections.** Books and the ceramics magazines publish recipes that have been fired by more than one person. Start there.
**Supplier recipes.** Many suppliers publish recipes formulated around materials they actually stock, which removes the substitution problem entirely.
**Studio recipes.** If you work in a shared studio, their buckets have been fired hundreds of times in the kiln you are using. That is more valuable than any published recipe.
**Online forums and social media.** Treat with care. Materials vary by region and by brand, and a recipe that works with one supplier's feldspar may not with another's.
Two cautions worth carrying into any recipe. First, **check what is in it before you mix it** — barium carbonate, lithium compounds and some colourants have real handling and food-safety implications. Second, **a recipe is a starting point, not a result.** Your kiln, your schedule, your clay body and your application thickness all change what comes out, which is why the test tile always comes before the batch.
## Where to go next
The chemistry behind those adjustments is in [what is ceramic glaze made of](/blog/what-is-ceramic-glaze-made-of). For application once it is mixed, see [how to glaze pottery at home](/blog/how-to-glaze-pottery-at-home). And if you would rather buy than weigh, [where to buy pottery glaze](/blog/where-to-buy-pottery-glaze) compares the formats.
---
# What Is Glazing in Ceramics? What the Word Actually Covers
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/what-is-glazing-in-ceramics
Published: 2026-08-16
Category: Glazing
Tags: Glazing, Pottery basics, Beginners
Summary: Glazing is applying a glass-forming coating to bisque ware and firing it until it melts into a sealed, glassy surface. It waterproofs porous clay, makes it hygienic and easy to clean, and provides the colour and surface.
**Glazing** is the process of coating a fired clay object with a mixture of minerals and firing it again until that coating melts into a thin layer of glass.
> **From the studio:** It took me embarrassingly long to realise that the porosity of bisque is not a defect to be worked around but the entire mechanism that makes dipping work. Once that clicked, the difference between a pot that takes glaze evenly and one that does not stopped being a mystery.
The word covers the whole activity — choosing the coating, applying it, and the firing that transforms it. The material itself is *a glaze*. The finished result is sometimes called *glost ware* or *glazeware*.
## Why it is done
**Waterproofing.** Most fired clay stays porous. Earthenware in particular absorbs 5 to 15 percent of its weight in water. Glaze is what makes a pot hold coffee rather than seep it.
**Hygiene.** A porous, unglazed interior is difficult to clean and can harbour bacteria. A glazed one wipes clean.
**Durability.** Glass is much harder than fired clay, so a glazed surface resists scratching, staining and abrasion.
**Appearance.** Colour, gloss, texture, depth. For most potters this is the reason, and the other three are welcome side effects.
## Where it sits in the process
A pot passes through three named states:
1. **Greenware** — unfired clay, from freshly made to bone dry.
2. **Bisque ware** — after the first firing, typically to around cone 06 (about 1000 °C). Hard, still porous, and ready to accept glaze.
3. **Glazeware** — glazed and fired again to the glaze's own maturing temperature.
The porosity of bisque is doing real work. When you dip a bisque pot, it pulls water out of the glaze and leaves an even deposit of glaze material behind. That is why [dipping](/blog/how-to-glaze-pottery-at-home) a *raw* pot fails — it dissolves.
## What a glaze is made of
Three components, in every recipe:
- **Silica** forms the glass.
- **A flux** lowers silica's melting point from around 1700 °C into kiln range.
- **Alumina** stiffens the melt so it clings to a vertical wall instead of pooling on the shelf.
Colourants such as iron, cobalt and copper, and opacifiers such as tin oxide, are added on top of that base.
## The vocabulary you will meet
**Underglaze** — colour applied *before* the glaze, usually on bisque or leather-hard clay. Stays where you put it because it does not melt much. Used for painted detail.
**Overglaze** — colour or metallic lustre applied on top of an already-fired glaze and fired again at a low temperature. This is where gold and platinum lines come from.
**Engobe** — a slip adjusted so it behaves more like a glaze, applied to drier clay than plain slip allows.
**Clear, opaque, satin, matt** — surface descriptions. Clear shows the clay and any decoration beneath; opaque hides it.
**Celadon, shino, tenmoku, ash** — traditional glaze families, mostly high-fire, defined by their chemistry and their firing atmosphere.
**[Crazing](/blog/glaze-crawling-causes-and-fixes)** — a fine crack network in the glaze from a thermal expansion mismatch. Decorative on some ware, a genuine hygiene problem on functional pieces.
**Food safe** — a property of the fired result, not a glaze type. It depends on the glaze being fully melted, properly fitted to the body without crazing, and free of leachable metals in the surface.
## How it is applied
**Dipping** — submerging the pot in a bucket. Fastest and most even, and how most production work is glazed.
**Pouring** — filling and emptying the interior, and pouring over the exterior. Used for pieces too large to dip.
**Brushing** — three coats of a gum-containing brushing glaze, each in a different direction. Best for detail and for small quantities.
**Spraying** — in a booth with extraction. Gives gradients and blends, and needs proper equipment because airborne glaze is exactly what you must not breathe.
Whatever the method, the target thickness is about that of a postcard, and every surface that touches the kiln shelf must be wiped back to bare clay.
## What glazing is not
It is not a sealant you apply and leave to dry — without a firing, a glaze coat is chalky powder that brushes off.
It is not a repair. A crack in a pot will still be a crack under glaze, usually a more visible one, because glaze pools in it.
And it is not one-size-fits-all. Every glaze is formulated for a specific temperature range. Firing a cone 6 glaze at cone 10 makes it run off the pot; firing it at cone 04 leaves an unmelted crust. The cone rating matters more than anything else on the label.
## The questions this usually leads to
Three follow-ups come up almost every time, and short answers help.
**Why does the pot need firing twice?** It does not, strictly — single firing exists and works. But bisque firing makes the pot hard enough to handle and porous enough to absorb glaze evenly, which makes glazing far easier and far more forgiving. The two-firing sequence is a practical convenience, not a physical necessity.
**Why can I not glaze the bottom?** Because molten glaze is glass, and glass sticks to whatever it touches. Any glaze on the foot fuses the pot permanently to the kiln shelf, and separating them damages both. Wipe every surface that touches the shelf back to bare clay.
**Why did my glaze look different from the sample?** Because a fired glaze depends on the clay underneath it, the thickness applied, the firing schedule and the cooling rate. The same glaze on a white body and a dark body can look like two different products, and a slow cool can turn a gloss into a satin.
All three lead to the same habit: test on your own clay, in your own kiln, before committing a batch of work.
## Where to go next
For what a glaze is actually made from, read [what is ceramic glaze made of](/blog/what-is-ceramic-glaze-made-of). For the practical steps, [how to glaze pottery at home](/blog/how-to-glaze-pottery-at-home). And to understand where bisque sits in the sequence, see [the stages of clay](/blog/clay-stages-leather-hard-bone-dry).
---
# Where to Buy Clay for Pottery: Every Option Compared
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/where-to-buy-clay-for-pottery
Published: 2026-08-14
Category: Buying guide
Tags: Buying, Beginners, Clay bodies
Summary: Buy from a dedicated ceramic supplier if you can reach one — they sell 10 to 12 kg boxes at a fraction of craft shop prices. Local studios often resell clay, and shipping is what makes online orders expensive.
Clay is heavy, which shapes everything about buying it. A 12 kg box costs little to make and a lot to ship, so the price you pay depends mostly on how far it travelled and how many hands it passed through.
> **From the studio:** I bought my first clay in 500 g craft-shop blocks and got through about four pots before working out I was paying roughly five times the per-kilo price of a supplier box. The box also lasted eight months in its sealed bag without deteriorating in the slightest.
## 1. A dedicated ceramic supplier — the cheapest by far
This is where potters actually buy clay. Ceramic suppliers sell clay by the box, usually 10 to 12.5 kg, alongside glaze materials, tools and kiln parts.
**Roughly what to expect**: a standard stoneware body works out at a modest per-kilo price, dropping further if you buy a pallet. Compared with a craft shop block, you are typically paying a third or less per kilo.
**Finding one**: search for "ceramic supply" or "pottery supplies" plus your region rather than "clay shop", which returns craft retailers. Most countries have only a handful of significant suppliers, and they ship nationally.
**What to ask for**, in this order:
1. **The cone you fire to** — [cone 6](/blog/cone-6-vs-cone-10) for most electric kilns, cone 10 if you have gas. This is the single most important thing.
2. **The forming method** — wheel throwing, hand building, or sculpture. Suppliers will steer you to a body with the right plasticity and grog content.
3. **The colour** — white, buff, speckled, red.
Say "a mid-fire stoneware for throwing, cone 6, buff" and you will get exactly the right thing.
## 2. Your local pottery studio
Community studios and teaching potters very often resell clay to members and sometimes to the public. Prices sit between supplier and retail, and you avoid shipping entirely.
There is a second reason to ask here first: **if the studio is going to fire your work, they may require their own clay.** A body rated for a different cone can bloat, slump or melt onto their shelves. Always check the policy before buying elsewhere.
## 3. Online
Suppliers ship, but the weight bites. A box of clay frequently costs more to deliver than to buy. Two ways to make it work:
- **Order in bulk.** Shipping does not scale linearly, so a pallet is dramatically cheaper per kilo than one box.
- **Split an order.** Two or three people ordering together turns an unreasonable delivery cost into a reasonable one.
General marketplaces sell clay too, usually in small blocks at high per-kilo prices, and often without saying what the firing range is. A listing that does not state a cone is not worth buying for pottery.
## 4. Craft and art shops
Convenient, and expensive per kilo. Genuinely useful for two cases: buying your very first block to see whether you enjoy this, and buying air-dry or polymer clay, where the small-block format is normal anyway.
Be careful with labelling here. "Modelling clay" in a craft shop is often oil-based plasticine, which never hardens and cannot be fired. Look for "pottery clay", "stoneware", "earthenware" or "porcelain", and for a stated firing temperature.
## 5. Digging it yourself
Free, abundant and a genuine project rather than a shortcut. [Wild clay](/blog/where-to-find-natural-clay) is found in riverbanks, road cuttings and building excavations, and it needs to be dug, slaked, sieved, dried to workable stiffness and test-fired before you know what it does. Most wild clay is low-fire and behaves nothing like a commercial body.
Worth doing for the connection to the material. Not the way to get clay for a project due next week.
## What you actually want to buy
For most people starting out: **a mid-fire (cone 5–6) stoneware with fine grog, in a 12 kg box.**
That body throws forgivingly, hand-builds well, tolerates uneven drying, vitrifies to a durable, food-safe result, and fires in any electric kiln. Porcelain is beautiful and unforgiving; heavily grogged sculpture bodies are rough on the hands at the wheel; low-fire earthenware limits your glaze options and stays porous.
## Storing it
Clay does not go off. Keep the plastic bag sealed inside the box, out of frost and direct sun.
If it stiffens, poke holes in the block with a dowel, fill them with water, re-bag it tightly, and leave it a week. If it arrives too soft, wedge it on a plaster bat or a dry board for twenty minutes. Both problems are routine and neither is a reason to buy new clay.
## What to say when you call a supplier
Suppliers are helpful and used to beginners, but the conversation goes much better if you lead with the right information.
A good opening is one sentence: **"I'm firing to cone 6 in an electric kiln, I'm mostly hand building, and I'd like a buff stoneware."** That gives them everything they need.
If you do not know your cone, say so and ask what they recommend for an electric kiln — the answer will almost always be cone 5 to 6.
Worth asking while you have them:
- **Is this body grogged, and how coarsely?** It changes the feel more than the colour does.
- **What is the shrinkage and absorption?** Both are usually on the datasheet and both are useful.
- **What glazes do you know fit this body?** Fit is the thing most likely to bite you later, and suppliers often know which combinations craze.
- **Do you have offcuts or a returns pallet?** Slightly dried or mislabelled boxes are sometimes sold cheaply and are perfectly usable.
One box, one conversation, and you avoid most of the expensive mistakes people make in their first year.
## Where to go next
Decide the body before you order — [stoneware, porcelain or earthenware](/blog/stoneware-porcelain-earthenware) covers what to ask for. For budgeting the whole hobby rather than just the clay, see [how much does pottery clay cost](/blog/how-much-does-pottery-clay-cost). And if free appeals more than fast, [where to find natural clay](/blog/where-to-find-natural-clay).
---
# Where to Buy Pottery Glaze (and What to Check Before You Do)
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/where-to-buy-pottery-glaze
Published: 2026-08-12
Category: Buying guide
Tags: Buying, Glazing, Beginners
Summary: Buy from a ceramic supplier: jarred brushing glaze for small quantities and detail, dry powder or bulk buckets once you use more than a few litres. Check the cone, the food-safety statement, the finish and the batch.
Glaze is sold in three formats, and choosing the right one saves more money than choosing the right shop.
> **From the studio:** I bought five litres of a glaze on the strength of a catalogue photograph and got something two shades duller on my buff stoneware than on the white body it was shot on. A single small jar and one test tile would have told me that for a fraction of the price.
## The three formats
**Jarred brushing glaze** — ready to use, thickened with gums so it flows off a brush without streaking. Typically sold in 100 ml to 500 ml pots. The most expensive per litre by a wide margin, and the right answer for detail work, small studios and anyone without space for buckets.
**Dry glaze powder** — a pre-weighed dry mix you add water to. Roughly half the price of jarred glaze per litre of usable glaze, and much cheaper to ship because you are not paying to move water. You need a sieve, a bucket and a dust mask.
**Bulk liquid glaze** — buckets of 5 to 25 litres, ready to [dip](/blog/how-to-glaze-pottery-at-home). Cheapest per litre in use, heaviest to ship, and the standard for studios that dip everything.
Below a few litres a year, jars are fine. Above that, powder or bulk pays for itself quickly.
## Where to buy
### Ceramic suppliers
The proper source, and the cheapest for anything beyond a jar or two. They stock the recognised commercial glaze lines, dry powders, and raw materials if you want to mix from a recipe. They also employ people who can tell you which of their glazes actually fit which of their clay bodies — information no marketplace listing carries.
Search for "ceramic supply" plus your region. Most will ship, and glaze ships better than clay because a jar is light.
### Your local studio
Studios often resell glaze, and more importantly, many have communal dipping buckets included in the firing fee. If you use a studio, this is usually the cheapest glazing you will ever do, and the results are predictable because everyone fires the same schedule.
### Online
Fine for jarred glaze, where shipping is proportionate. Two cautions: buy from sellers who state the [cone](/blog/cone-6-vs-cone-10) clearly, and be aware that glaze photographs are taken on a specific clay body at a specific thickness. The same glaze on your buff stoneware at your thickness may look nothing like the picture.
### Craft and art shops
They carry a narrow range, usually low-fire jarred glazes aimed at school and hobby use. Convenient, expensive, and often light on technical detail. Check the cone before you buy.
## Four things to check on any label
**1. The cone.** Non-negotiable. A cone 6 glaze fired at cone 10 runs off the pot; at cone 04 it stays an unmelted crust. Match the glaze cone to your firing and to your clay body's rating.
**2. Food safety.** If the piece will hold food or drink, look for an explicit statement. Absence of a claim is not a claim of safety. Note that the statement assumes correct firing — an underfired glaze is not food safe regardless of the label.
**3. The finish.** Gloss, satin, matt, opaque, transparent, breaking. A transparent glaze shows every mark of the clay and any decoration; an opaque one hides them. Matt glazes vary most between kilns.
**4. Whether it is a brushing or dipping formulation.** Brushing glazes contain gum and will drag if you dip with them. Dipping glazes brush unevenly. They are not interchangeable, and the jar usually says which it is in small print.
## Buy small first
Glaze looks different on every clay body, at every thickness, in every kiln. Before committing to a large container:
- Buy the smallest size available.
- Dip an L-shaped test tile of **your** clay, with one end double-dipped.
- Fire it in **your** kiln at **your** schedule.
- Keep the tile with the glaze name and cone written on the back.
A drawer of test tiles is worth more than any catalogue photograph, and it turns a shelf of glazes into a palette you actually know.
## Storing it
Sealed containers keep indefinitely. Glaze does not expire; it settles. Everything heavy sinks, so stir all the way to the bottom before every use — glaze taken off the top of an unstirred bucket is a different recipe from what the label says.
If a jar has dried to a solid, add water, leave it overnight, blend and sieve. Very little glaze is ever genuinely ruined.
## What to buy first
A sensible starting set is smaller than most beginners expect, and it is worth resisting a shelf of colours.
**One good clear glaze** in your firing range. It goes over underglaze, over coloured slip, and over bare clay, and it teaches you more about application thickness than anything else because every flaw shows through it.
**One white or off-white opaque.** The workhorse for functional ware, and a clean ground for decoration.
**One dark glaze** — a tenmoku, a satin black, a deep blue. Dark glazes are forgiving of uneven application and immediately make work look resolved.
**A small jar of one colour you actually love.** Something to enjoy rather than to be sensible about.
That is four containers, and it will carry you through a year of work while you learn how thickness, clay body and firing schedule change the result. Adding a fifth glaze before you can predict the first four is how people end up with a shelf of half-used jars and no consistent results.
Buy them in the smallest size stocked, test each on an L-shaped tile of your own clay, and only scale up the ones that earn it.
## Where to go next
Before ordering, know what cone you fire — [cone 6 vs cone 10](/blog/cone-6-vs-cone-10). To apply what you buy, [how to glaze pottery at home](/blog/how-to-glaze-pottery-at-home). And if the cost of jars is what brought you here, [how to make ceramic glaze](/blog/how-to-make-ceramic-glaze) shows the alternative.
---
# Where to Find Natural Clay (And How to Know It Is Clay)
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/where-to-find-natural-clay
Published: 2026-08-10
Category: Wild clay
Tags: Wild clay, Materials, Beginners
Summary: Look at exposed vertical faces — riverbanks, cuttings, drainage ditches, foundation digs. Clay is smooth, sticky when wet and holds a shape. Test it with the ribbon test and the coil-bend test before you carry a bucket home.
Clay is not rare. It is one of the most common materials on the surface of the planet — the fine end product of rock weathering, washed downhill and deposited wherever water slowed down. Most places have some.
> **From the studio:** The first clay I ever dug came out of a ditch two hundred metres from my house, and I had walked past it for years. It was a bright orange band under about forty centimetres of ordinary soil, and it wrapped round my finger on the first try. Once you have seen one band, you start seeing them everywhere.
The trick is knowing where it becomes visible, and how to confirm what you are looking at.
## Look for exposed vertical faces
Clay is almost always buried under topsoil. What you want is somewhere the ground has been cut open so you can see the layers.
- **Riverbanks and stream beds.** The classic source. Look at the outside of bends and at the base of eroding banks, below the loose topsoil, where a smooth grey, blue, orange or cream band appears. Undercut banks and the bottom of the cut are best.
- **Road and railway cuttings.** Anywhere a route has been carved through a hill. Distinct horizontal bands are visible from a distance, and clay bands look smoother and more uniform than the soil above.
- **Drainage ditches and field drains.** Cheap and easy to inspect, and often already partly weathered.
- **Building excavations.** Foundation digs and trenches produce heaps of subsoil. Many builders are pleased to have some taken away — ask.
- **Ponds and puddles that hold water.** Water sitting for days after rain in a field is a strong clue that the layer underneath is clay, since clay is nearly impermeable.
- **Landslips and eroded slopes.** Nature does the digging.
## Two field tests
**The ribbon test.** Wet a lump and roll it into a coil about the thickness of a pencil. Wrap it round your finger.
- Cracks and falls apart immediately → too much sand or silt. Not usable as it is.
- Bends most of the way with a few cracks → workable, probably needs cleaning.
- Wraps fully with no cracks → genuinely plastic clay. Take it home.
**The feel test.** Rub a wet pinch between finger and thumb. Clay is smooth and faintly greasy, with no grit at all. Silt feels floury when dry and slightly gritty when wet. Sand is unmistakably gritty.
A third clue: dry clay is hard, cracks into blocks with straight edges, and rings faintly when two pieces are tapped together.
## What the colour tells you
Colour comes from the metal content and predicts something about the firing.
- **Red, orange, brown** — high iron. Fires red or brown, usually at low temperature, and often melts if pushed above about 1100 °C.
- **Grey and blue** — iron in a reduced form, common in waterlogged deposits. Often fires buff or light brown, and frequently smells of sulphur when dug.
- **White and cream** — low iron, potentially higher-firing. The rarest to find and the most useful when you do.
- **Black** — organic matter. Burns out in the firing, usually leaving a much lighter colour, and can cause bloating if the piece is fired too fast.
Colour when wet is not colour when fired. A vivid orange clay may fire to a modest buff, and only a test tile tells you.
## Digging responsibly
**Ask before you dig.** On your own land you are free to do as you please. Public land, nature reserves, protected sites and riverbanks are usually restricted, sometimes strictly, and river banks in particular are often protected against erosion for good reason.
Dig from an already exposed face rather than opening new holes. Take modest amounts. Fill in and reinstate anything you disturb. A bucket of clay is enough for several pots and weighs a great deal more than you expect after a kilometre.
## Before you use it
Wild clay always arrives contaminated with sand, gravel, roots and organic matter. The processing sequence is: [slake](/blog/how-to-process-wild-clay) it down in water, sieve out the coarse material, let the fines settle, pour off the water, and dry the resulting slurry back to a workable stiffness on a plaster bat.
Then [test fire](/blog/firing-clay-without-a-kiln) it, starting low. Most wild clay is low-fire, and pushing an unknown body to stoneware temperature is how you find out what melted clay does to a kiln shelf. Fire a small test tile at cone 06 first, then higher if it survives, and note where it stops absorbing water and where it starts to slump.
## What to take with you
A short list, learned mostly by not having any of it.
**A trowel or a small spade.** A trowel is enough for a test sample; a spade if you are actually harvesting.
**A bucket with a lid**, and lower expectations about how much you can carry than you think. Wet clay is roughly twice the weight of the same volume of water in feel, and a full bucket up a riverbank is a serious carry.
**A bottle of water**, for the ribbon test on the spot. There is no point taking home a bucket of silt.
**Zip bags and a marker**, for small samples from several spots. Label them with the location and depth, because after three sites they all look identical and the differences only appear once fired.
**A phone photo of the face** you dug from, showing the layers. Useful when you return, and useful for working out later why one sample behaved differently.
Test before you carry. Two minutes with a wet pinch of clay and one coil round your finger saves an hour of hauling material that was never going to work.
## Where to go next
Digging it is the easy part — [how to process wild clay](/blog/how-to-process-wild-clay) covers turning it into something workable. If your garden is the likeliest source, [how to make clay from soil](/blog/how-to-make-clay-from-soil) is the shorter version. And [what does clay look like](/blog/what-does-clay-look-like) helps you identify it before you carry a bucket home.
---
# How to Process Wild Clay Into Usable Pottery Clay
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/how-to-process-wild-clay
Published: 2026-08-08
Category: Wild clay
Tags: Wild clay, Materials, Technique
Summary: Dry the dug clay, slake it in water, sieve to remove grit and roots, let the fines settle, pour off the water, then dry the slurry on plaster to throwing stiffness. Test fire before making anything you care about.
Wild clay comes out of the ground mixed with sand, gravel, roots and organic matter. Processing means separating the fine clay particles from everything else, and it works because clay particles are so small that they stay suspended in water long after sand has sunk.
> **From the studio:** My first wild clay test tile slumped into a puddle and glued itself to the shelf at cone 6, which is exactly why I now fire every unknown body on a scrap of broken shelf. It cost me nothing that time. It could easily have cost me a shelf.
The whole method is built on that one difference.
## Step 1: Dry it out first
Counter-intuitive, but it saves a great deal of time. Spread the dug clay in a shallow tray and let it dry completely — a few days in the sun, or a week indoors. Break the dry lumps up with a hammer or by treading on them in a bag.
Dry clay is full of open pores, so when it hits water it collapses on its own within hours. Wet clay dropped in water stays a sullen lump for days.
## Step 2: Slake it
Put the dry crumbs in a bucket and cover with plenty of water — roughly twice the volume of clay. Leave it overnight, or up to a day for big lumps. Do not stir at first; stirring early wraps wet clay around dry cores.
Come back to a bucket of sludge and stir it thoroughly into a thin slurry, thinner than you think is useful. Thin slurry sieves easily; thick slurry clogs everything.
## Step 3: Sieve
Pour the slurry through a coarse kitchen sieve first to catch stones, roots and worms, then through a finer one — 30 mesh is a reasonable working screen, 60 or 80 mesh if you want a smooth body.
Push it through with your hand or a stiff brush and rinse the residue with a little water to recover the clay clinging to the grit. What stays behind in the sieve is sand and organic matter you do not want.
An alternative for very sandy material is the **decant method**: stir the slurry hard, wait 20 to 30 seconds for the sand to sink, then pour the still-cloudy water off the top into a second bucket. The clay is in the cloudy water; the sand is what you left behind. Repeat until the sand stops accumulating.
## Step 4: Settle and pour off
Leave the sieved slurry to stand, undisturbed, for one to three days. The clay settles into a dense layer with clear water on top.
Pour or siphon off the clear water carefully. What remains is clay at far too high a water content to use, but it is now clean.
## Step 5: Dry to working stiffness
Spread the slurry on a **plaster bat** about 3 cm thick. Plaster pulls water out steadily from below, which is exactly what you want. Alternatives that work: a bed of dry newspaper on a board, an old cotton pillowcase in a colander, or a wooden board in a warm room, all slower.
Check it every few hours. When the surface stiffens, turn the slab over so the wetter side is exposed. It is ready when a lump holds its shape, does not stick to your hands, and bends without cracking.
If it goes too far and gets crumbly, add water back and [wedge](/blog/wedging-clay-properly). If it stays sticky, give it more time on plaster.
## Step 6: Wedge and age
Wedge it thoroughly — spiral or ram's head — to make the moisture uniform and drive out air. Cut the ball with a wire and look at the cut face: it should be featureless, with no streaks or voids.
Then, if you can, **age it**. Bagged wet for a few weeks, wild clay becomes noticeably more plastic as bacteria break down organic matter and the particles align. Old potters' clay was aged for years. A month makes a visible difference.
## Step 7: Test before you trust it
This is the part people skip and regret.
**Make a shrinkage bar.** Roll a slab, cut a strip, and scribe a line exactly 10 cm long. Measure it bone dry, then again after firing. Total shrinkage over about 14 percent means a body prone to cracking, and adding sand or [grog](/blog/what-is-grog-in-clay) will help.
**Fire a stepped test.** Fire small test tiles at cone 06 first. If they survive intact, fire more at cone 3, then cone 6. Stop when the tiles start to bloat, slump or stick to the shelf. **Always fire unknown clay on a piece of scrap kiln shelf or a bed of sand**, never directly on your good shelves.
**Test absorption.** Weigh a fired tile, boil it in water for two hours, cool it submerged overnight, dry the surface and weigh again. Under 3 percent gain means a body approaching vitrification; 10 percent or more means it is porous earthenware and needs a glaze to hold liquid.
## Adjusting the body
- **Cracks while drying, shrinks a lot** — add 10 to 25 percent fine sand or grog by volume, wedged in thoroughly.
- **Short and crumbly, will not bend** — age it wet, or blend in 10 to 20 percent of a commercial plastic ball clay.
- **Melts or bloats at low temperature** — high iron or high flux content. Use it as a slip or a decorating material on a commercial body instead of building with it.
A wild clay that never becomes a good throwing body is still useful. Sieved fine and thinned, it makes a slip with a colour you cannot buy.
## Where to go next
If you have not found a deposit yet, start with [where to find natural clay](/blog/where-to-find-natural-clay). For the garden-scale version of this method, see [how to make clay from soil](/blog/how-to-make-clay-from-soil). And once you have a body, [wedging clay properly](/blog/wedging-clay-properly) is the next step.
---
# How to Make Clay From Soil in Your Own Garden
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/how-to-make-clay-from-soil
Published: 2026-08-06
Category: Wild clay
Tags: Wild clay, Materials, Beginners
Summary: Clay is already in the soil — extraction, not creation. Slake the dirt in water, stir hard, pour off the cloudy water before the sand settles, let the clay settle out of it, then dry the sludge on plaster.
The phrase is a little misleading. You cannot manufacture clay from soil — clay is a specific mineral produced by rock weathering over geological time. What you can do, and what everyone actually means, is **separate the clay that is already in your soil from the sand, silt and organic matter mixed in with it**.
> **From the studio:** I ran the jar test on three spots in one garden and got wildly different answers — a sandy loam by the path, and a band under the vegetable bed that gave nearly half its volume back as clay. Ten minutes of testing saved me from digging in the wrong place for an afternoon.
That works because of settling speed. Drop a handful of soil into water, stir it, and gravel sinks in a second, sand in twenty, silt in a few minutes, and clay stays suspended for hours. Time the pour and you separate them.
## Dig in the right place
**Go below the topsoil.** The dark, crumbly upper layer is mostly organic matter and is the worst source. Clay content generally increases with depth. Anywhere from 30 cm down is worth trying, and a vertical face — a ditch, a bank, the side of a trench — lets you see the layers directly.
**Signs your soil holds clay**: puddles that sit for days after rain, ground that becomes sticky and slippery when wet, deep straight-sided cracks in dry weather, and soil that clumps solidly around a spade.
**A first check**: wet a pinch, rub it between your fingers, and roll it into a thin coil. If it wraps around your finger without cracking, there is plenty of clay in there. If it crumbles instantly, this spot will not repay the effort.
## The extraction, step by step
**1. Dry and break up.** Spread the soil out to dry completely, then crush the lumps. Dry material disperses in water in hours; wet clods take days.
**2. Slake.** Put the crushed soil in a bucket and cover with about twice its volume of water. Leave overnight.
**3. Stir hard.** Break everything up into a thin, muddy soup. Pick out roots and stones as you go. Thin is better than thick — this is not the stage to conserve water.
**4. Decant on a timer.** This is the actual separation. Stir vigorously, then count 20 to 30 seconds. Sand and grit reach the bottom in that time; clay does not. Pour the cloudy water off into a second bucket, stopping as soon as you see grit moving.
Add fresh water to the first bucket, stir, wait, pour again. Two or three rounds recovers most of the clay. What is left in the first bucket is clean sand — keep it, since you may want to add some back later.
**5. Sieve.** Pour the cloudy water through a kitchen sieve or a piece of window screen to catch floating organic matter. An 80-mesh screen gives a fine, smooth body.
**6. Settle.** Leave the second bucket undisturbed for one to three days. The clay forms a dense layer at the bottom under clear water.
**7. Pour off the clear water.** Carefully, or siphon it with a length of tube. What remains is clean clay slurry.
**8. Dry to working consistency.** Spread the slurry roughly 3 cm thick on a plaster bat, an old cotton sheet in a colander, or a bed of newspaper on a board. Turn it when the top stiffens. It is ready when it holds its shape without sticking to your hands.
**9. Wedge.** Thoroughly, to even out the moisture and remove air. Cut it with a wire and check that the face is uniform.
## Test it, and test it low
Garden clay is almost always low-firing, and often contains fluxes that make it melt far below stoneware temperature.
- Make a **[shrinkage bar](/blog/how-to-process-wild-clay)**: scribe exactly 10 cm on a strip and measure it dry and fired. Over roughly 14 percent total shrinkage means it will crack, and wedging in 10 to 25 percent fine sand or grog will fix it.
- **Fire test tiles at cone 06 first**, standing them on scrap shelf or a bed of sand. Only go higher if they survive intact.
- Watch for **bloating** — swollen bubbles in the fired tile, caused by organic matter or high iron. Slower firing helps; so does more thorough sieving.
## If it does not make a good pot
Not every garden yields a throwing body, and the effort is not wasted either way. Fine-sieved garden clay thinned with water makes an excellent [decorating slip](/blog/how-to-make-colored-slip), in a colour you cannot buy, on a commercial body that you know is reliable. Some of the most interesting surfaces in studio pottery come from exactly that combination.
## Judging what you got
When the sludge finally reaches working stiffness, four quick checks tell you what you are holding.
**Roll a coil and bend it.** A full wrap round your finger with no cracking means genuinely plastic clay. Cracks at the outside of the curve mean it is short, and 10 to 20 percent of a plastic commercial ball clay wedged in will fix it.
**Feel for grit.** Any grittiness means the sieve was too coarse. Fine for sculpture, unpleasant to throw.
**Watch the shrinkage bar.** Over about 14 percent total shrinkage and it will crack; add fine sand or grog.
**Smell it.** A strong sulphurous or organic smell is normal in clay from waterlogged ground and tends to fade. It also predicts a body that benefits from a slow bisque, since organic matter needs time and oxygen to burn out cleanly.
None of these is a pass or fail. Garden clay that fails as a throwing body still makes an excellent slip, a good sculpture body when grogged, or a colour you could never buy — and you now know exactly which of those you have.
## Where to go next
The fuller version of this method, including the test firing sequence, is in [how to process wild clay](/blog/how-to-process-wild-clay). To find better material than your own garden, see [where to find natural clay](/blog/where-to-find-natural-clay). And if your clay turns out to be unfireable, [how to make coloured slip](/blog/how-to-make-colored-slip) is a good use for it.
---
# How Much Does Pottery Clay Cost? A Realistic Breakdown
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/how-much-does-pottery-clay-cost
Published: 2026-08-04
Category: Buying guide
Tags: Buying, Beginners, Clay bodies
Summary: A 10 to 12 kg box of stoneware works out to a low single-digit cost per kilogram, which is well under a dollar of clay in a typical mug. Firing, glaze and studio time cost far more than the clay does.
Clay is the cheapest input in pottery, and this surprises people who assume the material is the expensive part. It is not. Firing is.
> **From the studio:** When I finally worked out my cost per mug, the clay was the smallest line by a distance — well behind the electricity for two firings and miles behind studio time. It changed how I thought about failures too: a cracked pot does not waste clay, it wastes a kiln slot.
## What a box costs
Clay is sold in boxes of roughly 10 to 12.5 kg, sometimes as a pair of bags in a carton.
Prices vary by region, supplier and body, but the ratios hold everywhere:
| Body | Relative price per kg |
| --- | --- |
| Standard stoneware | Baseline |
| Earthenware / terracotta | About the same, sometimes slightly less |
| Speckled or coloured stoneware | 10–30% more |
| Sculpture / heavily grogged bodies | 10–25% more |
| Porcelain | 1.5–2.5× the baseline |
| Paper clay | 2–3× the baseline |
Buying by the pallet typically cuts the per-kilo price by 20 to 40 percent. This is why studios and classes buy in bulk and resell.
## What that means per pot
Wet clay weight for common items, including what you lose in trimming:
| Item | Wet clay |
| --- | --- |
| Small bowl | 300–400 g |
| Standard mug with handle | 400–500 g |
| Dinner plate | 800 g–1.2 kg |
| Large mixing bowl | 1.5–2.5 kg |
| Medium vase | 1–1.5 kg |
A 12 kg box is roughly 25 mugs, or 12 dinner plates. Divide the box price by 25 and the clay content of a mug is a small fraction of what anything else in the process costs.
## Where the money actually goes
**Firing.** Every pot is fired at least twice. An electric kiln firing to [cone 6](/blog/cone-6-vs-cone-10) uses a significant amount of electricity, and that cost is shared across however many pots fit in the load. Studios that charge by volume are passing this on. Firing typically costs several times more per pot than the clay.
**Glaze.** Jarred commercial glaze is expensive per litre; raw materials mixed in bulk are much cheaper. Either way, the glaze on a mug usually costs more than the clay in it.
**Studio time or equipment.** Membership fees, class fees, or the capital cost of a wheel and a kiln. This dwarfs everything else, and it is the reason a handmade mug is not priced like clay.
**Losses.** Pots crack, warp, stick to shelves or come out of the kiln disappointing. A realistic loss rate for a beginner is high, and every loss carries its full clay, glaze and firing cost.
## Reclaim makes clay effectively cheaper still
Nothing but plaster and fired ware needs to leave a pottery studio. Trimmings, failed pots, dried-out scraps and the sludge in the bottom of your water bucket can all be slaked down in water, dried back on a plaster bat and wedged into usable clay.
Keeping a [reclaim](/blog/how-to-make-slip-for-pottery) bucket cuts real clay consumption substantially — for many potters, by a third or more. It costs nothing but the space and a little labour, and reclaimed clay is often more plastic than fresh because it has been aged and thoroughly mixed.
## Do not buy small
The single most expensive way to buy clay is in small craft-shop blocks. Per kilo, they routinely cost several times what a supplier charges for a full box, and the block is rarely enough for more than a couple of pots.
If you are certain you want to try clay properly, one full box from a ceramic supplier is the cheapest possible start, it stores indefinitely if the bag stays sealed, and there is no meaningful risk of it going off.
## What about blue clay, kaolin and other named clays?
Searches about the value of particular clays usually come from geology or from cosmetics rather than pottery. Raw clay in the ground has essentially no commercial value to an individual — the economics of clay are entirely about processing, blending and transport, not about the material itself.
Bentonite, kaolin and similar named clays sold for cosmetic or industrial use are priced by purity and particle size, and cost far more per kilo than a pottery body while being unsuitable for making pots on their own. If you want clay to make things from, buy a pottery body from a ceramic supplier.
## Working out your own cost per pot
If you want a real number rather than a feeling, the arithmetic takes about ten minutes and it is worth doing once.
1. **Clay.** Box price divided by the weight in the box gives cost per kilo. Multiply by the wet weight of the pot.
2. **Firing.** Take your kiln's power rating in kilowatts, multiply by the rough hours at full draw for a firing — usually about half the total firing time — and multiply by your electricity rate. Divide by the number of pots in the load, and remember there are two firings.
3. **Glaze.** Container price divided by how many pots it coats. Jarred glaze is often more per pot than the clay; mixed glaze is usually a fraction of it.
4. **Losses.** Divide the total by your success rate. At 80 percent, everything costs 25 percent more than the arithmetic suggests.
What this exercise usually reveals is that firing dominates, and that a half-empty kiln load is the most expensive thing in the studio. Packing a firing properly — small pieces tucked between larger ones, shelves set to the actual height needed — often cuts cost per pot more than any material decision you can make.
## Where to go next
For where to actually buy it, see [where to buy clay for pottery](/blog/where-to-buy-clay-for-pottery). To cut consumption by a third, start a reclaim bucket using the method in [how to make slip for pottery](/blog/how-to-make-slip-for-pottery). And if firing costs are the concern, [cone 6 vs cone 10](/blog/cone-6-vs-cone-10) explains where the electricity goes.
---
# What Is Clay Made Of? The Minerals Behind the Material
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/what-is-clay-made-of
Published: 2026-08-02
Category: Materials
Tags: Materials, Pottery basics, Beginners
Summary: Clay is fine plate-shaped minerals — mostly kaolinite, illite and montmorillonite — produced by feldspar weathering over long periods. Water between the plates lets them slide, which is why clay is plastic.
Clay is made of **clay minerals**: microscopically small, plate-shaped crystals of hydrous aluminium silicate. Chemically that means aluminium, silicon, oxygen and water, arranged in layers.
> **From the studio:** Knowing that clay particles are flat plates rather than round grains explained more of my day-to-day problems than any technique video. Shrinkage, plasticity, why compression works, why a dried pot cracks where it does — all of it follows from that one shape.
Most clay you encounter also contains other things — quartz sand, iron oxides, organic matter, calcium compounds — and those extras determine its colour, how hot you can fire it, and how it behaves in your hands.
## Where it comes from
Clay begins as **feldspar**, one of the most abundant minerals in the earth's crust and a major component of granite. Over very long periods, water, carbon dioxide and temperature cycling break feldspar down, stripping away the soluble sodium and potassium and leaving behind aluminium and silicon bound with water.
That process produces particles smaller than 2 microns across — hundreds of times finer than a grain of sand, and flat rather than round. Everything distinctive about clay follows from that shape and size.
## The main clay minerals
**Kaolinite** — the simplest and purest, Al2Si2O5(OH)4. It is the main mineral in kaolin (china clay) and the basis of porcelain. Low in iron, so it fires white, and relatively non-plastic on its own.
**Illite** — a mica-derived clay mineral, common in ordinary sedimentary clays. More plastic than kaolinite, contains potassium, and fires at lower temperatures.
**Montmorillonite** (the main mineral in bentonite) — extremely fine and extremely absorbent. It swells dramatically with water and is added to clay bodies and glazes in small amounts, 1 to 3 percent, to increase plasticity and suspension.
**Halloysite** and others fill out the family. Almost all natural clay is a mixture rather than a single mineral.
## Why clay is plastic
Take a lump of clay, squeeze it, and it holds the new shape. Almost nothing else behaves that way.
The reason is the plates. Clay particles are flat and carry a small electrical charge on their surfaces. Water forms a thin film between them, and that film does two things at once: it lubricates, letting the plates slide past each other, and its surface tension holds them together, so the mass does not fall apart.
Too little water and the plates cannot slide, so the clay is stiff and crumbly. Too much and the films get thick, the attraction weakens, and the clay slumps. Between those extremes is the plastic range — the reason clay can be thrown, coiled, pinched and rolled.
This also explains why clay shrinks. Drying removes the water films and the plates pack closer together, typically shrinking the piece 5 to 8 percent before it even reaches the kiln.
## Primary and secondary clay
**Primary (residual) clay** sits where it formed, still on top of its parent rock. It is pure, coarse-particled, white, and not very plastic. Kaolin is the main example.
**Secondary (sedimentary) clay** has been carried by water and deposited elsewhere. The journey grinds the particles finer, sorts them, and mixes in iron, organic matter and other minerals. It is far more plastic and usually darker. Ball clay and most common clays are secondary.
Almost every clay body used in pottery blends both, plus non-clay materials.
## What else is in a pottery clay body
A commercial clay body is a recipe, not a dug material:
- **Clays** for plasticity and workability.
- **Feldspar** as a flux, to lower the temperature at which the body vitrifies.
- **Silica** (quartz sand) to control shrinkage and thermal expansion, and to help the glaze fit.
- **[Grog](/blog/what-is-grog-in-clay)** — pre-fired crushed clay — to open the body, cut shrinkage and reduce warping.
- Sometimes **talc**, **bentonite**, or **paper fibre** for particular properties.
That is why a bag of stoneware behaves so much better than clay dug from a ditch. It has been blended for a specific firing range and forming method.
## What firing does to it
Heat changes clay permanently and irreversibly.
- Around **100 °C** free water evaporates.
- Around **500 °C** the chemically bound water is driven out of the mineral structure. This is the point of no return: the clay minerals decompose and can never be dissolved back into slip.
- **573 °C** brings [quartz inversion](/blog/cone-6-vs-cone-10), where silica crystals change form and expand suddenly. Fast firing through this range cracks pots.
- Above roughly **1000 °C** sintering begins, particles fuse at their contact points, and the material becomes ceramic.
- At the body's maturing temperature, enough glass forms between the particles to close the pores. This is vitrification, and it is what makes stoneware watertight.
Everything on that list is one-way. A clay pot in the ground stays a clay pot for thousands of years, which is why ceramics are the single richest source of evidence in archaeology.
## Why the particle shape explains everything else
It is worth pulling the practical consequences together, because almost every property of clay follows from flat particles a couple of microns across.
| Observation | Cause |
| --- | --- |
| Clay holds a shape when squeezed | Water films let plates slide, surface tension holds them together |
| It shrinks 5–8% as it dries | Water films leave and the plates pack closer |
| Thin walls dry faster than thick ones | Water must travel out through tortuous gaps between plates |
| Compression strengthens a surface | It aligns plates and closes micro-voids that become cracks |
| Grog reduces cracking | Pre-fired particles do not shrink and open escape routes for water |
| Clay soil puddles after rain | Overlapping plates make it nearly impermeable |
| Slip works as glue | The same plates, suspended, fill scored grooves and bond on drying |
| Fired clay never returns | Above 500 °C the mineral structure that held the water is destroyed |
Once that column on the right is familiar, most studio problems stop needing a rule to remember. You can work out what the clay is going to do from what is physically happening inside it, which is a much smaller thing to carry around.
## Where to go next
For where the material comes from geologically, read [where does clay come from](/blog/where-does-clay-come-from). To turn that theory into a purchase, [stoneware, porcelain or earthenware](/blog/stoneware-porcelain-earthenware). And [is clay renewable or non-renewable](/blog/is-clay-renewable-or-nonrenewable) covers the resource question this raises.
---
# Where Does Clay Come From? From Granite to the Ground Under You
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/where-does-clay-come-from
Published: 2026-08-01
Category: Materials
Tags: Materials, Wild clay, Pottery basics
Summary: Clay forms when feldspar in rocks like granite weathers chemically over thousands of years. Some stays where it formed as primary clay; most is carried by water and deposited elsewhere as secondary clay.
Clay is what rock becomes when water works on it for long enough.
> **From the studio:** The first time a supplier told me a clay body had been reformulated because a seam had run out, the geology stopped being abstract. The bag looked identical and threw slightly differently, and I had to relearn a body I thought I knew.
## It starts with feldspar
Granite and similar igneous rocks are made largely of three minerals: quartz, mica and **feldspar**. Feldspar is the vulnerable one.
Rainwater is slightly acidic, because it dissolves carbon dioxide from the air as it falls. Over thousands of years, that weak acid attacks feldspar crystals and strips out the soluble elements — potassium, sodium, calcium — leaving behind aluminium and silicon bound together with water.
What remains is a clay mineral: a flat, microscopically small plate of hydrous aluminium silicate. This is chemical weathering, and it is slow. Frost, roots, temperature swings and grinding by ice and water all help break the rock apart physically, exposing more surface for the chemistry to work on.
## Two kinds of deposit
**Primary clay** stays where it formed, sitting directly on the parent rock. It is chemically pure, with coarser particles and low iron content, so it fires white. Kaolin — china clay — is the classic example, and it is what porcelain is built from. Primary clay is not very plastic, because the particles have not been ground fine by transport.
**Secondary clay** has been picked up by water and carried away. Rivers move the fine particles downstream and drop them wherever the current slows: in floodplains, lake beds, estuaries and, over geological time, in beds that later become dry land.
The journey changes the material. It grinds the particles finer, which makes secondary clay far more plastic. It also sorts and mixes: iron oxides, organic matter, calcium and other minerals get folded in, which is why secondary clay is usually grey, brown or red rather than white and why it fires at lower temperatures.
Almost all clay you will encounter — in a riverbank, in a garden, in a bag from a supplier — is secondary.
## Why it ends up in bands
Deposition sorts material by particle size. In slowing water, gravel drops first, then sand, then silt, and clay last, because the particles are so fine they stay suspended almost indefinitely.
Repeat that over thousands of flood cycles and you get the horizontal [banding](/blog/where-to-find-natural-clay) visible in any road cutting or eroding riverbank: coarse layers where the water ran fast, fine clay layers where it stood still. That banding is what makes clay findable — you are looking for the layer that was laid down in calm water.
## Where it is mined
Commercial extraction happens where beds are thick, consistent and shallow enough for open-pit quarrying.
The best-known kaolin deposits include Cornwall and Devon in England, where china clay has been worked since the 1740s, and a wide belt across Georgia in the United States. Ball clays come from Devon and Dorset, Kentucky and Tennessee. Large deposits are worked in Brazil, Ukraine, India and China — the last of which gave porcelain its English nickname.
Mining is straightforward: strip the overburden, extract the clay, then wash, sieve, settle, filter-press and dry it. That refining is most of the value. Raw clay in the ground is worth almost nothing; processed, blended, consistent clay is worth buying.
## Is clay renewable?
Technically it is still forming, everywhere, all the time. Practically, it is classified as a **non-renewable resource**, because the rate of formation is measured in thousands of years and the rate of extraction is measured in tonnes per hour.
The saving grace is abundance. Clay minerals make up a substantial fraction of all sedimentary rock on earth, and there is no realistic prospect of running out of clay in general. What can and does run out is a *particular deposit* with a particular whiteness, plasticity and firing range — which is why potters occasionally find that a favourite clay body has been reformulated. The mine ran out, and the supplier had to blend something else to match.
## The one-way trip
Firing ends the cycle. Above about 500 °C the chemically bound water is driven permanently out of the clay minerals, and the structure that made the material plastic is destroyed for good.
Unfired clay can be recycled endlessly — slaked in water, dried back, wedged and used again. Fired ceramic cannot. It can be crushed into [grog](/blog/what-is-grog-in-clay) and added back to a clay body as filler, but it will never again be clay. That irreversibility is exactly why pottery survives in the ground for thousands of years, and why broken pots are the most abundant artefact in archaeology.
## Why it matters to a potter
Geology sounds academic until you notice how much of studio practice it explains.
**Why clay bodies get reformulated.** A seam runs out, and the supplier blends something else to approximate it. Your familiar clay throws slightly differently, and nothing on the bag has changed.
**Why porcelain costs more.** It needs primary kaolin of a specific whiteness and consistency, which occurs in far fewer places than the mixed sedimentary clays that make stoneware.
**Why wild clay is usually low-fire.** Secondary clay picks up iron and other fluxes on its journey, and those fluxes make it melt at a lower temperature.
**Why grey clay fires orange.** The iron in a waterlogged deposit is chemically reduced and turns grey; oxidise it in a kiln and it goes red-brown.
**Why clay bodies are recipes, not dug material.** No single natural deposit has the right plasticity, firing range, colour and shrinkage all at once, so bodies are blended from several clays plus feldspar, silica and grog.
None of this changes what you do on a Tuesday evening. It does make a surprising number of otherwise arbitrary facts fit together.
## Where to go next
For the mineral chemistry, see [what is clay made of](/blog/what-is-clay-made-of). To find some yourself, [where to find natural clay](/blog/where-to-find-natural-clay) explains what to look for. And [is clay renewable or non-renewable](/blog/is-clay-renewable-or-nonrenewable) answers the question this always raises.
---
# What Is Clay Used For? Far More Than Pottery
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/what-is-clay-used-for
Published: 2026-07-30
Category: Materials
Tags: Materials, Pottery basics
Summary: Pottery is a small share of clay use. Construction materials dominate, followed by industrial applications that exploit clay's fine particle size, absorbency and chemical stability.
Clay is one of the most widely used materials on earth, and the pots are a rounding error. Its usefulness comes from a small set of physical properties: the particles are extremely fine and flat, the mass is plastic when wet, it holds its shape when dry, it becomes permanently hard when fired, it is chemically stable, and it is nearly impermeable when compacted.
> **From the studio:** The fact that stopped me short was paper. I had assumed glossy magazine pages were coated in something synthetic, and it turns out I had been holding kaolin in my hands for my whole life without noticing.
Different industries exploit different items on that list.
## Construction — by far the largest use
**Bricks.** Fired clay bricks have been made for over five thousand years and are still one of the most common building materials on the planet. Cheap raw material, straightforward firing, and a product that lasts centuries.
**Roof tiles and floor tiles.** Same principle, different shapes and firing temperatures. Porcelain floor tile is fired hard enough to be essentially non-absorbent.
**Pipe and drainage.** [Vitrified](/blog/stoneware-porcelain-earthenware) clay pipe resists chemical attack and root intrusion in ways plastic does not, and is still specified for sewerage.
**Cement.** Portland cement is made by firing limestone with clay or shale. The clay supplies the alumina and silica that the chemistry needs.
**Expanded clay aggregate.** Clay pellets heated until they puff up into lightweight, insulating balls, used in concrete and in hydroponics.
## Ceramics and tableware
Everything from mugs to sanitaryware to laboratory porcelain. Sanitaryware alone — basins, cisterns, toilets — consumes far more clay than studio pottery ever will.
Technical ceramics based on refined clay minerals appear in electrical insulators, spark plugs, kiln furniture and furnace linings, where the ability to survive high temperature without deforming is the whole point.
## Paper
One of the largest industrial uses of kaolin. A coating of fine clay fills the gaps between wood fibres and gives paper its smooth, opaque, printable surface. Glossy magazine paper is substantially clay by weight.
## Drilling
Bentonite is pumped into oil and water wells as drilling mud. It carries rock cuttings up to the surface, cools the bit, and — because it swells and gels when it stops moving — holds the borehole walls open. Nothing synthetic does the job as cheaply.
## Sealing and containment
Compacted clay liners sit under landfills and around contaminated sites, and are used to line ponds, canals and reservoirs. Bentonite mats do the same job in a manufactured form.
This is the permeability question answered: clay has **very low** permeability, not high. The flat plates pack into overlapping layers with tortuous, tiny gaps between them, and water moves through at a crawl. That is exactly why clay soil puddles after rain while sandy soil drains, and why a clay layer is the standard natural barrier for containing liquids.
## Absorbents
Cat litter is mostly bentonite or attapulgite clay, chosen for absorbency and, in clumping litters, for the way bentonite swells and binds. The same clays turn up in oil absorbents, spill kits and industrial filtration, where fuller's earth is used to decolourise and clean oils.
## Cosmetics and medicine
Kaolin and bentonite are common in face masks, powders and cleansers, valued for absorbing oil and for their fine, smooth texture. Medically, kaolin has a long history in anti-diarrhoeal preparations, and clays are used as binders, carriers and thickeners in tablets, ointments and suspensions.
## Agriculture and soil
Clay content is what gives soil its capacity to hold nutrients. The charged surfaces of clay particles grip potassium, calcium, magnesium and ammonium ions that would otherwise wash straight through, then release them to roots. A soil with no clay is a soil that cannot hold fertility.
Kaolin sprays are also used on fruit trees as a physical barrier against insects and sunburn.
## Art and craft
Studio pottery, sculpture, modelling clay for animation, polymer clay for jewellery, air-dry clay for schools and crafts. Small by volume, and the reason most people ever handle the material deliberately.
## Why one material does all this
Almost every application traces back to particle size and shape. Particles under 2 microns across, flat rather than round, give an enormous surface area per gram — which is what makes clay absorbent, chemically reactive at its surfaces, smooth to the touch, plastic when wet and nearly impermeable when packed.
Add the fact that it is abundant on every continent, cheap to dig, and permanently hardened by heat, and you have a material that turns up in construction, industry, agriculture, medicine and art at the same time.
## The property that explains each use
It is worth mapping the applications back to the physics, because the pattern makes the list much easier to remember.
| Property | What it enables |
| --- | --- |
| Plastic when wet | Forming — pottery, bricks, tiles, sculpture |
| Hardens permanently when fired | Everything ceramic, from mugs to spark plugs |
| Extremely fine, flat particles | Paper coating, cosmetics, smooth surfaces |
| Enormous surface area per gram | Absorbency — cat litter, spill kits, filtration |
| Charged particle surfaces | Nutrient retention in soil, ion exchange |
| Very low permeability when compacted | Pond and landfill liners, drilling mud |
| Supplies alumina and silica | Cement manufacture, technical ceramics |
| Swells and gels (bentonite) | Drilling fluids, sealing, clumping litter |
Almost every entry traces back to the same two facts: the particles are under 2 microns across, and they are flat rather than round. That geometry gives clay a surface area per gram that most materials cannot approach, and it lets the particles pack into overlapping layers that water struggles to cross.
Once you see that, the leap from a coffee mug to a landfill liner stops looking strange.
## Where to go next
For the mineralogy behind all of this, read [what is clay made of](/blog/what-is-clay-made-of). For the geology, [where does clay come from](/blog/where-does-clay-come-from). And if you want to use some yourself, [where to buy clay for pottery](/blog/where-to-buy-clay-for-pottery) is the practical starting point.
---
# Is Clay Renewable or Non-Renewable?
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/is-clay-renewable-or-nonrenewable
Published: 2026-07-28
Category: Materials
Tags: Materials, Pottery basics
Summary: Clay is a non-renewable mineral resource: it forms far slower than we extract it. It is also one of the most abundant materials on earth, and unfired clay can be recycled indefinitely.
**Clay is classified as a non-renewable natural resource.** That is the short answer, and it is the one exam boards want. But it is a classification that hides two more interesting facts, and both of them matter if you actually use clay.
> **From the studio:** Running a reclaim bucket properly cut what I actually buy by something close to a third, and the reclaimed clay throws better than the fresh bag because it has been aged and thoroughly mixed. It is the rare case where the environmentally better option is also the nicer material.
## Why it is called non-renewable
Clay forms by chemical weathering: rainwater, slightly acidic from dissolved carbon dioxide, slowly breaks down feldspar in rocks like granite. The soluble elements wash away and what remains is hydrous aluminium silicate — clay minerals.
That process takes **thousands to millions of years**. A commercial quarry removes in a day what took geological time to accumulate.
The definition of renewable hinges on rate, not on whether a process has stopped. Timber is renewable because a forest regrows in decades. Solar energy is renewable because the supply is continuous. Clay, coal, oil, metal ores and stone are non-renewable because replacement happens far slower than use, on any timescale a human institution can plan around.
So clay is still forming, right now, in every riverbank and weathering outcrop on the planet. It simply is not forming fast enough to count.
## Why running out is not the concern
Clay minerals make up a very large share of all sedimentary rock and soil on earth. Clay is not scarce in the way that helium or particular rare earth elements are scarce. There is no realistic scenario in which the world exhausts its clay.
What genuinely runs out is a **specific deposit with specific properties**. A particular kaolin seam with a particular whiteness, particle size and iron content is finite, and when it is worked out, the supplier has to blend something else to approximate it.
Potters see this directly. Clay bodies are periodically reformulated, and named glaze and body ingredients occasionally disappear from catalogues — the mine closed or the seam ran out. The material is abundant; the exact material is not.
## Extraction has real costs
Non-renewable does not only mean finite. It also means the extraction has consequences worth acknowledging:
- **Land disturbance.** Clay is quarried in open pits, which changes landscapes and habitats. Restoration is possible and increasingly required, but it takes decades.
- **Energy.** The clay itself is cheap. Processing it — washing, filter-pressing, drying — and above all **firing** it uses substantial energy. For a potter, the kiln is the environmental cost centre, not the clay.
- **Transport.** Clay is heavy. Moving it across a country or a continent is a large share of both its price and its footprint.
## Unfired clay is endlessly recyclable
Here is the fact that most matters day to day: **before it is fired, clay can be recycled indefinitely.**
Trimmings, failed pots, dried scraps, the sludge in your throwing bucket — all of it can be broken up, [slaked in water](/blog/how-to-make-slip-for-pottery), dried back to workable stiffness on a plaster bat, wedged and used again. The material is not degraded by the cycle. Reclaimed clay is often *more* plastic than fresh clay, because it has been aged and thoroughly mixed.
In a well-run studio, essentially nothing leaves except plaster and fired ware. That is unusual among craft materials, and it is worth taking advantage of.
## Firing is the point of no return
Above roughly 500 °C, the chemically bound water is driven permanently out of the clay mineral structure. The material becomes ceramic and can never be dissolved back into slip.
Fired ceramic can be crushed into **[grog](/blog/what-is-grog-in-clay)** and added back to a clay body as filler, which is a genuine and useful form of recycling, but it returns as an inert aggregate, not as clay. This irreversibility is why potsherds survive in the ground for thousands of years and why ceramics are the richest artefact class in archaeology.
## The honest summary
If you need one sentence for a homework answer: clay is a non-renewable natural resource, because it forms over geological timescales far slower than it is extracted.
If you need the useful version: clay is non-renewable but abundant, its real environmental cost is the energy used to fire it rather than the material itself, and unfired clay is one of the very few craft materials you can recycle forever without loss.
## How to run a reclaim bucket
Since the recyclability is the practically useful half of this answer, here is the method in full.
1. **Keep one bucket per clay body.** Mixing bodies gives you an unpredictable blend with an unknown firing range.
2. **Everything goes in**: trimmings, failed pots, dried scraps, and the sludge from the bottom of your throwing water once it has settled.
3. **Let it dry out completely** before adding water. Dry clay slakes down in hours; wet lumps take days and stay lumpy.
4. **Cover with water** and leave it until everything has collapsed into sludge.
5. **Pour off any standing water** from the top.
6. **Spread it on plaster** about 3 cm thick. Turn it over when the top surface stiffens.
7. **Wedge thoroughly** when it holds its shape without sticking to your hands.
The result is often better than fresh clay, because it has been aged and thoroughly mixed. The only thing to watch is contamination — a single piece of plaster in reclaim will cause a fired pot to pop a crater months later, so keep plaster tools well away from the bucket.
## Where to go next
For the formation process behind the classification, see [where does clay come from](/blog/where-does-clay-come-from). To start reclaiming, the slaking method is in [how to make slip for pottery](/blog/how-to-make-slip-for-pottery). And [how much does pottery clay cost](/blog/how-much-does-pottery-clay-cost) shows what that saves in practice.
---
# What Does Clay Look Like in the Ground?
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/what-does-clay-look-like
Published: 2026-07-26
Category: Wild clay
Tags: Wild clay, Materials, Beginners
Summary: Look for smooth, evenly coloured bands with no visible grit in a cut bank or ditch. Clay is sticky when wet, cracks into straight-edged blocks when dry, and rolls into a thin coil without breaking.
Clay in the ground rarely announces itself. It is usually buried under topsoil, and the way to see it is to find somewhere the ground has been cut open — a riverbank, a ditch, a road cutting, a foundation trench.
> **From the studio:** The clue I now trust most is the dry cracking pattern. A dried-out puddle with deep, straight-sided cracks in a polygon pattern has told me there is workable clay underneath every single time, and it is visible from twenty metres away.
## In an exposed face
Look at the vertical section rather than the surface. What you are looking for is a **band that is smoother and more uniform than everything around it**.
- The topsoil layer at the top is dark, crumbly and full of roots.
- Below it, layers separate by particle size: gravelly and sandy bands look speckled and granular.
- A clay band looks **solid and even**, with no visible individual grains, often with a slight sheen where a spade or the weather has cut it clean.
Clay layers frequently look almost artificially uniform, like a stripe of modelling material laid into the bank. That uniformity is the giveaway.
## Colour
Colour comes from what else is present, and covers a wide range:
- **Grey and blue-grey** — very common, especially in waterlogged deposits where iron is chemically reduced. Often smells faintly of sulphur when freshly dug.
- **Orange, red and rust** — oxidised iron. Common in well-drained deposits and in terracotta clays.
- **Brown** — iron plus organic matter.
- **Cream, buff and near-white** — low iron. Least common in the field and the most useful when you find it.
- **Black** — high organic content, which burns away in firing to leave a much paler result.
None of these predicts [fired colour](/blog/how-to-process-wild-clay) reliably. Grey clay commonly fires buff or orange, since firing oxidises the iron. Only a test tile tells you.
## Texture and behaviour
**Wet**, clay is sticky, smooth and plastic. It clings to boots and spades in heavy lumps, it feels slightly greasy between the fingers, and it holds any shape you press it into.
**Damp**, it is dense and cuts cleanly. A spade slices it rather than crumbling it, and the cut face is shiny.
**Dry**, it is hard, pale and cracks into blocks with distinctly straight edges. Those shrinkage cracks are the most recognisable field sign there is — deep, straight-sided and often forming polygons across a dried pond bed or a bare field.
## Three field tests
**The ribbon test.** Wet a lump and roll it into a coil the thickness of a pencil, then wrap it round a finger.
- Wraps with no cracks → high clay content, plastic, usable.
- Bends with a few cracks → some clay, mixed with silt or sand.
- Breaks immediately → mostly silt or sand.
**The feel test.** Rub a wet pinch between finger and thumb. Clay is smooth with no grit at all. Silt feels floury dry and faintly gritty wet. Sand is unmistakably gritty.
**The jar test.** Put a few spoonfuls of soil in a jar of water, shake hard, and leave it. Sand sinks in seconds, silt in minutes, clay in hours to days as a distinct top layer. Measure the bands to estimate the proportions.
## Where clayey soil shows up
Land that puddles for days after rain, ground that becomes slippery and heavy underfoot, fields that crack in summer, and gardens where a spade meets dense resistance 30 cm down. All of these indicate a clay layer, since compacted clay is nearly impermeable and water sits on top of it rather than draining through.
Ponds that hold water without a liner are sitting on clay. So, usually, are the wettest corners of a garden.
## What it looks like once you have it
Freshly dug clay is not ready to use and does not look like the clay in a bag. It contains sand, gravel, roots and organic matter, and it usually needs slaking in water, sieving, settling and drying before it becomes a smooth, uniform, workable body. Judged by eye at the point of digging, good wild clay tends to look disappointingly like heavy mud — which is exactly what it is until it is cleaned.
## What it looks like once it is processed
There is a large gap between clay in the ground and clay in a bag, and it catches people out.
Freshly dug clay looks like heavy, wet, unpromising mud, usually with visible sand, small stones, roots and the occasional worm. Nothing about it looks like a material you could make a pot from, and that is normal.
After slaking and sieving, the slurry is smooth and uniform and pours like thick cream. It looks far more like something usable, and it is still much too wet.
Dried back to working stiffness on a plaster bat, it finally resembles bagged clay: dense, even in colour, faintly shiny where it has been cut, and holding a fingerprint cleanly. If it still shows streaks or specks of grit at this point, it needed a finer sieve.
The fired colour is the last surprise. Grey and blue clays commonly fire buff or orange, because the iron in them oxidises in the kiln. Black clays usually fire much paler, since the organic matter that made them dark burns away. Orange clay often stays orange but a few shades duller. There is no shortcut here — only a fired test tile tells you what colour you actually have.
## Where to go next
Once you have identified a deposit, [where to find natural clay](/blog/where-to-find-natural-clay) covers digging it responsibly, and [how to process wild clay](/blog/how-to-process-wild-clay) turns it into something you can use. For the garden version, see [how to make clay from soil](/blog/how-to-make-clay-from-soil).
---
# How to Store Polymer Clay So It Stays Workable
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/how-to-store-polymer-clay
Published: 2026-07-24
Category: Polymer clay
Tags: Polymer clay, Beginners, Technique
Summary: Keep it cool, dark and away from incompatible plastics. Wrap opened clay in wax paper or parchment, store in metal tins or polypropylene boxes, and never leave it in a warm car or a sunny window.
Polymer clay has no water in it. It is PVC particles suspended in liquid plasticiser, which is why it never dries out on the table and why the storage problems it does have are unlike those of any other clay.
> **From the studio:** I left a conditioned sheet on a clear plastic lid overnight and came back to find both fused into one sticky, unusable object. Now everything sits on a ceramic tile, which cleans in seconds and goes straight into the oven with the piece still on it.
Three things degrade it: **heat**, **light**, and **contact with the wrong plastics**.
## Heat is the real enemy
Polymer clay begins to cure at around 110 °C, and it starts to firm up well below that. A block left in a car in summer, on a windowsill, on top of a radiator, or in a loft can partially cure — and once part of a block has cured, that part is permanently hard and no amount of kneading brings it back.
Store it somewhere that stays reliably cool: a cupboard, a drawer, a box under a bed. A cool room is fine; refrigeration is unnecessary. If you do keep clay in a fridge, seal it well, because condensation on cold clay is a nuisance when it comes out.
## Light matters too
Ultraviolet light degrades the polymer over time and fades colours, particularly reds, purples and translucents. Opaque containers or a dark cupboard solve this completely.
## The plastics problem
Plasticiser is a solvent, and it attacks some plastics on contact. Leave clay on a polystyrene surface overnight and you will find it has welded itself into a sticky mess that ruins both.
**Safe**: polypropylene (recycling code 5), polyethylene (codes 2 and 4), metal tins, glass, ceramic tiles, wax paper, parchment paper, and the manufacturer's own packaging.
**Not safe**: polystyrene (code 6), many clear disposable takeaway containers, styrofoam, some cling films, and painted or varnished wooden surfaces.
When in doubt, check the recycling triangle on the base. Number 5 is your friend.
## Storing opened blocks
The manufacturer's plastic film is designed for the job. If it has torn, wrap the block in **wax paper or baking parchment** — both are inert — and then put it in a tin or a number 5 box.
Do not wrap clay in cling film for long-term storage; many varieties are not compatible and it can bond to the surface.
Keep colours separated. Polymer clay picks up colour from anything it touches, and a white block that spent a month next to red is now a pink block.
## Storing mixed colours and small pieces
Custom colour blends are worth protecting, because remixing an exact shade is nearly impossible.
- Flatten each blend into a thin sheet, wrap it in parchment, and label it with the recipe — for example "2 parts white, 1 part crimson, pinch of black".
- Store sheets flat in a shallow tin. Sheets are easier to condition later than balls.
- Small offcuts go in a single "scrap" tin. Mixed scraps eventually blend into a usable grey-brown that is perfectly good for armatures and hidden interiors.
## Storing canes
Millefiori canes are the hardest thing to store well, because pressure distorts the pattern.
- Rest them on a flat surface, not on their ends.
- Do not stack anything on top.
- Wrap in parchment and store in a shallow rigid box.
- Rotate a quarter turn occasionally if they will sit for months, so one side does not flatten.
Slightly firm canes actually slice more cleanly than fresh ones, so a short rest is beneficial. Months of pressure is not.
## Reviving old clay
Clay that has gone crumbly has lost plasticiser, not water. Adding water does nothing at all.
What works:
- **Knead thoroughly.** Warmth from your hands recovers a lot of clay that only seems hard. Give it a genuine five minutes before deciding it is dead.
- **Add clay softener** (sometimes sold as clay conditioner or diluent), a few drops at a time, kneaded in fully. Overdoing it makes clay sticky and slumpy, and that is harder to fix than crumbly.
- **Blend in fresh clay**, roughly one part fresh to two or three parts old.
- **Chop and rest.** Grate or chop the hard clay finely, add a few drops of softener, seal it in a bag, and leave it a few days. The plasticiser redistributes on its own.
A block that has partially cured from heat exposure is genuinely finished. You will know because part of it stays hard and gritty no matter how long you knead. Use it chopped as filler inside larger pieces.
## A note on workspace, not storage
The same plastic compatibility rules apply to your working surface. A ceramic tile, a sheet of glass, or a piece of parchment on the desk are all safe, easy to clean, and can go straight into the oven with the piece still on them — which is also the least stressful way to move a finished sculpture without denting it.
## Setting up a workspace that does not cost you clay
Storage failures and workspace failures are the same failure, and a few choices remove both.
**Work on a ceramic tile.** Cheap, perfectly flat, immune to plasticiser, wipes clean in seconds, and it goes straight into the oven with the piece still on it — which means you never have to lift a finished raw sculpture and dent it.
**Keep colours apart.** Polymer clay picks up pigment from anything it touches, including your hands. Wipe your hands with rubbing alcohol or a baby wipe between colours, and always work light colours before dark ones.
**Have a scrap tin.** Offcuts eventually blend into a serviceable grey-brown that is ideal for armature cores and hidden interiors. Nothing needs throwing away.
**Label your blends.** Flatten custom colours into sheets, wrap in parchment, and write the ratio on the wrapper. Recreating an exact shade from memory is essentially impossible.
**Keep it out of the sun.** A windowsill in summer will part-cure a block and fade the colours, and part-cured clay is the only kind that cannot be revived.
## Where to go next
For getting the block workable again, [how to sculpt with polymer clay](/blog/how-to-sculpt-with-polymer-clay) covers conditioning properly. When it comes to curing, [baking polymer clay without burning](/blog/baking-polymer-clay-without-burning) is the post to read. And if you are still choosing a material, see [is modeling clay the same as polymer clay](/blog/modeling-clay-vs-polymer-clay).
---
# How to Sculpt With Polymer Clay: A Working Method
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/how-to-sculpt-with-polymer-clay
Published: 2026-07-22
Category: Polymer clay
Tags: Polymer clay, Sculpting, Technique
Summary: Condition the clay thoroughly, build over a foil armature to keep the walls thin, work from large forms down to detail, bake in stages for complex pieces, and support overhangs during baking.
Polymer clay behaves nothing like ceramic clay. It never dries, so there is no leather-hard stage and no rush. It stays exactly as soft as your hands make it, which means the real constraints are gravity, thickness and heat rather than moisture.
> **From the studio:** Baking in stages changed what I could attempt more than any tool ever did. Once the body is cured you can lean on it, press against it, and add detail without flattening what is underneath — which is impossible on a raw figure.
## 1. Condition every block properly
Straight from the packet, polymer clay is stiff and its particles are not evenly distributed. Conditioning fixes both, and skipping it produces sculptures that crack and snap after baking.
By hand: knead, roll into a snake, fold, and repeat for five to ten minutes until the clay is uniformly soft and stretches before it tears.
With a pasta machine: run it through on the thickest setting, fold, and pass it through again — twenty times, folding the same way each pass so you do not trap air.
You know it is conditioned when a strip stretches and thins before breaking rather than snapping cleanly.
## 2. Build an armature
Anything bigger than a large coin should be built over a core, for three reasons: thick clay cures unevenly, thick clay cracks, and clay is expensive.
**Aluminium foil** is the standard core. Crush it into the rough mass of your form, squeezing hard so it is dense — a loose core moves under your fingers while you work. Aim to leave 5 to 10 mm of clay over the surface.
**Wire** for limbs and anything with a thin projection. Aluminium [armature](/blog/how-to-make-clay-figures) wire bends easily and holds. Wrap wire with a little foil or masking tape to give the clay something to grip.
Both survive baking without issue. Do not use anything with trapped air pockets or moisture inside, since both expand in the oven.
## 3. Work from large to small
The order that produces good sculpture is always the same: the big masses first, proportions and gesture second, surface detail last.
- Block in the primary forms as simple shapes — a sphere for a head, a tapered cylinder for a torso.
- Check proportions from several angles before adding anything.
- Refine the secondary forms: brow ridges, muscle groups, folds of cloth.
- Only then add detail: eyelids, texture, fine lines.
The temptation is always to start carving eyelashes into a head that is still the wrong shape. Resist it, because you will lose the detail when you fix the underlying form.
**Rest the clay if it gets too soft.** Warm hands make clay sticky and unresponsive. Put the piece down for ten minutes, or in the fridge for five, and it firms up enough to take detail.
## 4. Join pieces properly
Fresh clay bonds to fresh clay under pressure. Press firmly and blend the seam with a tool rather than just butting the pieces together.
To attach to **already-[baked](/blog/baking-polymer-clay-without-burning)** clay, use liquid polymer clay (bake-and-bond) as a glue. It cures into the same material and forms a genuine bond. Raw clay pressed onto cured clay without it will hold for a while and then pop off.
## 5. Smooth it
- **Rubbing alcohol** on a soft brush dissolves the very surface and removes fingerprints and tool marks. This is the single most useful smoothing trick, and it takes seconds.
- **Silicone shapers** push clay without leaving the fine ridges a metal tool leaves.
- **Cornstarch** on a brush stops tools sticking during detailing, and brushes off before baking.
- Anything still imperfect can be sanded after baking with wet sandpaper from 400 up to 1500 grit.
## 6. Bake it correctly
Follow the brand's temperature, which varies from about 110 °C to 150 °C, and bake for **at least 30 minutes per 6 mm of thickness**. Underbaking is the leading cause of brittle sculptures, and extra time at the right temperature is harmless.
Two things that prevent most baking failures:
- **Use an oven thermometer.** Domestic ovens swing 20 to 40 °C around the dial setting, and scorching starts near 175 °C.
- **Tent the piece with foil.** This blocks direct radiant heat from the element, which is what browns edges and thin points while the middle is still curing.
**Support overhangs.** Polymer clay softens slightly before it cures, so an outstretched arm droops. Bed the piece in polyester fibrefill, cornstarch or a nest of crumpled foil while it bakes.
## 7. Bake in stages for complex work
This is the technique that unlocks ambitious sculpture. Build and cure the base form, then add the next layer of detail on top of a rigid, non-deformable object and bake again. You can lean on a cured piece; you cannot lean on a raw one.
For a figure: bake the body, then add the head; bake, then add clothing folds; bake, then add fine surface detail. Each stage sits on a solid foundation.
## 8. Finish
Let it cool completely before judging it — hot polymer clay is flexible and disappointingly soft, and reaches full strength only when cool.
Then sand if needed, buff on a soft cloth for a natural sheen, or apply a **polymer-compatible** varnish. Nail polish and generic craft varnishes react with the plasticiser and can stay tacky for years.
## Where to go next
The curing step has its own failure modes — see [baking polymer clay without burning](/blog/baking-polymer-clay-without-burning). For general sculpting method that applies in any material, read [how to sculpt with clay](/blog/how-to-sculpt-with-clay). And [how to store polymer clay](/blog/how-to-store-polymer-clay) keeps the rest of the block usable.
---
# Is Modeling Clay the Same as Polymer Clay?
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/modeling-clay-vs-polymer-clay
Published: 2026-07-20
Category: Modelling clay
Tags: Polymer clay, Modelling clay, Beginners, Materials
Summary: Polymer clay is one specific type of modelling clay that hardens permanently when baked. Plasticine never hardens at all, and air-dry clay hardens in air but stays fragile and water-soluble.
"Modelling clay" is a category, not a material. It covers at least four different substances that share only the property of being soft enough to shape by hand — and they behave completely differently.
> **From the studio:** The mistake I see most often is someone buying a tub labelled only modelling clay, spending a weekend on a figure, and then discovering it will never harden. That tub is almost always plasticine, and the packet will say non-hardening somewhere in small print.
Polymer clay is one member of that category. The confusion is understandable, because shops shelve them together.
## The four materials
### Polymer clay
**What it is**: PVC particles suspended in liquid plasticiser. Not clay in the geological sense at all — there is no clay mineral in it.
**How it sets**: [baked](/blog/baking-polymer-clay-without-burning) in a domestic oven at 110 to 150 °C depending on brand, for at least 30 minutes per 6 mm of thickness. The particles fuse into a solid, slightly flexible plastic.
**Stays workable**: indefinitely. It contains no water, so it cannot dry out on the table.
**Best for**: jewellery, miniatures, figurines, beads, canework — anything small, detailed and meant to last.
**Brands**: Sculpey, Fimo, Premo, Cernit, Kato.
### Oil-based modelling clay (plasticine)
**What it is**: clay or chalk powder bound with oils and waxes.
**How it sets**: it does not. Ever. It stays soft permanently, softening further when warm and stiffening when cold.
**Best for**: animation, prototyping, practising form, mould-making masters, and anything you intend to reuse. Professional versions such as Monster Clay, Chavant and Plastilina are the industry standard for sculpting film props and character models.
**Cannot be**: baked, fired, or kept as a finished object. It will slump on a warm day.
### Air-dry clay
**What it is**: usually real clay minerals plus cellulose fibre and a binder, though some are entirely synthetic.
**How it sets**: evaporation, over 24 hours to a week depending on thickness.
**Best for**: school projects, decorative pieces, cheap practice, large lightweight forms.
**Limitations**: never fully waterproof, structurally weak, and it shrinks as it dries so thick pieces crack. Sealing with acrylic varnish helps, but it is never food safe or dishwasher safe.
### Ceramic (pottery) clay
**What it is**: actual clay minerals and water, the material pottery is made from.
**How it sets**: dried, then fired in a kiln at 1000 °C or more. Below that it is not permanent — an unfired pot dissolves in water.
**Best for**: functional pottery, real ceramics, anything that has to hold liquid or go in a dishwasher.
## Quick comparison
| | Polymer | Plasticine | Air-dry | Ceramic |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Hardens | In the oven | Never | In air | In a kiln |
| Waterproof when set | Yes | n/a | No | Yes, when glazed |
| Reusable | No, once baked | Yes, forever | No, once dry | Yes, until fired |
| Detail held | Excellent | Excellent | Moderate | Good |
| Strength when set | Good, slightly flexible | n/a | Poor, brittle | Excellent |
| Food safe | No | No | No | Yes, when properly glazed and fired |
| Needs equipment | Domestic oven | None | None | Kiln |
## How to tell what you have bought
Read the packet, not the shelf label.
- Mentions a **baking temperature** in °C or °F, and a brand like Sculpey or Fimo → polymer clay.
- Says **non-hardening**, **reusable** or **oil-based** → plasticine.
- Says **air-dry**, **self-hardening** or **no firing needed** → [air-dry clay](/blog/air-dry-clay-cracking).
- States a **cone number** or a temperature above 1000 °C → pottery clay.
The dangerous ambiguity is a craft shop tub labelled only "modelling clay" with no further information. That is most often plasticine, which means nothing you make with it can be kept.
## Choosing
- **Something to keep, small, detailed** → polymer clay.
- **Practising sculpture, or working out a form you will remake** → oil-based clay.
- **A school project, or something big and cheap** → air-dry clay.
- **A mug you will actually drink from** → pottery clay, and access to a kiln.
The mistake to avoid is buying air-dry clay expecting pottery. It looks and feels similar in the packet, and it will never hold water or survive a dishwasher.
## What each one costs, and how far it goes
Price per block hides how differently these materials are used, so it is worth thinking in terms of what you actually get.
**Polymer clay** is the dearest by weight and the cheapest by object, because most pieces are small and built over a foil core. A single 350 g block makes a surprising number of miniatures. It also never expires, so nothing is wasted.
**Oil-based clay** looks expensive until you realise you are buying it once. The same block gets reused indefinitely, which makes it the cheapest material in the list over any period longer than a few months.
**Air-dry clay** is cheap per kilo and consumed permanently. It suits large decorative pieces and anything a child will make and keep.
**Ceramic clay** is by far the cheapest per kilo, and the firing is what costs money — usually several times the value of the clay in the piece.
So the honest way to choose is not by price per packet. Ask whether the material is consumed or reused, and whether it needs a kiln, and the economics fall out of that. A sculptor practising heads every week spends less on oil clay in a year than on two months of air-dry clay.
## Where to go next
If it turns out you have polymer clay, [baking polymer clay without burning](/blog/baking-polymer-clay-without-burning) is next. If it is air-dry, [why air-dry clay cracks](/blog/air-dry-clay-cracking) will save you a piece or two. And if you have plasticine and need something permanent, [how to harden modelling clay](/blog/how-to-harden-modelling-clay) explains the mould-and-cast route.
---
# How to Harden Modelling Clay (It Depends Which Kind You Have)
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/how-to-harden-modelling-clay
Published: 2026-07-18
Category: Modelling clay
Tags: Modelling clay, Polymer clay, Air-dry clay, Beginners
Summary: Polymer clay hardens by baking at 110 to 150 °C. Air-dry clay hardens by evaporation over one to three days. Oil-based plasticine never hardens — no oven, freezer or varnish will change that.
Before anything else: **work out which material you actually have.** The three common types harden by completely different mechanisms, and one of them does not harden at all.
> **From the studio:** Almost every brittle polymer piece I have been shown was underbaked rather than overbaked, and the give-away is a clean chalky break. Rebaking those pieces for a proper hour at the right temperature fixes most of them, which surprises people every time.
- Packet mentions an **oven temperature** and a brand like Fimo or Sculpey → polymer clay.
- Packet says **air-dry** or **self-hardening** → air-dry clay.
- Packet says **non-hardening**, **reusable**, or **oil-based**, or gives no instructions at all → plasticine, and it will never harden.
## Polymer clay: bake it
Polymer clay cures when the PVC particles fuse, which happens at a specific temperature.
**Temperature**: follow the brand. Fimo Professional is around 110 °C, Sculpey III and Premo around 130 °C, Kato around 150 °C. Going hotter does not speed it up; it scorches the surface.
**Time**: at least **30 minutes per 6 mm of thickness**, measured at the thickest point. The 15 minutes some packets suggest is a bare minimum and produces weak results. An hour at the right temperature does no harm at all.
**Two things that fix most problems**:
1. **Use an oven thermometer.** Domestic ovens swing 20 to 40 °C around the dial, and scorching begins near 175 °C. Set the dial by what the thermometer reads, not what the knob says.
2. **[Tent the piece](/blog/baking-polymer-clay-without-burning) with foil.** This blocks the direct radiant heat from the element that browns edges while the centre is still curing.
Bake on a ceramic tile with a sheet of paper on top, on the middle rack. Let the piece cool completely before judging it — polymer clay is soft and flexible while hot and reaches full strength only when cool.
If it snaps easily and the break looks chalky, it was underbaked. Rebake it. Extra curing is not a problem.
## Air-dry clay: let it evaporate, slowly
Air-dry clay hardens as water leaves. You cannot rush this without cracking the piece.
**Timing**: 24 to 72 hours for work under 1 cm thick, up to a week for thicker or hollow-built pieces. It is dry when it feels the same temperature as the room against your cheek rather than cool.
**The technique that prevents cracks**: tent the piece loosely with a plastic bag for the first 24 hours, then uncover it. Cracking happens when the outside shrinks before the inside does, and slowing the first day lets the core catch up.
**Also**:
- Keep walls under about 1 cm, and hollow anything thicker over a foil core.
- Dry on a wire rack or a piece of drywall, not on a plastic table, so the base loses water too.
- Turn the piece once a day.
- Keep it away from radiators, direct sun and fans. Heat dries the surface only.
**To make it stronger and water-resistant**, seal it once fully dry with several thin coats of acrylic varnish, acrylic medium or diluted PVA, covering every surface including the base. It will still never be waterproof or food safe.
## Oil-based clay: it will not harden
Plasticine, Monster Clay, Chavant and similar professional oil clays contain no water and no curing polymer. They are designed to stay workable indefinitely, which is exactly why animators and prop sculptors use them.
Nothing changes this. The oven softens them into a mess. The freezer firms them temporarily and they soften again at room temperature. Varnish sits on the surface and traps soft clay underneath.
If you have made something in oil clay and need it permanently:
- **Take a mould.** Silicone rubber over the sculpture, then cast the mould in resin, plaster or wax. This is the professional route and the reason oil clay is used in the first place.
- **Remake it** in polymer clay, using the oil clay version as a reference.
## Ceramic clay: it needs a kiln
Pottery clay hardens permanently only above about 1000 °C. Drying it in air produces a piece that looks finished and dissolves in water, and a domestic oven, which tops out near 250 °C, does not come close.
Without a [kiln](/blog/firing-clay-without-a-kiln), either pay a studio to fire the work, or use air-dry or polymer clay for anything that has to survive as it is.
## How to tell when each one is genuinely done
Guessing is what produces brittle polymer pieces and cracked air-dry ones, and each material has a reliable test.
**Polymer clay.** Let it cool completely first — hot polymer clay is soft and flexible and tells you nothing. Once cool, press a fingernail into a hidden area: properly cured clay resists and leaves at most a faint mark. Try to flex a thin edge. Cured clay bends slightly before it breaks; underbaked clay snaps cleanly with a chalky, matt break face. Anything that fails these can simply be rebaked.
**Air-dry clay.** Hold it against your cheek. Damp clay feels distinctly cool, because evaporation is still pulling heat out of it. Bone dry clay feels the same temperature as the room. The colour is also a guide: it lightens noticeably and evenly as it dries, and any darker patch is still holding water.
**Oil-based clay.** There is nothing to test, because it never sets. If it feels firm, the room is cold.
In all three cases, the mistake is judging too early. Give a piece an extra day, or an extra twenty minutes of cooling, before you decide it has failed.
## Where to go next
For the oven detail, see [baking polymer clay without burning](/blog/baking-polymer-clay-without-burning). For air-dry work, [why air-dry clay cracks](/blog/air-dry-clay-cracking) covers drying without splitting the piece. And if you have real pottery clay, [firing clay without a kiln](/blog/firing-clay-without-a-kiln) sets out the honest options.
---
# How to Make Modelling Clay at Home: Three Recipes That Work
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/how-to-make-modelling-clay-at-home
Published: 2026-07-16
Category: Modelling clay
Tags: Modelling clay, Beginners, Technique
Summary: Salt dough is cheapest and coarsest, cornstarch clay is smooth and white and needs no cooking, and cold porcelain is the finest but needs PVA and heat. None of them is pottery clay.
Homemade modelling clay is genuinely useful for children, for quick decorative pieces and for practising form. It is not pottery clay and it will never behave like it — there are no clay minerals in any of these recipes, so nothing here can be fired.
> **From the studio:** Cold porcelain caught me out with its shrinkage the first time — I made a set of flowers to a careful size and they came out noticeably smaller and slightly warped. Now I make everything about a fifth larger than I want it to end up.
With that clear, three recipes, from coarsest to finest.
## 1. Salt dough — cheapest, best for children
**Ingredients**
- 2 cups plain flour
- 1 cup fine salt
- 1 cup water, roughly
**Method**
1. Mix the flour and salt thoroughly in a bowl.
2. Add water a little at a time, mixing as you go, until it comes together as a firm dough. Add water sparingly — it goes sticky fast.
3. Knead on a floured surface for five minutes. It should be smooth and elastic and not stick to your hands.
4. Use immediately, or wrap airtight and refrigerate for up to a week.
**Drying**: air dry for one to three days depending on thickness, or oven dry at about 100 °C for two to three hours. Low and slow is essential; a hot oven puffs and browns it.
**Good for**: ornaments, handprints, keepsakes, anything a child makes in an afternoon.
**Not good for**: fine detail, anything thick, or anywhere damp. Salt dough absorbs moisture from the air and will soften or grow mould if unsealed. Seal both sides with [acrylic varnish](/blog/how-to-harden-modelling-clay).
## 2. Cornstarch clay — smooth, white, no cooking
**Ingredients**
- 1 cup cornstarch (cornflour)
- 1 cup bicarbonate of soda
- 3/4 cup water
**Method**
1. Combine everything in a saucepan over medium heat.
2. Stir constantly. It will look like thin milk for a minute or two, then thicken suddenly into something like mashed potato. That transition happens fast — keep stirring.
3. Remove from the heat as soon as it holds together in a mass.
4. Turn out onto a plate, cover with a damp cloth, and let it cool to handling temperature.
5. Knead until completely smooth.
**Drying**: 24 to 48 hours in air for thin pieces.
**Good for**: smooth white ornaments, stamped decorations, pieces you want to paint. It takes fine impressions well and dries a clean bright white.
**Not good for**: anything structural. It is brittle when dry and cracks if pieces are thick or dried too fast.
## 3. Cold porcelain — the finest finish
**Ingredients**
- 1 cup cornstarch
- 1 cup white PVA glue
- 2 tablespoons baby oil or mineral oil
- 1 tablespoon lemon juice or white vinegar (a preservative)
**Method**
1. Mix everything in a non-stick pan over low heat.
2. Stir constantly until it thickens and pulls away from the sides in a single lump. This takes several minutes and there is no shortcut.
3. Turn out onto a surface greased with a little oil, cover with a damp cloth, and cool until you can handle it.
4. Knead for five to ten minutes with oiled hands until it is silky and elastic.
5. Store wrapped in cling film inside an airtight container. It keeps for weeks.
**Drying**: 24 hours to several days. It shrinks noticeably as it dries — around 10 to 20 percent — so make pieces slightly larger than the final size you want.
**Good for**: flowers, delicate ornaments, fine detail. It dries hard, semi-translucent and takes a lovely finish. Colour it by kneading in a little acrylic paint or oil paint while it is soft.
**Not good for**: thick pieces, which crack, and anything that will be handled roughly.
## Colouring and finishing
Colour by kneading in acrylic paint, food colouring or powdered pigment while the clay is soft — the colour goes right through, so chips do not show white.
Once fully dry, sand lightly with fine paper and seal with two or three thin coats of acrylic varnish, including the underside. Sealing is what determines whether the piece survives a year or a decade.
## What none of these can do
They cannot hold water, they are not food safe, they cannot go in a dishwasher, and they cannot be fired. [Kilns reach 1000](/blog/firing-clay-without-a-kiln) °C and above, which would simply carbonise flour, salt and glue.
If you want something that genuinely holds liquid, you need real ceramic clay and access to a kiln, or a commercially made air-dry clay sealed thoroughly — and even then, sealed air-dry clay is decorative rather than functional.
## Working with the homemade versions
These recipes handle differently from shop-bought clay, and a few habits make them much more pleasant.
**Keep your hands and tools lightly oiled** for cold porcelain, and lightly floured for salt dough. Both stick otherwise.
**Work small.** All three recipes are weakest in thick sections, so build over a foil core for anything more than a couple of centimetres thick.
**Roll between guide sticks.** Two strips of wood of equal thickness either side of the clay give you an even slab every time, which matters more here than with pottery clay because these recipes crack readily at thickness changes.
**Join with water, not slip.** A damp brush along both faces and firm pressure is enough for salt dough and cornstarch clay. For cold porcelain, a smear of PVA works better.
**Store the excess airtight.** Cold porcelain keeps for weeks wrapped in cling film inside a sealed box. Salt dough keeps about a week in the fridge. Cornstarch clay dries fastest and is best made in the quantity you will use that day.
**Dry slowly**, tented for the first day, exactly as with any air-dry material.
## Where to go next
For hardening and sealing whatever you make, see [how to harden modelling clay](/blog/how-to-harden-modelling-clay). If you want something more durable, [is modeling clay the same as polymer clay](/blog/modeling-clay-vs-polymer-clay) compares the shop-bought options. And [firing clay without a kiln](/blog/firing-clay-without-a-kiln) explains why none of these can be fired.
---
# Drying Pots Evenly: The Step That Decides If They Survive
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/drying-pots-evenly
Published: 2026-07-15
Category: Troubleshooting
Tags: Troubleshooting, Pottery basics, Firing, Wheel throwing
Summary: Wrap loosely for the first day, dry on a porous board, keep thin parts covered, and give every piece the same environment. Slow, even drying prevents nearly all cracking.
If you make ten pots and three crack, the drying stage is where it happened. Throwing and firing get the blame because that is when you notice, but a crack in the bisque was almost always initiated by a moisture gradient days earlier.
> **From the studio:** I lost four large platters in a row to warping before I noticed the studio door was directly in line with my drying shelf. One side of every piece was drying in a draught. Moving the shelf two metres solved a problem I had spent a month blaming on my throwing.
## The mechanism, once more
Clay shrinks as it loses water — around 5–8% from wet to [bone dry](/blog/clay-stages-leather-hard-bone-dry), then another 5–7% in the firing. If one part of a piece reaches its dry size before an adjacent part does, the drier part is in tension. Clay's tensile strength is negligible. It tears.
Everything below is a way of making the whole piece dry at once.
## Where uneven drying comes from
**Airflow.** The side facing the open room dries far faster than the side facing the wall. A draught from a door or a window is the classic cause of a one-sided warp.
**Thickness.** A thick base under thin walls dries slowest and finishes last, pulling against walls that already shrank.
**The surface it sits on.** A pot on a nonporous table dries everywhere but the base. On plaster or drywall the base dries with everything else.
**Attachments.** Handles, spouts, lugs and rims are thin and exposed. They finish long before the body.
## The routine that works
1. **Compress everything as you make it.** Ribs on walls, a firm rib on the floor of thrown pots, a wet finger on rims. [Compression](/blog/centering-clay-on-the-wheel) is drying insurance you buy in advance.
2. **Cover loosely for the first 24 hours.** A dry-cleaning bag, a plastic sheet, or a damp box. Not sealed — you want slow drying, not zero drying.
3. **Dry on a porous board.** Plaster bats, drywall offcuts or bare wood all draw water from the base. Never leave a pot on a plastic or metal shelf.
4. **Cover thin parts selectively.** Small strips of plastic or foil over handles and rims hold them back so the body can catch up. This trick alone fixes most handle cracks.
5. **Turn pots upside down at leather-hard.** Once the pot is stiff enough to sit on its rim safely, invert it. The base gets air and the rim, which is well ahead, gets slowed.
6. **Give everything the same environment.** Not one shelf by the radiator and one by the window.
7. **Wait for bone dry, then wait one more day.** Especially with large or thick work.
## Reading the cracks
| Crack | Where | Cause |
| --- | --- | --- |
| S or line across the base | Thrown pots | Uncompressed floor plus slow-drying base |
| Rim crack, straight down | Any | Rim dried far ahead of the wall |
| Crack around a handle | Mugs | Moisture mismatch at the join |
| Warped oval rim | Thrown pots | Draught on one side, or lifted off the bat while soft |
| Flat pieces curling | Tiles, slabs | Top face drying faster than the face on the board |
| Crack through the wall thickness | Large forms | Thickness variation across the wall |
Tiles deserve a note of their own: they are the hardest thing to dry flat. Sandwich them between two boards with a sheet of newspaper on each face, add a light weight, and flip the stack daily. Anything less and they potato-chip.
## Slow candling makes up for a lot
If a piece is important, or big, or you are not certain it is dry, start the bisque with the kiln held at 90–100 °C for three to six hours with the lid propped or the vents open. That drives off the last free water gently, below the temperature where steam pressure can do damage. It costs a little electricity and saves work you cannot replace.
## Building a drying setup that works
Most studios solve this with three cheap things rather than any equipment.
**Drywall offcuts.** A builder's merchant will sell you a sheet for very little, and a saw turns it into a stack of bats. Drywall draws moisture out of the base at roughly the rate air pulls it from the sides, which is exactly the balance you want. Wooden boards work almost as well.
**A dry-cleaning bag or a plastic sheet.** Not sealed around the pot, just draped over the shelf. This is the single most useful item in the list, because it slows the first day without stopping the drying.
**A damp box.** A plastic storage box with 3 cm of plaster set in the bottom, kept slightly wet. Work put inside holds its moisture for days, and a piece that has stiffened too far comes back down overnight. If you cannot make one, a sealed box with a damp cloth inside — not touching the clay — is close enough.
Arrange the shelf away from doors, windows and radiators, and give every piece the same conditions. The most common cause of a warped rim I see is one shelf getting a draught the potter never noticed, which is worth checking before you blame anything you did at the wheel.
## Where to go next
Cracks that appear around attachments are join problems rather than drying problems — see [score and slip joins](/blog/score-and-slip-joins). To place your piece correctly on the stage timeline, read [the stages of clay](/blog/clay-stages-leather-hard-bone-dry). And if you are working in air-dry clay rather than pottery clay, [why air-dry clay cracks](/blog/air-dry-clay-cracking) covers the same physics with different materials.
---
# How to Store Air-Dry Clay Once Opened
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/how-to-store-air-dry-clay
Published: 2026-07-14
Category: Air-dry clay
Tags: Air-dry clay, Beginners, Technique
Summary: Wrap the block tightly in cling film or its original plastic, put it in an airtight container with a damp sponge that does not touch the clay, and keep it somewhere cool. Rehydrate stiff clay by kneading in water.
Air-dry clay is real clay plus a binder, held together by water. From the moment the packet is opened, water starts leaving — and unlike polymer clay, which never dries, this is a race you are always slightly losing.
> **From the studio:** Spraying a stiff block and using it straight away is the mistake I made for a year. You get a wet skin over a dry core, and everything built from it cracks two days later. Breaking it up and letting it sit in a sealed bag overnight works properly and takes no effort at all.
Good storage is about eliminating air contact, not about adding water.
## The method that works
**1. Reshape the block.** Squash the remaining clay into a single compact lump with no folds or [cracks](/blog/air-dry-clay-cracking). A ball with a smooth surface has far less exposed area than a torn, ragged offcut.
**2. Wrap it tightly.** Cling film pressed directly against every surface, or the original plastic packaging if it is intact, taped closed. The enemy is trapped air, so press the wrapping down onto the clay rather than leaving a pocket.
**3. Bag it.** A resealable freezer bag with the air squeezed out, or a second layer of cling film.
**4. Box it.** An airtight plastic container with a proper seal. This third layer is what turns "a few weeks" into "several months".
**5. Add a damp sponge — not touching the clay.** A small damp (not dripping) sponge in the corner of the box keeps the internal air humid. It must not touch the clay, or you will get a soggy patch and a stiff remainder.
**6. Keep it cool.** A cupboard or a shelf away from radiators and sunlight. Warmth accelerates evaporation through any gap in the wrapping.
## Storing work in progress
An unfinished piece is more vulnerable than a block, because it has more surface area and thin sections that dry fastest.
- Cover the whole piece loosely with a plastic bag, or spray a light mist and bag it.
- Wrap thin sections — arms, handles, rims — in individual strips of plastic or foil, so they do not race ahead of the body.
- If you will be away for more than a few days, put the bagged piece inside a box with a damp sponge.
A piece that stiffens unevenly is much harder to work with than one that is uniformly firm, so it is worth the extra minute.
## Reviving clay that has stiffened
**Slightly stiff but still bendable**: wet your hands and [wedge](/blog/wedging-clay-properly) it. Repeat a few times. Five minutes usually recovers it.
**Firm and cracking**: break it into pieces the size of a walnut, put them in a bag, sprinkle water over them, seal, and leave for 24 hours. The water redistributes through the mass. Then wedge thoroughly.
**Bone dry and crumbly**: break it small, cover with water in a tub, and leave it to slake down for a day. Pour off excess water and spread the sludge on a plaster bat, a board or a stack of newspaper until it stiffens to a workable consistency, then wedge.
Rehydrated air-dry clay is usually a bit less pleasant than fresh — repeated cycles wash out some binder, leaving it short and crumbly. Kneading in a few drops of PVA glue restores much of the working feel and does not affect the finished result.
## What not to do
**Do not spray a stiff block and use it immediately.** You get a wet skin over a dry core, which is exactly the moisture gradient that cracks pieces as they dry.
**Do not store it in a paper bag or cardboard box alone.** Both draw moisture out of clay.
**Do not leave it in the car, on a windowsill or near a radiator.** Heat plus any imperfection in the wrapping empties a block quickly.
**Do not freeze it.** Freezing does not preserve air-dry clay usefully, and thawing leaves the water distributed unevenly through the block.
## When a block is genuinely finished
Air-dry clay that has dried and been revived several times eventually loses too much binder to hold together well. You will notice it tearing rather than stretching, and cracking at every bend.
That clay is still useful. Slake it down thin, sieve it, and keep it as a slip for filling cracks and joining pieces — where the lack of plasticity does not matter at all.
## Storing tools, slip and work in the same space
Storage problems in air-dry clay rarely stop at the block.
**Slip and joining paste.** Keep a small sealed jar of slip made from the same clay. It dries out faster than the block because of the surface area, so a screw-top jar rather than a tub is worth it. If it separates, stir it back together; if it grows a skin, sieve it.
**Tools.** Wipe them before the clay dries on. Dried air-dry clay on a metal tool is harder to remove than pottery clay, because the binder acts like a weak glue.
**Unfinished work.** Wrap the whole piece loosely and add a strip of plastic over any thin part — handles, arms, rims — so they do not race ahead of the body. A piece that stiffens unevenly is much harder to finish than one that is uniformly firm.
**Offcuts.** Keep one tub for scraps. When it fills, cover the scraps with water, let them slake down, and dry the sludge back on a board. That reclaim is perfectly usable for interiors, armature filling and repairs, even if it is a little short for detailed work.
## Where to go next
If pieces are cracking as they dry, [why air-dry clay cracks](/blog/air-dry-clay-cracking) covers the causes in full. For getting revived clay back to a usable state, see [wedging clay properly](/blog/wedging-clay-properly). And [how to harden modelling clay](/blog/how-to-harden-modelling-clay) explains sealing once the piece is finished.
---
# How to Use Foam Clay: Working Time, Drying and Finishing
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/how-to-use-foam-clay
Published: 2026-07-12
Category: Modelling clay
Tags: Modelling clay, Technique, Beginners
Summary: Work it in thin layers on a firm base, smooth with a wet finger or tool, and let it dry 24 to 48 hours per layer. It dries light and slightly spongy, sands easily, and needs a flexible sealer before paint.
Foam clay is an [air-dry](/blog/how-to-store-air-dry-clay) modelling material filled with tiny lightweight beads. It dries to a firm, springy, closed-cell foam rather than a hard brittle shell, which makes it the standard filler and sculpting material for cosplay armour, props and large costume pieces.
> **From the studio:** I ruined a pauldron by rushing a 15 mm layer in one go. The outside skinned over in an hour and the inside was still soft a week later, and it dented under a thumb every time I picked it up. Three thin layers over three days would have been faster in the end.
It behaves differently enough from ordinary air-dry clay that the usual habits do not transfer.
## What it is good at
- **Filling gaps** between EVA foam pieces, so seams disappear.
- **Sculpting detail** onto a foam base — ornament, scrollwork, gems, texture.
- **Building lightweight volume**. A helmet crest in foam clay weighs almost nothing.
- **Taking a smooth finish** with far less work than filler and [sanding](/blog/how-to-harden-modelling-clay).
What it is not good at is structural work. It is a surface and detail material, and it needs something underneath.
## Preparing the base
Foam clay grips clean, slightly textured surfaces. On EVA foam, scuff the area lightly with sandpaper and wipe off the dust. On smooth plastic or already-sealed surfaces, apply a thin layer of contact adhesive or PVA and let it go tacky first.
Do not apply it over an unsealed surface that will off-gas or flex heavily, and do not expect it to bridge a gap wider than a few millimetres without support.
## Applying it
**Work in thin layers.** 3 to 5 mm at a time. A thick blob dries with a hard skin over a soft, spongy core that never firms up properly and dents under a thumb weeks later.
**Wet your fingers and tools.** Foam clay is sticky, and water is the release agent. A bowl of water beside you and a damp fingertip does most of the smoothing.
**Smooth it as you go.** A wet silicone shaper, the back of a spoon or a damp finger gives a surface that needs almost no sanding. Time spent smoothing while it is wet is time saved sanding later.
**Work quickly on exposed clay.** It starts skinning within about 15 to 30 minutes, and once a skin has formed, blending a new addition into it is difficult. Keep the packet closed and take out only what you need.
**Build proud of the final shape.** It shrinks a few percent as it dries and can pull back from sharp corners. Add a little extra and sand it down.
## Drying
**24 to 48 hours per layer**, at room temperature. Thicker layers take longer, and a piece in a cold or humid room can take three days.
It is dry when it is **light, springy and room temperature to the touch**. Damp foam clay feels cool and dense. Press a fingernail into an inconspicuous area: dry foam clay resists and springs back, wet foam clay dents.
Do not force it with a heat gun or a hairdryer. As with any air-dry material, heating the surface while the core is wet produces cracks and a hard shell over a soft middle.
## Sanding and shaping
Once fully dry, foam clay sands beautifully — far more easily than most fillers.
- Start at **220 grit** for shaping, then 320 to 400 for smoothing.
- It removes fast, so check the form often and stop earlier than you think.
- It carves too, with a sharp craft knife, which is often faster than sanding for cutting a crisp edge.
- Small imperfections can be filled with a thin skim of fresh foam clay, dried and sanded again.
Wear a mask. The dust is fine and light and stays airborne for a long time.
## Sealing and painting
Dry foam clay is porous and slightly flexible, so it needs a **flexible sealer** before paint, or the paint will crack the first time the piece bends.
The standard approach is two to three thin coats of flexible PVA, wood glue thinned with water, or a plastic-dip style flexible primer, letting each dry fully. Then prime and paint as normal with acrylics.
Rigid sealers and hard primers look fine until the piece flexes, at which point they craze. On armour that moves with the body, flexibility matters more than hardness.
## Storage
Air is the enemy. Reseal the packet with the air pressed out, then put it in an airtight container. A small damp sponge in the box, not touching the clay, keeps the air humid and extends the life considerably.
If it has stiffened slightly, knead in a few drops of water. If it has dried into a solid lump, it is finished — unlike ordinary clay, the foam beads do not slake back down usefully.
## Making your own
Homemade versions blend PVA glue with fine polystyrene beads or micro-balloons until the mixture holds together. They work, they are noticeably coarser than the commercial product, and the bead size largely determines how smooth a finish you can reach. For large filling jobs where a fine surface does not matter, it is a substantial saving.
## Where to go next
Foam clay is an air-dry material, so [why air-dry clay cracks](/blog/air-dry-clay-cracking) explains the drying physics that applies to it too. For storing what you do not use, see [how to store air-dry clay](/blog/how-to-store-air-dry-clay). And if you are choosing between materials for a prop, [what clay is best for sculpting](/blog/best-clay-for-sculpting).
---
# How to Use Monster Clay: Melting, Sculpting and Moulding
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/how-to-use-monster-clay
Published: 2026-07-10
Category: Sculpting
Tags: Sculpting, Modelling clay, Technique
Summary: Warm it to soften, block in the large forms while it is soft, then let it cool to firm up for detail. It never hardens, so a finished sculpt is a mould master, not a finished object.
Monster Clay is a sulphur-free, oil and wax based sculpting clay used widely in special effects, prop making and character sculpture. Its defining property is that **heat, not water, controls how soft it is**. Warm it and it flows; let it cool and it firms up.
> **From the studio:** The first time I detailed a sculpt in a cold garage I could not work out why it suddenly felt so much easier. It was the temperature. Now I deliberately let a piece cool for twenty minutes before any fine work, and a fan does the job in summer.
That single fact reorganises how you work.
## Softening it
The clay arrives as a solid block that is genuinely hard at room temperature.
- **Microwave**, in short bursts of 15 to 20 seconds, kneading between each. Overheating produces liquid clay and a hot mess, and the outside melts long before the centre softens.
- **Crock pot or clay warmer**, on low. The professional method for larger quantities, and the only comfortable way to get a workable pool for building up big forms.
- **Heat gun or hairdryer**, for softening the working surface of a sculpt in place rather than the whole block.
- **Hands alone**, for small amounts. Body heat does soften it, slowly.
Melted clay poured into a form and left to set makes a good starting block for a bust. It is entirely reusable, and reheating does not degrade it.
## The warm-cool working rhythm
This is the technique that makes [oil clay](/blog/best-clay-for-sculpting) pleasant to work with:
- **Warm and soft** for blocking in large masses, roughing out proportions, and adding volume quickly.
- **Cool and firm** for detail, crisp edges, undercuts and fine texture.
So a sculpting session tends to move from warm to cool. If you need to add a lot of material to a cooled sculpt, warm just that area with a heat gun rather than reheating the whole thing.
Keeping the sculpture cool while detailing — a cold room, or a few minutes in front of a fan — makes fine work far easier.
## Armatures
Anything above small scale needs a support, because oil clay is heavy and will sag under its own weight over hours.
- **Aluminium wire** for figures and limbs.
- **Foil, foam or a turned wooden core** for busts and heads, to save weight and clay.
- **A sculpting stand or [armature](/blog/how-to-sculpt-with-clay) board** so you can turn the piece and work from every angle.
Bulk out as much interior volume as possible with the armature. Solid oil clay is expensive and unnecessarily heavy.
## Working method
Block in the largest forms first as simple geometric masses, then check silhouette and proportion from several angles before refining anything. Detail last, once the underlying form is right.
Useful tools: metal loop and rake tools for cutting back and shaping, silicone shapers for pushing and smoothing without leaving ridges, and simple wooden tools for blending.
Because the clay never dries, you can stop and resume indefinitely. A sculpture can sit for months and be picked up exactly where you left it — the reason it is preferred for long-running professional work.
## Smoothing
Three approaches, from gentlest to strongest:
1. **Gentle heat.** A hairdryer at a distance softens the very surface so tool marks flow out. Move constantly, or you will melt a hollow.
2. **Oil on a brush.** Mineral oil or baby oil, sparingly. Softens the surface and blends marks, and leaves a slight sheen.
3. **99 percent isopropyl alcohol on a soft brush.** Dissolves the surface briefly and evaporates fast, leaving the crispest finish. The standard for final smoothing.
Fingerprints are the main enemy on a finished sculpt, and alcohol removes them in seconds.
## It never hardens, and that is the point
Monster Clay is a **mould master**, not a finished object. To keep the sculpture you take a mould from it:
- **Silicone rubber** brushed or poured over the sculpt, supported by a plaster or fibreglass jacket for larger pieces, then cast in resin, plaster, foam latex or wax.
- Being sulphur-free matters here: sulphur inhibits the cure of platinum-based silicones, and a sulphur-bearing clay will leave you with a permanently tacky mould.
Once the mould is taken, the clay is scraped out, remelted, and used again. That reusability is a large part of why studios work this way.
## Storage
Wrap it or box it and keep it away from dust, since dust embeds in the surface and is difficult to remove. Keep it out of direct heat so it does not slump. It has no shelf life at all — oil clay from decades ago is still perfectly usable, which cannot be said of any water-based clay.
## Tools that suit oil clay
Oil-based clay responds to a different toolkit than water-based clay, mostly because you can cut it cleanly and it never dries on your tools.
**Metal rake and loop tools.** The workhorses. Rakes cut back a surface in controlled passes and leave a texture you can then smooth, which is far more accurate than pushing clay around with your thumbs.
**Silicone shapers.** Push and blend without leaving the fine ridges a metal tool leaves. Excellent for soft transitions.
**Wooden tools.** For blending and for pressing forms without scarring the surface.
**A knife or a scalpel.** Firm oil clay cuts like cheese, which makes crisp edges and undercuts straightforward — something water-based clay only allows briefly at leather-hard.
**A heat gun or hairdryer.** Effectively a tool in its own right, for softening a specific area rather than the whole piece.
**Isopropyl alcohol and a soft brush.** The finishing tool. It dissolves the very surface, removes fingerprints and evaporates in seconds.
Clean tools with a rag and a little mineral oil. Because nothing dries, tools left dirty for a month are no worse than tools left dirty for an hour.
## Where to go next
For the general method that applies whatever the material, read [how to sculpt with clay](/blog/how-to-sculpt-with-clay). To decide whether oil clay is the right choice at all, see [what clay is best for sculpting](/blog/best-clay-for-sculpting). And [what is a clay model in sculpture](/blog/what-is-a-clay-model-in-sculpture) explains where the mould fits in.
---
# What Clay Is Best for Sculpting? Matched to What You Are Making
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/best-clay-for-sculpting
Published: 2026-07-08
Category: Sculpting
Tags: Sculpting, Materials, Beginners, Clay bodies
Summary: There is no single best sculpting clay. Oil-based clay for anything you will mould or rework, polymer for small permanent detail, grogged ceramic clay for fired sculpture, air-dry for scale on a budget.
There is no best sculpting clay in the abstract. There is a best clay for a specific combination of scale, permanence, detail and equipment. Answer four questions and the choice makes itself.
> **From the studio:** The advice I give most often is to use one block of oil clay for a whole year. Removing the cost of every experiment, and the pressure of drying time, does more for a developing sculptor than any upgrade in material.
1. Does it need to survive as a finished object, or will it be moulded?
2. How big is it?
3. How much fine detail does it carry?
4. Do you have a kiln?
## Oil-based clay — the professional default
**Examples**: Monster Clay, Chavant NSP, Plastilina, Plasticine.
**Why it wins**: it never dries. There is no time pressure at all, so a sculpture can sit for months and be resumed exactly as it was. It holds fine detail, it is fully reusable, and heat controls its softness — warm to block in masses, cool to detail.
**The catch**: it never hardens. A finished sculpture is a **mould master**, not a finished object. To keep it you take a silicone mould and cast in resin, plaster or wax.
**Choose it for**: learning, portrait and figure work, prop and character sculpture, anything destined for casting, and anything you expect to rework repeatedly.
Buy sulphur-free if there is any chance of moulding it in platinum silicone, since sulphur inhibits the cure.
## Polymer clay — small, detailed, keepable
**Examples**: Sculpey, Fimo, Premo, Cernit.
**Why it wins**: it hardens permanently in a domestic oven, holds extremely fine detail, comes in every colour, and needs no kiln.
**The catch**: cost and scale. It is expensive by weight, and large pieces need a foil [armature](/blog/how-to-make-clay-figures) to keep walls thin, because thick sections cure unevenly and crack. Colour choices are permanent, and overbaking scorches.
**Choose it for**: figurines, miniatures, jewellery, doll heads, anything under about 15 cm that you want to keep as it is.
## Ceramic sculpture clay — fired, permanent, large
**Examples**: any heavily [grogged](/blog/what-is-grog-in-clay) stoneware or sculpture body.
**Why it wins**: fired ceramic sculpture lasts for millennia. Grogged bodies handle thick sections, uneven drying and large scale far better than throwing clay, and the surface can be glazed or left raw.
**The catch**: a kiln, and real discipline about hollowing. Every enclosed form must be pierced, walls should stay reasonably even, and drying must be slow. It also shrinks 10 to 14 percent from wet to fired, which matters if the piece must fit something.
**Choose it for**: garden and outdoor sculpture, gallery work, anything large and permanent — if you have kiln access.
Ask a supplier for a "sculpture body" or "handbuilding body" rather than a throwing clay. The extra grog is exactly what you want.
## Air-dry clay — cheap and large, structurally weak
**Why it wins**: no kiln, no oven, low cost, and you can work at scale without special equipment.
**The catch**: it is genuinely weak. It chips, it is never waterproof, and thick pieces crack as they dry. Detail is moderate at best.
**Choose it for**: school projects, practice at scale, lightweight decorative work over an armature, and anything where cost matters more than durability.
Build over a crumpled foil core, keep walls under 1 cm, and dry slowly under a loose plastic tent for the first day.
## Wax and epoxy putty — the specialists
**Sculpting wax** for jewellery, where the piece will be cast in metal by lost-wax casting. Carves crisply and takes exceptional detail.
**Epoxy putty** — Milliput, Green Stuff, Apoxie Sculpt — for miniatures, repairs and any small detail that needs to be rock hard and self-supporting. It cures chemically in a few hours, bonds to almost anything, and can be drilled and tapped. Working time is short, which is the whole discipline of using it.
## Quick answers
| You want to make | Use |
| --- | --- |
| A portrait bust to learn on | Oil-based clay, medium grade |
| A figurine to keep | Polymer clay over a foil armature |
| A garden sculpture | Grogged ceramic sculpture body, fired |
| A prop to mould and cast | Sulphur-free oil clay |
| A school project | Air-dry clay |
| A miniature or a repair | Epoxy putty |
| A ring or pendant to cast in silver | Carving wax |
## The advice under the advice
If you are learning to sculpt rather than trying to produce a specific object, use **oil-based clay** and reuse the same block for a year. Removing the pressure of drying time, and the cost of every experiment, is worth more to a developing sculptor than any property of a fancier material.
## What you actually need to buy alongside it
Material choice tends to dominate the conversation, and the supporting kit matters almost as much.
**A turntable.** A cheap lazy Susan is the highest-value purchase in sculpture, because it makes turning the piece effortless and turning is what keeps a sculpture coherent from every angle.
**Armature wire.** Aluminium, 2–3 mm for small figures. Cheap, bends by hand, holds its shape.
**Aluminium foil.** For bulking out interior volume. It saves clay, weight and curing problems all at once.
**Three tools, not thirty.** A wire loop for cutting back, a wooden or silicone tool for blending, and a knife. Large sets are mostly unused drawer filler.
**Callipers.** Even cheap plastic ones. Proportion errors are the difference between a sculpture that reads and one that does not, and callipers find them in seconds.
**A mirror.** Free, and it reverses the image so asymmetry your eye has learned to ignore becomes obvious instantly.
Total outlay is small, and none of it depends on which clay you chose.
## Where to go next
Once you have picked a material, [how to sculpt with clay](/blog/how-to-sculpt-with-clay) covers the working sequence. For oil clay specifically, see [how to use Monster Clay](/blog/how-to-use-monster-clay). And if you chose ceramic, [stoneware, porcelain or earthenware](/blog/stoneware-porcelain-earthenware) narrows the body down.
---
# What Is a Clay Model in Sculpture?
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/what-is-a-clay-model-in-sculpture
Published: 2026-07-06
Category: Sculpting
Tags: Sculpting, Materials, Pottery basics
Summary: In sculpture, the clay model is the artist's original. Because clay is not durable, it is moulded and the mould is used to cast the final piece in a permanent material.
In sculpture, a **clay model** is the original three-dimensional work the artist makes by hand in clay. It is the source object. Everything else — the mould, the bronze, the resin, the marble carved to its proportions — descends from it.
> **From the studio:** What surprised me most is how much of the sculptor's hand survives the translation. Fingerprints and tool marks in the clay come through in the bronze, which is why casts from clay originals look so different from machined or carved work.
The term covers a range of sizes and stages, and the distinctions matter in practice.
## The terms
**Sketch or bozzetto** — a very quick, small study, made in minutes to find a gesture or a composition. Often deliberately rough.
**Maquette** — a small finished model, typically 20 to 40 cm, made to test composition, proportion and silhouette before the full-size work. Presented to clients and committees to approve a design, and frequently a valued work in its own right.
**Full-size clay** — the finished original at final scale. This is the piece the sculptor actually resolves, and it is what gets moulded.
**[Armature](/blog/how-to-sculpt-with-clay)** — the internal skeleton of wood, metal pipe or wire that holds the clay up. For anything above small scale, the armature is engineering, not an afterthought: clay is heavy and will collapse under its own weight.
## Why clay
Clay is the only common sculptural material that is truly **additive and subtractive at once**. You can build up, cut back, and rework the same passage twenty times. Stone carving is one-way; welding is slow; casting cannot be done directly by hand.
Clay also holds the sculptor's touch. Fingerprints, tool marks and the pace of the modelling survive into the final bronze, which is why casts from clay originals look different from carved or machined work.
And it is cheap enough to experiment with, and — in the oil-based version professionals use — endlessly reusable.
## Which clay
**[Oil-based clay](/blog/how-to-use-monster-clay)** (Monster Clay, Chavant, Plastilina) is the professional standard for anything that will be cast. It never dries, so a piece can be worked over months, and it is fully recoverable afterwards. Its softness is controlled with heat.
**Water-based ceramic clay** is used where the clay original will itself be fired, and in academic study where the tradition runs that way. It must be kept damp under plastic between sessions and hollowed before firing.
**Wax** substitutes for small work destined for lost-wax metal casting.
## From clay to permanent material
The clay model is not the finished sculpture. Clay is fragile, and unfired clay is not durable at all. The route to permanence is moulding and casting:
1. **Mould the clay.** Traditionally, a **waste mould** of plaster is built over the clay, then broken away — destroying both mould and, usually, the clay original. Modern practice uses **silicone rubber** backed by a rigid plaster or fibreglass jacket, which survives and can produce multiple casts.
2. **Cast from the mould.** Plaster for study casts and exhibition pieces, resin for props and editions, or wax for the lost-wax process.
3. **For bronze**, the wax cast is chased by hand, invested in a ceramic shell, burned out, and filled with molten bronze. The bronze is then cut from its casting channels, welded together if cast in sections, chased and patinated.
Each step is a translation, and the sculptor's decisions in clay survive all of them.
## Pointing: clay to stone
Marble and stone sculpture also start in clay. A **pointing machine** — a mechanical measuring frame — transfers measurements from the clay or plaster model to a stone block, so the carver can remove material to precisely the right depth at hundreds of reference points.
This is why a carved marble portrait can match a clay model exactly. The clay is still the original; the stone is a copy made by removal rather than by pouring.
## Beyond fine art
The same principle runs through industry. Car manufacturers still sculpt full-size **clay models** of new vehicles over a foam and steel armature, because a physical surface reveals reflections, proportion and stance in a way a screen render does not. Animation studios sculpt character maquettes for reference. Product designers model in clay before committing to CAD.
In each case the logic is the same as the sculptor's: clay is the fastest way for a hand to find a three-dimensional form, and everything permanent is made from what the hand found.
## Why the clay original is usually destroyed
This surprises people, so it is worth explaining properly.
The traditional method is a **waste mould**. Plaster is built up over the finished clay in a shell, usually with a coloured first layer so the sculptor knows when they are getting close to the surface during removal. The clay is dug out, the mould is cast in plaster, and then the mould is chipped away from the cast — destroying itself in the process. One mould, one cast, and the clay is gone.
That sounds wasteful until you consider what it buys: extraordinarily faithful surface detail, no seam lines from a flexible mould, and no need for expensive rubber.
**Silicone moulding** changed this. A flexible rubber mould pulls off undercuts without destroying either the mould or the original, and it can produce an edition of casts. It is now standard for anything being reproduced more than once.
Either way, the clay itself is rarely kept. Oil-based clay is scraped out, remelted and used for the next piece — a sculptor might work through the same block for years. The clay was never the artwork; it was the means of arriving at it.
## Where to go next
For the working method behind the model, read [how to sculpt with clay](/blog/how-to-sculpt-with-clay). To choose the material, [what clay is best for sculpting](/blog/best-clay-for-sculpting). And [how to use Monster Clay](/blog/how-to-use-monster-clay) covers the oil clay that most of this work is made in.
---
# How to Make Clay Figures That Do Not Fall Over or Crack
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/how-to-make-clay-figures
Published: 2026-07-04
Category: Sculpting
Tags: Sculpting, Hand building, Beginners, Technique
Summary: Work from big shapes to small, support anything that projects, keep the mass low and the base wide, and hollow anything thicker than 2.5 cm. Attach limbs at matching stiffness or they crack off.
Small figures are the most popular thing people make from clay and the most likely to fail — usually in one of three ways: they topple, they crack while drying, or a limb falls off a week later. All three have straightforward fixes.
> **From the studio:** I once fired a small figure with a wire armature still inside it, on the theory that a thin wire could not do much harm. It expanded more than the clay did and split the figure from the inside. That is a mistake you make exactly once.
## Choose the material first
**Polymer clay** for small keepable figures with fine detail. Hardens in a domestic oven, holds detail beautifully, and needs a foil armature above a few centimetres.
**Air-dry clay** for cheap practice and larger decorative figures. Weak, so keep projections short and thick.
**Ceramic clay** for figures that will be fired. Use a grogged sculpture body, and **no wire armature** — wire does not burn out, it expands more than clay when heated, and it cracks the piece apart in the kiln. Support ceramic figures externally while you work, or build them hollow.
## Start with the big shapes
The order matters more than the tools:
1. **Block in the masses.** A sphere for the head, a tapered form for the torso, cylinders for limbs. Assemble the figure from these crude shapes and look at it.
2. **Fix the proportions now.** As a rough guide, a stylised figure reads well at five to six head-heights; a realistic adult is seven to seven and a half. Check the silhouette from the front, side and back before you refine anything.
3. **Refine secondary forms** — the wedge of the ribcage, the taper of a forearm, the fall of a garment.
4. **Detail last.** Faces, fingers, texture, surface pattern.
The universal beginner mistake is detailing a face on a head that is the wrong shape and the wrong size. That work is lost as soon as you fix the underlying form, so save it for last.
## Keep it standing
Small figures topple because the mass sits too high over a narrow base.
- **Widen the base.** Feet on a slab, a rock, a plinth. A base is not a cop-out; it is normal sculptural practice.
- **Keep the weight low.** Big heads and outstretched arms move the centre of gravity up and out. Bulk out the lower half.
- **Support it while you work.** A blob of scrap clay under an outstretched arm, or a wire prop for a polymer piece, holds the pose until it firms up.
- **Test it early**, before you have committed hours to the surface.
## Attaching limbs so they stay attached
For **ceramic clay**, this is the crack that ruins most figures:
1. **Match the stiffness.** Both the limb and the body must be at the same leather-hard stage. A fresh soft arm on a firm body will shrink more as it dries and pull itself off.
2. **[Score](/blog/score-and-slip-joins) deeply.** Crosshatch both faces about 1 mm deep with a needle tool. Scratches do nothing.
3. **[Slip](/blog/how-to-make-slip-for-pottery) both faces** with slip made from the same clay body.
4. **Press and wiggle** until a small bead of clay squeezes out around the join, then blend that bead into both surfaces. No bead means trapped air.
5. **Reinforce** the inside of the join with a thin coil pressed in and smoothed, if you can reach it.
For **polymer clay**, fresh clay bonds to fresh clay under pressure; to attach to already-baked clay, use liquid polymer clay as glue.
## Hollow anything thick
Solid clay thicker than about 2.5 cm dries unevenly and, in a kiln, can trap steam and blow apart.
Three ways to avoid it:
- **Build over a hollow core** of crumpled newspaper or foil. Paper burns out in the firing; foil should be removed before firing where possible, though a small amount will usually survive without damage.
- **Build in two halves** and join them at leather-hard. Standard for heads.
- **Hollow it out from underneath** once the figure is leather-hard, using a loop tool, leaving walls about 1 cm thick.
**Pierce every enclosed form.** A sealed hollow shape contains air, and air expands in a kiln. One small hole, somewhere discreet, is enough to prevent an explosion that will also damage the pots around it.
## Drying without cracks
Thin projections — arms, ears, tails, tool handles — dry far faster than the body and pull away as they shrink.
- Cover the whole figure loosely with plastic for the first 24 hours.
- Wrap thin parts individually in small strips of plastic or foil to slow them further.
- Set the figure on a wire rack or a piece of drywall so the base dries too, and turn it daily.
- Keep it away from radiators, sunlight and draughts.
Patience here costs a day and saves the piece.
## Finishing
**Ceramic**: bisque fire, then glaze, or leave raw and finish with a wash of oxide rubbed into the texture and wiped off the high points, which reads far better on a figure than a thick glossy coat.
**Polymer**: cool fully, sand with wet paper from 400 to 1500 grit, then buff or seal with a polymer-compatible varnish.
**Air-dry**: sand when bone dry, paint with acrylics, and seal every surface including the base with two or three thin coats of acrylic varnish.
## Where to go next
The attachment step is where most figures fail, so [score and slip joins](/blog/score-and-slip-joins) is worth reading in full. For the wider sculpting method, see [how to sculpt with clay](/blog/how-to-sculpt-with-clay). And if you are working in polymer, [how to sculpt with polymer clay](/blog/how-to-sculpt-with-polymer-clay) covers armatures and staged baking.
---
# How to Sculpt With Clay: A Method for Beginners
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/how-to-sculpt-with-clay
Published: 2026-07-02
Category: Sculpting
Tags: Sculpting, Beginners, Technique
Summary: Build a support, block in the big masses, fix proportion and silhouette before anything else, refine secondary forms, and add detail last. Turn the piece constantly and step back often.
Sculpting is a sequence, and the sequence is the same whether you are making a thumb-sized figure or a life-size head. Most beginner difficulty comes from doing the stages in the wrong order — usually detailing far too early.
> **From the studio:** Photographing a sculpture on my phone became the habit that improved my work fastest. A flat image strips away the three-dimensional cues my eye was using to excuse errors, and problems I had looked straight past for an hour are obvious in the photo within seconds.
## 0. Set yourself up
**Work at eye level.** A sculpture made looking down at a table will look wrong when it stands on a shelf, because you built in a viewing angle you will never use again. Raise it on a box, a turntable or a stand.
**Be able to turn it.** A lazy Susan costs little and changes everything. Sculpture is three-dimensional, and a piece that only ever gets seen from the front becomes a relief.
**Have a reference.** Multiple photographs from different angles, or better, a physical object. Working from imagination is the hardest possible mode, and even experienced sculptors work from reference.
## 1. Build an armature
Anything above hand size needs internal support. Clay is heavy and it creeps under its own weight over hours.
- **Aluminium wire** for figures and limbs; twist two lengths together for stiffness.
- **A pipe and board stand** for busts.
- **Foil or foam** to bulk out interior volume, saving clay and weight.
For ceramic clay that will be fired, use no permanent wire — build hollow, or over a paper core, or in halves that get joined.
## 2. Block in the big masses
Add clay in large, simple shapes: a sphere, a wedge, a cylinder. Do not smooth them. Do not refine them. You are looking for the **gesture and the mass distribution**, and both are easier to see in crude shapes than in half-finished ones.
Squint at it. Squinting removes detail and shows you the silhouette and the value structure, which is exactly what matters at this stage.
## 3. Fix the proportions
Now, before anything else, get the measurements right.
- Use **callipers** or a pencil held at arm's length to compare distances.
- Work in **relationships**, not absolutes: the width of the head compared to the width of the shoulders, the length of the forearm compared to the upper arm.
- Check the silhouette from at least four angles, and check it in a mirror. A mirror reverses the image and instantly reveals asymmetry your eye has stopped noticing.
- Photograph it on your phone and look at the photo. A flat image exposes errors that the three-dimensional object hides.
Every hour spent here saves three later. Proportion errors found after detailing mean destroying the detail.
## 4. Refine the secondary forms
Now the structure under the surface: the plane changes of a face, the ribcage and pelvis as separate masses, the way a sleeve hangs off a shoulder.
Think in **planes**, not lines. A face is a set of flat surfaces meeting at edges — forehead, temples, cheek planes, the sides and front of the nose. Getting the planes right is what makes a sculpture read as solid, and it matters far more than any individual feature.
Keep turning the piece. Work one area, rotate, work another. A sculpture developed evenly all round stays coherent; one that is finished at the front and rough at the back never quite recovers.
## 5. Detail last
Eyelids, lips, fingers, hair, texture, fabric weave. This stage is the fun one and it is the shortest.
Detail cannot rescue bad proportion — it draws attention to it. A well-proportioned figure with almost no surface detail reads as good sculpture; a badly proportioned one with beautifully modelled eyelashes reads as wrong, and viewers cannot always say why.
## 6. Finish the surface
Smooth, texture, or leave the tool marks. All three are legitimate choices and it is worth deciding deliberately rather than defaulting to smooth.
- **Oil clay**: 99 percent isopropyl alcohol on a soft brush, or gentle heat.
- **Ceramic clay**: a rubber rib at leather-hard, or a damp sponge.
- **Polymer clay**: rubbing alcohol on a brush before baking, sanding after.
## The habits that matter most
**Step back often.** Every few minutes, physically move a couple of metres away. Errors invisible at arm's length are obvious across a room.
**Rotate constantly.** Never do more than a few minutes of work from one angle.
**Take breaks.** Coming back after a night away reveals mistakes your eye had normalised. This is not laziness; it is the most reliable error-detection method there is.
**Work all over the piece.** Resist finishing one area. Bring the whole sculpture along together at the same level of resolution.
**Expect to remove clay.** Cutting a form back and rebuilding it is normal practice, not failure. The loop tool gets as much use as your thumbs.
## Common problems and what causes them
Most sculptural difficulties trace to one of a handful of causes, and naming them makes them fixable.
| What you see | Usual cause |
| --- | --- |
| It looks fine from the front, wrong from the side | You worked from one angle. Rotate every few minutes |
| Something is off but you cannot say what | Proportion. Check with callipers and in a mirror |
| The face reads as flat | You modelled features, not planes. Build the planes first |
| It looks stiff and lifeless | The gesture was lost during refinement. Squint at the silhouette |
| Detail looks fussy and unconvincing | Detail added before the underlying form was resolved |
| It sags or leans over hours | Not enough armature, or too much clay on a thin support |
| You keep fixing the same area | You have stopped seeing it. Leave it a day |
The pattern in that table is worth noticing: almost every entry is a sequencing problem rather than a skill problem. Working large to small, checking proportion before refining, and refining before detailing prevents most of them outright — which is why the order of the stages matters more than how good your hands are.
## Where to go next
To choose a material first, read [what clay is best for sculpting](/blog/best-clay-for-sculpting). For figures specifically, [how to make clay figures](/blog/how-to-make-clay-figures) covers armatures, hollowing and joins. And [what is a clay model in sculpture](/blog/what-is-a-clay-model-in-sculpture) explains what happens to the clay afterwards.
---
# What Is Grog in Clay, and When Do You Want It?
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/what-is-grog-in-clay
Published: 2026-06-28
Category: Materials
Tags: Materials, Clay bodies, Pottery basics
Summary: Grog is pre-fired clay, crushed and added back into a clay body. It opens the body so water escapes evenly, which cuts shrinkage, warping and cracking. The trade-off is a rougher surface and more wear on your hands and tools.
Grog is clay that has already been fired, crushed back into granules, and mixed into a new clay body. If that sounds circular, it is — and it is one of the oldest tricks in ceramics, used in pots four thousand years older than the potter's wheel.
> **From the studio:** The first time I switched from a smooth throwing body to a grogged hand building one, I hated it. It scratched my fingertips raw in an hour and blunted my favourite trimming tool. Two weeks later I built a slab planter that would have slumped and cracked in the smooth body, and I understood exactly what I had traded for those sore fingers.
## What it actually does
Fired clay has been through its chemical changes already. It has no water left to lose, and it will not shrink again. So every particle of grog in a body is a little island that stays exactly the same size while the clay around it dries and shrinks.
That produces four effects, and they all follow from the same fact.
**It lowers overall shrinkage.** A body with 20 percent grog has 20 percent less material that can shrink. Less shrinkage means less stress, and less stress means fewer cracks.
**It opens the body.** Grog particles are irregular, so they leave microscopic channels between them. Water from deep inside a thick wall can escape along those channels instead of being trapped, which is exactly what causes thick work to crack or, in the kiln, to blow apart.
**It adds tooth.** Grogged clay resists slumping. A coil-built wall stands up where a smooth one would sag, which is why hand builders reach for it.
**It improves thermal shock resistance.** The grog interrupts crack propagation, which is why raku bodies — pulled glowing from a kiln into a bin of sawdust — are always heavily grogged.
## What it costs you
**Surface.** Grogged clay does not take a fine polished surface. Carved detail is less crisp, and a burnished finish is essentially impossible.
**Your hands.** Grog is abrasive. An hour of throwing a heavily grogged body will genuinely take skin off your fingertips, and long sessions need care.
**Your tools.** Trimming tools blunt noticeably faster.
**Fired strength.** Counter-intuitively, a heavily grogged body is often slightly weaker once fired, because the grog interrupts the continuous glassy matrix that forms during vitrification. The green strength goes up; the fired strength comes down slightly.
## Particle size matters as much as quantity
Grog is graded by mesh size, and the number tells you a lot:
- **Fine grog** (around 60–80 mesh) — barely visible, adds working properties without much roughness. Common in throwing bodies.
- **Medium grog** (around 30–40 mesh) — visible speckle, noticeable tooth. The standard for hand building.
- **Coarse grog** (20 mesh and larger) — obvious texture, sometimes used deliberately as a surface. Sculpture and large architectural work.
A body with 15 percent fine grog throws almost like a smooth body. A body with 15 percent coarse grog is a completely different material in the hand.
## Choosing by what you make
| What you make | Grog content |
| --- | --- |
| Thrown mugs and bowls | 0–10%, fine |
| Thrown large forms | 10–15%, fine to medium |
| Slab and coil work | 10–25%, medium |
| Large sculpture | 25%+, medium to coarse |
| Raku | High, coarse |
| Porcelain, fine detail | None |
If you are choosing a body from a supplier, this is the second question to answer after the cone — and [stoneware, porcelain or earthenware](/blog/stoneware-porcelain-earthenware) covers the first.
## Adding grog yourself
You can wedge grog into a commercial body, or into wild clay that shrinks and cracks too much. It is genuinely useful for [processing dug clay](/blog/how-to-process-wild-clay), where shrinkage is often the main problem.
The method:
1. Weigh out grog at the percentage you want, by dry weight of clay.
2. Spread the clay flat and sprinkle the grog over it.
3. Fold and wedge thoroughly — at least forty rotations. Grog does not distribute easily.
4. Cut the ball with a wire and check the cut face for streaks. Streaks mean keep wedging.
Adding grog is one-way. There is no practical means of getting it back out, so test a small batch before you convert 12 kg of clay.
## Alternatives to grog
**Sand** does a similar job and is far cheaper, but it is pure silica, so it changes the body's thermal expansion and can cause glaze fit problems. Fine for sculpture, riskier under a glaze.
**Molochite** is a calcined china clay grog. It is white, so it does not speckle a pale body — the usual choice for porcelain and white stoneware.
**Paper fibre** gives extraordinary green strength and burns out completely in the firing, leaving a lighter, more porous body. It solves different problems from grog and is covered in [score and slip joins](/blog/score-and-slip-joins).
## Making your own grog
Studios with a lot of bisque waste sometimes make grog rather than buying it, and it is straightforward if not especially quick.
1. **Collect bisque-fired scrap** — failed pots, test tiles, broken shelves of the same clay body if you have them.
2. **Break it down.** A hammer inside a heavy canvas bag, or a jaw crusher if a studio has one. Wear eye protection; bisque shards travel.
3. **Sieve to grade it.** Separate what passes an 80 mesh from what passes a 30 and what stays behind. The particle size matters as much as the quantity, so unsorted rubble is not grog.
4. **Wash out the dust.** The finest fraction is essentially clay dust and does not behave like grog.
5. **Wedge it in** at your chosen percentage, and test a small batch before converting a whole bag.
Two cautions. Use scrap from the **same clay body** where you can, since a grog with a different thermal expansion can cause problems under a glaze. And never crush glazed ware — melted glaze fragments in a clay body create bloating and craters that appear only after firing, long after you can do anything about them.
## Where to go next
If grog is the thing standing between your hand-built pieces and cracking, the wider picture is in [drying pots evenly](/blog/drying-pots-evenly). To pick a body that already contains the right amount, see [stoneware, porcelain or earthenware](/blog/stoneware-porcelain-earthenware). And if you are working with clay you dug yourself, [how to process wild clay](/blog/how-to-process-wild-clay) explains when to add it.
---
# What Is Low Fire Clay? And Which Clay Ceramics Actually Use
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/what-is-low-fire-clay
Published: 2026-06-24
Category: Clay bodies
Tags: Clay bodies, Firing, Materials, Beginners
Summary: Low fire clay is any body that matures around cone 06 to 02, about 1000 to 1100 C. It never fully vitrifies, so it stays porous and needs a well-fitted glaze to hold liquid. In exchange it gives you the brightest colour palette in ceramics.
**Low fire clay** is any clay body that reaches maturity at roughly cone 06 to cone 02 — about 1000 to 1100 °C. Terracotta is the familiar red version; white earthenware is the base of most commercially produced dinnerware, and of nearly every piece of decorated ware in a school art room.
The defining characteristic is not the temperature itself but what happens at it: low fire bodies **never fully vitrify**. Enough glass forms between the particles to make the pot hard and permanent, but not enough to close the pores.
> **From the studio:** I made a set of terracotta planters and left them outside through a hard winter, and by spring three of them had split along visible lines. Water had soaked into the porous body, frozen, and pushed the walls apart. Nothing was wrong with how I made them. I had simply used a porous body somewhere it would freeze wet.
## What porosity actually means
A fired low fire body typically absorbs **5 to 15 percent** of its weight in water. Stoneware fired to maturity absorbs under 1 to 2 percent.
That difference has practical consequences:
- **Water gets in.** Any chip, crack, unglazed foot or crazed glaze lets liquid into the body, where it can seep, stain and harbour bacteria.
- **Freeze-thaw destroys it.** Water inside a porous wall expands when it freezes. This is why unglazed terracotta planters crack outdoors in cold climates.
- **The glaze does all the work.** On low fire ware, the glaze is not decoration with a waterproofing side effect; it is the only barrier there is.
- **Crazing matters more.** On stoneware, a crazed glaze is unattractive. On earthenware, it is a genuine functional failure.
## What you get in return
Low fire is not a lesser option, it is a different set of trade-offs, and for some work it is clearly the right one.
**Colour.** This is the real reason. Many ceramic stains and underglazes burn out or shift above cone 6 — bright reds, oranges, hot pinks, purples and clear yellows are far more reliable at low temperature. The vivid majolica tradition, and most brightly decorated commercial tableware, exists at low fire for exactly this reason.
**Cost.** Less time above 1000 °C means less electricity and much longer element life. For a school firing weekly, the difference over a year is substantial.
**Equipment.** Almost any kiln, including small hobby kilns that plug into a standard socket, will reach cone 04.
**Speed.** Lower peak temperature means shorter firings and faster cooling.
## Which clay ceramics actually use
If the question is what a working potter uses, the honest answer is that the field has largely moved to the middle:
| Body | Cone | Typical use |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Earthenware / terracotta | 06–02 | Decorative work, planters, majolica, schools |
| Mid-fire stoneware | 5–7 | The functional default: mugs, bowls, plates |
| High-fire stoneware | 9–10 | Gas reduction work, traditional studio pottery |
| Porcelain | 6–13 | White, translucent, fine work |
For anything that holds food or drink daily, mid-fire stoneware is the pragmatic choice, and [cone 6 vs cone 10](/blog/cone-6-vs-cone-10) covers why cone 6 in particular has become the standard.
## The mistake to avoid
**Never fire a low fire body above its range.** A cone 04 earthenware taken to cone 6 does not become stronger — it bloats, slumps, and can weld itself permanently to your kiln shelf. The fluxes that let it mature at low temperature keep working as the temperature rises, and the body eventually turns into something closer to a glaze.
The reverse is equally unhelpful. A cone 10 stoneware fired at cone 04 comes out chalky, weak and thoroughly porous, because it never got close to maturity.
The rule is simple: **match the body, the glaze and the firing to the same cone.** This is the first question to ask a supplier, and [where to buy clay for pottery](/blog/where-to-buy-clay-for-pottery) covers the rest of the conversation.
## Testing what you actually have
If you have a bag of unlabelled clay, or clay you dug yourself, one test tells you nearly everything:
1. Fire a small tile at your intended cone.
2. Weigh it dry.
3. Boil it in water for two hours, then leave it submerged overnight to cool.
4. Dry the surface and weigh it again.
The percentage gain is the absorption. Under 1 percent means fully vitrified. Around 3 percent is usable for most functional work. Over 5 percent and you have a low fire body, whatever the temperature said on the shelf.
## Where low fire is the right answer
It is worth being specific, because "use stoneware" is over-applied advice.
**Bright decorated surfaces.** If the piece depends on a hot pink, a clear yellow or a saturated red, low fire is not a compromise — it is the only place those colours survive reliably. Majolica exists at this temperature for exactly this reason.
**Schools and shared kilns.** Shorter firings, lower running costs and much longer element life matter enormously when a kiln runs weekly for years.
**Sculpture and decorative work.** Porosity is irrelevant when nothing holds liquid. Low fire bodies are often more open and more forgiving of thick sections.
**Terracotta planters, indoors.** The porosity is arguably a feature, since the wall breathes. Outdoors in a freezing climate it becomes a liability.
Where it is the wrong answer is anything used daily with liquid: mugs, bowls, jugs, anything going through a dishwasher. Not because low fire ware cannot work, but because it depends entirely on the glaze staying perfect, and glazes chip.
If you are unsure which you have, the absorption test settles it in an evening and is described in the testing section above.
## Where to go next
To place low fire against the alternatives, read [stoneware, porcelain or earthenware](/blog/stoneware-porcelain-earthenware). For the firing decision itself, [cone 6 vs cone 10](/blog/cone-6-vs-cone-10) is the fuller argument. And if you are testing wild clay, [how to process wild clay](/blog/how-to-process-wild-clay) explains the stepped firing that finds a body's real range.
---
# How to Make a Clay Pot by Hand, Start to Finish
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/how-to-make-a-clay-pot
Published: 2026-06-20
Category: Hand building
Tags: Hand building, Beginners, Pottery basics, Technique
Summary: You can make a real clay pot with your hands and no equipment. Pinch or coil the form, keep the walls even at about 8 mm, dry it slowly under plastic, then bisque fire and glaze it. The whole process takes about two weeks, most of it waiting.
You do not need a wheel to make a pot. You need clay, your hands, a table and — eventually — access to a kiln. Everything else is optional, and the first pot most people make by hand is better than the first pot most people throw.
> **From the studio:** My first coiled pot took two hours and looked like it. The walls wandered, the rim was a wave, and I nearly threw it in the reclaim bucket. I fired it instead, and it has held pencils on my desk for years. It is a much better reminder of where I started than anything I could have bought.
## What you need
- **Clay** — a mid-fire stoneware with fine grog is the most forgiving. [Where to buy clay for pottery](/blog/where-to-buy-clay-for-pottery) covers what to ask for.
- **A work surface** — a wooden board, a piece of drywall, or canvas over a table.
- **Water**, in a small bowl.
- **A needle or a knife**, and something with a serrated edge for scoring — a fork works.
- **A rib or a smooth spoon**, for compressing surfaces.
- **Access to a kiln**, at the end. Community studios will usually fire your work for a fee.
## Step 1: Wedge the clay
Cut off a fist-sized lump, about 500 g. Wedge it 20 to 40 rotations to make the moisture uniform and drive out air. Cut the ball in half with a wire and look at the cut face: it should be featureless, with no voids or streaks.
The full method, and both wedging styles, is in [wedging clay properly](/blog/wedging-clay-properly).
## Step 2: Build the form
### The pinch method — for anything cup-sized
Roll the clay into a genuinely round ball with no folds. Press your thumb into the centre, stopping about 1.5 cm from the bottom. Then pinch in **rings**: thumb inside, fingers outside, squeeze gently and rotate a small step, completing a full rotation at one height before moving up.
Twenty light rotations beat five hard ones. The full sequence is in [the pinch pot guide](/blog/pinch-pot-guide).
### The coil method — for anything larger
1. **Make a base.** Roll a slab about 8 mm thick and cut a circle.
2. **Roll coils.** Start with a sausage and roll it out with flat palms, moving your hands apart as you go. Aim for the thickness of your thumb, and keep them even.
3. **Attach the first coil.** Score the edge of the base, add a little slip, press the coil on and blend the join on both the inside and the outside.
4. **Keep stacking.** Each coil scored and slipped onto the last, each join blended. Blend downwards on the inside and upwards on the outside, or the wall pulls apart.
5. **Shape as you go.** Coils placed slightly outside the one below make the wall flare; slightly inside makes it close in.
6. **Let it firm up** if the wall starts to sag. Fifteen minutes is usually enough, and it is far quicker than rebuilding a collapsed pot.
You can leave the coils visible as texture or blend them away entirely. Both are legitimate.
## Step 3: Refine and compress
Even out the wall thickness, checking by pinching at several heights. About **8 mm everywhere** is a good target — consistency matters more than thinness.
Then compress. Run a rib, the back of a spoon or a damp finger firmly over the inside, the outside, the base and especially the rim. Compression aligns the clay particles and closes the micro-voids that later become cracks. It is the cheapest insurance in pottery, and skipping it is why so many first pots crack across the base.
## Step 4: Dry it slowly
This is where most first pots are lost, and it requires patience rather than skill.
- Tent the pot loosely with a plastic bag for the first **24 hours**.
- Then uncover it and set it on a wire rack or a piece of drywall, so the base dries too.
- Turn it daily.
- Keep it away from radiators, sunlight and draughts.
- Wait for **bone dry** — the pot should feel the same temperature as the room against your cheek, not cool. Three to seven days is typical.
The reasoning behind every one of those steps is in [drying pots evenly](/blog/drying-pots-evenly).
## Step 5: Bisque fire
The first firing, usually to around cone 06. It drives off the chemically bound water and turns the clay permanently into ceramic — hard, but still porous, which is exactly what makes it accept glaze.
If you are firing yourself and the pot is thick, hold the kiln at 90 to 100 °C for a few hours first with the vents open. That candling stage drives off any remaining free water gently, well below the point where steam can break the pot apart.
## Step 6: Glaze and fire again
Wipe the bisque with a damp sponge, let it dry, then dip, pour or brush your glaze. Aim for a coat about the thickness of a postcard, and **wipe the foot completely bare** — any glaze touching the shelf fuses the pot to it permanently.
Fire to the cone printed on the glaze, which must also be within your clay body's range. The whole application sequence is in [how to glaze pottery at home](/blog/how-to-glaze-pottery-at-home).
## What to expect from a first pot
It will be heavier than a shop-bought pot. The walls will vary. The rim will not be perfectly level. All of that is normal, and none of it stops the pot working.
The two things worth actually aiming for are **even wall thickness** and **a compressed rim and base**. Get those right and the pot will survive drying and firing, which is more than half the battle.
## Where to go next
For the small-scale version of this, [the pinch pot guide](/blog/pinch-pot-guide) goes deeper on wall control. If the pot cracked, [drying pots evenly](/blog/drying-pots-evenly) will tell you why from the shape of the crack. And when you are ready for the wheel, [centering clay](/blog/centering-clay-on-the-wheel) is the first real hurdle.
---
# Can You Make Pottery at Home? Honestly, Yes — With One Catch
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/can-you-make-pottery-at-home
Published: 2026-06-16
Category: Pottery basics
Tags: Pottery basics, Beginners, Kilns, Buying
Summary: You can make pottery at home with almost no equipment — a table, clay and your hands are enough to form real pots. The catch is firing, which needs a kiln reaching 1000 C or more. Most people solve that by paying a studio rather than buying one.
Yes — with one honest caveat. Everything up to the firing is genuinely easy to do at home with almost no equipment. The firing is the part that needs a machine you probably do not own.
That is the whole answer, and the rest of this post is about what each half actually involves.
> **From the studio:** I made pottery on a kitchen table for a year before I ever touched a kiln. I built pots in the evening, dried them on a shelf above the radiator (badly, at first), and carried a box of bone dry work to a studio once a month to be fired. It cost me less than a gym membership and taught me more than any single piece of equipment I have bought since.
## What you can absolutely do at home
**Forming.** Pinching, coiling and slab building need a table, clay, water and your hands. That is not a compromise — it is how most pottery in history was made, and [how to make a clay pot](/blog/how-to-make-a-clay-pot) walks through it end to end.
**Drying.** A shelf, a wire rack or a piece of drywall, and some patience. The technique matters more than the equipment, and [drying pots evenly](/blog/drying-pots-evenly) covers it.
**Decorating.** Carving, stamping, texturing and slip decoration all happen at leather-hard, at your table.
**Reclaiming.** Every scrap of clay can be slaked in a bucket and dried back to usable stiffness. This costs nothing at all.
**Glazing**, if you have glaze and somewhere to work. It is messy rather than difficult.
## The kiln question
Clay becomes ceramic somewhere above 1000 °C. Below that, it is dried mud that dissolves in water. A domestic oven tops out around 250 °C, a barbecue does not come close, and no amount of time at a low temperature substitutes for the temperature itself.
So the real question is not whether you can make pottery at home. It is how you get your work fired.
### Option 1: Pay a studio (start here)
Community studios, art centres and many independent potters will fire work for a fee, often charged by volume or by piece. For anyone starting out, this is by a distance the best answer: you get a properly controlled kiln, a glaze range that has already been tested, and someone to ask when something goes wrong.
Two things to check before you buy any clay:
- **Which cone do they fire to?** Your clay and glaze must match it.
- **Will they fire clay they did not sell you?** Many will not, because an unknown body can melt onto their shelves.
### Option 2: Buy a small kiln
A used top-loading electric kiln is often surprisingly cheap, because moving one is a serious job. Before buying, check three things:
- **The electrical supply.** Many need a dedicated high-current circuit and an electrician to install it. Small test kilns run from a standard socket.
- **The elements and bricks.** Elements are consumable and bricks crumble.
- **Where it will live.** A kiln needs clearance from walls, a non-combustible floor, and real ventilation. A spare room with a window is not automatically adequate.
### Option 3: Fire without a kiln
Pit firing and barrel firing genuinely work and produce beautiful smoke-marked surfaces, but they reach only 600 to 900 °C. The results are porous, unglazed and decorative rather than functional. [Firing clay without a kiln](/blog/firing-clay-without-a-kiln) covers the methods and their honest limits.
### Option 4: Use a material that needs no firing
Air-dry clay and polymer clay both harden without a kiln. Neither becomes ceramic, and neither is watertight or food safe, but for decorative work they are perfectly good. [Is modeling clay the same as polymer clay](/blog/modeling-clay-vs-polymer-clay) sets out what each can do.
## A realistic home setup
If you want to work at home regularly, this is roughly the order to buy things in:
1. **Clay** — one 12 kg box.
2. **A wire cutter, a needle tool and a rubber rib** — together they cost very little.
3. **A wedging surface** — a plaster bat, a hardwood board, or a slab of concrete.
4. **Shelving to dry on** — a wire rack and a couple of pieces of drywall.
5. **Buckets** — one for reclaim, one for slip, one for washing hands. Never wash clay down a household drain; it settles and blocks the trap.
6. **Later, a wheel** — only once you know you want to throw.
## The two health points worth taking seriously
**Silica dust.** Dry clay dust is genuinely harmful to lungs over long exposure. Never sweep a pottery space dry, never sand dry clay indoors, and wipe surfaces down wet.
**Drains.** Clay sets like concrete in a trap. Use a bucket, let the clay settle, pour off the clear water, and put the sludge in your reclaim.
Neither of these makes home pottery dangerous. Both are worth building a habit around from day one.
## A first month that works
If you want a concrete plan rather than a list of options, this is the sequence I would give anyone starting from nothing.
**Week 1.** Buy one box of mid-fire stoneware and find a studio that fires for the public. Ask which cone they fire and whether they accept outside clay before you buy anything.
**Week 2.** Make five pinch pots. Not one careful pot — five quick ones. You are learning wall thickness and compression, and repetition teaches that far faster than care does.
**Week 3.** Make something coiled and larger, and attach a handle to something. The handle will teach you more about moisture matching than any article can.
**Week 4.** Dry everything properly, take it to the studio for bisque firing, then glaze it there using their tested glazes.
By the end you will have made real pottery, learned where your pieces fail, and spent very little. Only then is it worth thinking about a wheel or a kiln — and you will know which one you actually want.
## Where to go next
To make your first piece, follow [how to make a clay pot](/blog/how-to-make-a-clay-pot) or start smaller with [the pinch pot guide](/blog/pinch-pot-guide). To buy the right material, see [where to buy clay for pottery](/blog/where-to-buy-clay-for-pottery). And [firing clay without a kiln](/blog/firing-clay-without-a-kiln) covers the options if a studio is not within reach.
---
# Things to Make With Clay: 12 Projects, Easiest First
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/things-to-make-with-clay
Published: 2026-06-12
Category: Hand building
Tags: Hand building, Beginners, Sculpting, Technique
Summary: Start with a pinch pot, then a coiled bowl, then something with an attachment. Each project on this ladder teaches one new skill, so pick the next one up rather than jumping to the piece you actually want to make.
The most common way people stall with clay is picking a project three rungs above where they are. A first-timer attempting a teapot will fail at the spout, the handle, the lid and the drying, all at once, and conclude they are bad at clay.
This is the same list of projects, ordered so each one teaches exactly one new thing.
> **From the studio:** I tried to make a lidded jar in my second month, and I made about six of them before one came out with a lid that actually fitted. Later I realised the problem was never the lid — it was that I could not yet make two forms with matching diameters, which is a skill a coiled bowl teaches for free. Going backwards down the ladder is not a defeat.
## The four ways to form wet clay
Before the projects, the methods. Nearly everything is a variation on one of these.
Press moulding into a plaster or bisque form, and slip casting into a plaster mould, round out the list, and both are more about mould making than clay handling.
## The ladder
### 1. Pinch pot
**Teaches**: wall thickness, compression, drying.
One ball, two hands, no tools. This is the foundation, and if you make five of them your third will be visibly better than your first. [Full guide here](/blog/pinch-pot-guide).
### 2. Pinch pot with texture
**Teaches**: working at leather-hard.
The same form, stamped, carved or rolled into fabric once the clay firms up. It teaches you to feel the difference between plastic and leather-hard clay — a distinction covered in [the stages of clay](/blog/clay-stages-leather-hard-bone-dry).
### 3. Coiled bowl
**Teaches**: joining, and controlling a profile.
Coils scored, slipped and blended one on top of another. You can build far larger than you can pinch, and each coil placed slightly in or out changes the shape. [How to make a clay pot](/blog/how-to-make-a-clay-pot) covers the sequence.
### 4. Spoon rest or soap dish
**Teaches**: slabs and slumping.
Roll a slab, cut a shape, drape it over a crumpled cloth or a bowl to give it a curve, and let it stiffen. The first genuinely useful object most people make.
### 5. Hanging planter or wall tile
**Teaches**: drying flat things, which is harder than it sounds.
Flat pieces curl as the top face dries faster than the underside. Sandwich them between boards with newspaper on each face, and flip daily.
### 6. Mug with a handle
**Teaches**: attachments, and the moisture-matching rule.
A coiled or thrown cup plus a pulled handle. This is the first project where a piece can look perfect and fail a week later, and the reason is always the same — read [score and slip joins](/blog/score-and-slip-joins) before you start.
### 7. Slab box
**Teaches**: right angles and interior seams.
Four walls and a base, cut at leather-hard so the edges stay crisp. Reinforce every interior corner with a thin coil pressed into the seam; a sharp inside corner is where cracks begin.
### 8. Sphere from two pinch pots
**Teaches**: hollow forms, and why you pierce them.
Two hemispheres joined at leather-hard, seam blended. The basis of rattles, bud vases and much sculpture. **Pierce it** before firing, or trapped air expands and destroys it.
### 9. Small figure
**Teaches**: proportion, and hollowing.
Big shapes first, detail last. Nothing solid thicker than about 2.5 cm. [How to make clay figures](/blog/how-to-make-clay-figures) covers armatures and the drying rules for thin limbs.
### 10. Set of four matching bowls
**Teaches**: consistency, which is a real skill.
Weigh the clay for each one. Making four similar bowls is far harder than making one good one, and it is the difference between a hobby and a practice.
### 11. Lidded jar
**Teaches**: fit, and shrinkage.
The lid and the gallery must match, and both shrink 10 to 14 percent between wet and fired. Make the lid at the same time as the jar, from the same clay, and dry them together with the lid in place.
### 12. Teapot
**Teaches**: everything at once.
Body, spout, handle, lid and strainer holes, all needing to work together, all at matching moisture. It is the traditional test piece for a reason. Attempt it when the previous eleven feel routine.
## Choosing a material for the project
If you cannot fire, the project list still works, but the material changes what you can keep:
- **Air-dry clay** — fine for 1 through 5 and 9. Never watertight, never food safe. [Why air-dry clay cracks](/blog/air-dry-clay-cracking) covers its main failure mode.
- **Polymer clay** — excellent for small detailed work and figures, and it cures in a domestic oven.
- **Ceramic clay** — the only option for anything holding liquid, and it needs a kiln. [Can you make pottery at home](/blog/can-you-make-pottery-at-home) explains the realistic routes to one.
## How to get better between projects
The ladder works best if you treat each rung as practice rather than production.
**Make five, not one.** Five quick pinch pots teach more than one careful one, because the improvement happens between attempts rather than within them. Your fifth will be visibly better than your first, and that gap is the actual lesson.
**Keep the failures.** A cracked pot is a diagnostic record. The shape and position of the crack tells you exactly what went wrong, and a shelf of failures is a far better teacher than a shelf of successes.
**Change one thing at a time.** If you alter the clay, the thickness and the drying method all at once, a bad result tells you nothing.
**Write on the bottom.** Date, clay body, and anything unusual, carved in before firing. Six months later you will want to know, and you will not remember.
**Repeat a project you already did.** Making the same bowl again three months later is the clearest measure of progress there is, and it is much more encouraging than most people expect.
## Where to go next
Start at rung one with [the pinch pot guide](/blog/pinch-pot-guide), or go straight to the full build in [how to make a clay pot](/blog/how-to-make-a-clay-pot). If you are choosing a material rather than a project, [what clay is best for sculpting](/blog/best-clay-for-sculpting) and [is modeling clay the same as polymer clay](/blog/modeling-clay-vs-polymer-clay) will both narrow it down.
---
# Firing Clay Without a Kiln: What Actually Works
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/firing-clay-without-a-kiln
Published: 2026-06-11
Category: Firing
Tags: Firing, Kilns, Beginners
Summary: You cannot fire clay in a kitchen oven — it tops out around 250 °C and clay needs 1000 °C or more. Use a pit or barrel fire, or pay a studio to fire your work.
The honest answer first: **a kitchen oven cannot fire clay.** Clay becomes ceramic when it passes through sintering, which begins around 900–1000 °C. Domestic ovens reach roughly 250 °C. A pot baked in your oven is dry clay, not pottery, and it will soften and slump back into mud in water.
> **From the studio:** The most common question I get asked in person is whether an oven will do it, and the disappointment when I say no is real. What usually cheers people up is finding out that most community studios will fire other people's work for the price of a couple of coffees, provided the piece is bone dry and properly made.
With that out of the way, there are real options.
## Option 1: Pay someone (usually the best answer)
Community studios, art centres, schools and many independent potters will fire your greenware for a fee. This gets you a real kiln, real temperature control, and a glaze firing if you want one.
Two conditions come up constantly:
- **They may require their own clay.** A studio firing to cone 6 cannot safely include an unknown cone 04 body that might melt onto their shelves. Ask before you make anything.
- **It must be [bone dry](/blog/clay-stages-leather-hard-bone-dry) and properly made.** No sealed hollow forms without a pierced hole, no thick solid lumps, nothing still cool to the touch.
## Option 2: Pit firing
The oldest method there is, and thoroughly achievable in a garden. Dig a pit, bed the pots in sawdust, build a wood fire over them, and let the whole thing burn down and cool slowly over 12–24 hours.
**Reaches**: roughly 600–900 °C.
**Gives you**: porous, unglazed, smoke-blackened and flashed surfaces with beautiful greys, oranges and blacks from the combustible materials — sawdust, seaweed, banana skins, copper wire, salt.
**Does not give you**: watertight, food-safe, or strong pottery.
Use an open, grogged clay body (raku or a heavily grogged stoneware). Pre-warm the pots at the fire's edge for an hour before they go in — cold, damp pots explode. Bring the temperature up gradually and, critically, **let it cool on its own**. Most pit-firing losses happen during a fast cool, not during the heating.
## Option 3: Barrel or bin firing
A pit firing without the digging: a metal drum with air holes punched around the base, filled in layers of sawdust and pots, lit at the top, and allowed to smoulder downward for 12+ hours. Slower, more controlled, and easier to repeat than a pit.
## Option 4: Raku
Raku uses a small kiln, so it is not strictly kiln-free, but the kiln can be a homemade one — a metal bin lined with ceramic fibre with a propane burner. Pots are pulled from the kiln glowing hot and dropped into a bin of combustibles, where the reduction produces metallic lustres and crackle.
Raku is genuinely dangerous without preparation: 1000 °C pots, open flame, thick gloves, a face shield, natural-fibre clothing, and an outdoor space with nothing flammable nearby. Learn it from someone who does it before you build anything. Raku ware is never food safe.
## Option 5: Buy a small kiln
A used top-loading electric kiln is often surprisingly cheap because moving one is a nightmare. Before you buy, check the electrical supply — many need a dedicated circuit — and check the elements and bricks. A test-kiln-sized unit runs from a standard socket and fires plenty for jewellery, test tiles and small pieces.
## If you cannot fire at all
Use materials that do not need it, and be honest about what they are:
- **[Air-dry clay](/blog/how-to-store-air-dry-clay)** for decorative pieces, sealed with acrylic varnish. Never watertight, never food safe.
- **Polymer clay** for anything small and durable — it cures in a home oven at 110–150 °C because it is a plastic, not a clay.
- **Plaster or concrete casting** where you want outdoor durability.
None of these is fired ceramic, and any pot that holds water for real is going to see a kiln first.
## What a pit firing actually costs you in time
Pit firing sounds spontaneous and is not. Budget a full weekend for a first attempt.
| Stage | Time |
| --- | --- |
| Digging the pit and gathering fuel | 2–3 hours |
| Pre-warming pots at the fire's edge | 1–2 hours |
| Building up and burning down | 4–8 hours |
| Cooling, undisturbed | 12–24 hours |
| Cleaning the soot off the results | 1 hour |
The cooling is not optional and it is where most losses happen. Pulling pots from a warm pit because you want to see them is thermal shock, and thermal shock cracks work that survived everything else.
A few practical notes from people who do this regularly: use a heavily grogged or raku body, because an open body survives the fast temperature changes that would destroy a dense one. Bed the pots in sawdust rather than resting them on bare earth. Add combustibles for colour — copper wire, seaweed, banana skins, salt — tucked around rather than under the pots. And keep a bucket of water and a way of controlling the fire to hand, since an unattended open fire is a genuine hazard rather than a theoretical one.
## Where to go next
Before anything goes into any fire, it has to be genuinely dry — [drying pots evenly](/blog/drying-pots-evenly) explains how to get there without cracks. If you decide against firing altogether, [is modeling clay the same as polymer clay](/blog/modeling-clay-vs-polymer-clay) covers the materials that need no kiln. And if you are shopping for one, [how much does pottery clay cost](/blog/how-much-does-pottery-clay-cost) puts firing costs in context.
---
# Score and Slip: Joins That Do Not Crack Off Later
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/score-and-slip-joins
Published: 2026-05-27
Category: Hand building
Tags: Hand building, Troubleshooting, Technique
Summary: Both parts at soft leather-hard, score deeply in a crosshatch, use slip made from the same clay, press until a bead squeezes out, then blend and dry slowly under plastic.
The join is where hand-built work fails, and it almost never fails at the moment you make it. It fails three days later, or in the bisque, because the two parts were at different moisture levels and shrank by different amounts.
> **From the studio:** Every handle I lost in my first year came off between three days and two weeks after I made it, never at the moment of attaching. Once I started letting handles stiffen for half an hour before attaching them, instead of putting them on straight from the pull, the failures simply stopped.
## The rule that matters most
**Both parts must be at the same stiffness, ideally soft [leather-hard](/blog/clay-stages-leather-hard-bone-dry).**
A freshly pulled handle contains far more water than a mug wall that has been sitting for two hours. The handle will shrink several percent more than the wall it is stuck to, and it pulls itself off. The join looks perfect the day you make it.
The fix is to let the handle stiffen — hang or lay it out for 20–60 minutes until it holds its curve without sagging — and to keep the mug from getting ahead of it. If the mug is already firm, wrap it and let it equalise, or wrap the whole assembly and give it a night.
## The method
1. **Score deeply.** Crosshatch both faces with a needle tool, a serrated rib, or a fork. Shallow scratches do nothing. You want grooves you can feel, roughly 1 mm deep, in both directions. The point is mechanical key and surface area.
2. **Apply slip to both faces.** Use [slip made from the same clay body](/blog/how-to-make-slip-for-pottery) — a scrap of your clay mashed with water to a thick cream. Slip from a different body shrinks differently and cracks along the seam.
3. **Press and wiggle.** Push the parts together firmly with a slight twisting motion until a small bead of clay squeezes out around the join. That bead is your proof of full contact. No bead means air is trapped in there.
4. **Blend the bead.** Work it into both surfaces with a wooden tool or a fingertip. Do not wipe it away — that is your reinforcement.
5. **Reinforce inside corners.** For slab boxes, press a thin coil into every interior seam and smooth it in. That fillet stops the sharp corner from acting as a crack initiator.
6. **Dry slowly and evenly.** Wrap the join area in a strip of plastic, or bag the whole piece loosely for a day. Thin parts — handles, spouts, lugs — always want to run ahead of the body.
## Handles specifically
- **Pull the handle, do not roll a coil.** Pulling aligns the clay particles along the length, which makes the handle stronger and gives it a natural taper.
- **Attach the top first**, then curve down and attach the bottom, so the handle hangs in a shape it wants to hold rather than being forced.
- **Support the loop** while it stiffens — a rolled-up piece of foam or a wad of newspaper inside the curve prevents sag.
- **Dry the mug upside down on its rim** so the handle and the rim, both thin, dry at a similar rate to the base.
## Paper clay changes the rules
Adding cellulose fibre to clay gives you enormous green strength and lets you join wet clay to bone dry clay, or even to bisque, with no cracking. The fibre burns out in the firing and leaves a slightly more porous body. For complex sculpture, repairs on dry work, and anything with delicate attachments, paper clay is not a shortcut — it is the correct tool.
You can make it: blend toilet paper or shredded newsprint into a slurry, wring it out, and wedge 10–25% by volume into your clay. Mix small batches; wet paper clay grows mould within a week and starts to smell, though that has no effect on the fired result.
## Diagnosing a failed join
**Clean separation, both faces smooth** — you did not score, or you did not score deeply enough.
**A hairline crack around the perimeter but still attached** — moisture mismatch. The parts shrank apart.
**Cracks radiating out from the join into the wall** — the attached part was too stiff and put the wall in tension, or you pressed hard enough to stress the wall.
**Fails only after the glaze firing** — a thermal expansion mismatch, not a join problem. Check that any slip or glaze in the seam belongs to the same firing range.
## A checklist for the joins that fail most
Some attachments are simply harder than others, and it helps to know which need extra care.
**Mug handles.** The classic failure. Let the pulled handle stiffen for 20 to 60 minutes before attaching, dry the mug upside down on its rim, and wrap the handle in a strip of plastic for the first day.
**Teapot spouts.** Same rules, plus the spout must be at the same stiffness along its whole length — a thin tip firms up long before the thick base does. Cut the strainer holes before attaching, never after.
**Slab box corners.** Reinforce every interior seam with a thin coil pressed in and smoothed. A sharp inside corner concentrates stress and is where cracks start.
**Feet and pedestals.** Attach at leather-hard, and make sure the foot ring is not appreciably thicker than the wall above it, or it will dry last and pull.
**Sprigs and small decorations.** Easy to attach, easy to lose. They are thin, so they dry fast — tent them along with the piece.
In every case the underlying rule is the same one: match the moisture, score deeply, and slow the thin part down.
## Where to go next
The slip you use matters, and [how to make slip for pottery](/blog/how-to-make-slip-for-pottery) gives the three consistencies. For why the moisture match is non-negotiable, see [the stages of clay](/blog/clay-stages-leather-hard-bone-dry). And if the join survived but the piece cracked anyway, the fault is in the drying — [drying pots evenly](/blog/drying-pots-evenly).
---
# Cone 6 vs Cone 10: Which Firing Temperature Should You Work At?
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/cone-6-vs-cone-10
Published: 2026-05-06
Category: Firing
Tags: Firing, Glazing, Kilns
Summary: Cone 6 costs less, works in any electric kiln, and now has a mature glaze palette. Cone 10 gives depth in reduction and tougher bodies, but needs gas or a heavy kiln.
The cone number on a bag of clay is not a temperature, it is a measure of *heat work*: the combined effect of how hot the kiln got and how long it stayed there. A pyrometric cone bending at cone 6 has absorbed roughly the same total energy whether you got there quickly and hot or slowly and slightly cooler. This is why potters talk in cones and not degrees.
> **From the studio:** The first time I put witness cones on every shelf instead of just the middle one, I found my bottom shelf was running nearly a cone cool. Every glaze failure I had been blaming on the recipe for months was really a loading problem, and a three-cone pack costing almost nothing told me in one firing.
## The short version
| | Cone 6 (mid-fire) | Cone 10 (high-fire) |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Peak, 60 °C/h ramp | ~1222 °C | ~1285 °C |
| Typical kiln | Any electric kiln | Heavy electric or gas |
| Element life | Long | Short and expensive |
| Energy per firing | Lower | Roughly 25–40% more |
| Reduction atmosphere | Not in electric | Standard in gas |
| Glaze palette | Wide, bright, stable | Deep, subtle, celadons and shinos |
| Body strength | Strong when mature | Marginally stronger, denser |
## Why most studios now fire cone 6
Twenty years ago, serious stoneware meant cone 10 and everything else was a compromise. That is no longer true. Mid-fire glaze chemistry caught up, and cone 6 has clear practical advantages:
- **Every electric kiln does it.** Cone 10 in electric requires expensive elements and a kiln rated for it, and even then element replacement becomes routine.
- **Elements last far longer.** Kanthal elements degrade rapidly at the top of their range. The difference between cone 6 and cone 10 firings can be several times the element life.
- **Cheaper per firing.** Less time above 1100 °C means measurably less electricity.
- **Bright colours survive.** Many stains and underglazes burn out above cone 6 — pinks, purples, bright reds and most yellows are more reliable at mid-fire.
- **The bodies are genuinely vitrified.** A cone 6 stoneware fired to maturity absorbs under 1% water. It is not a lesser pot.
## Why people still fire cone 10
- **Reduction.** In a gas kiln you can starve the atmosphere of oxygen and pull oxygen out of the glaze and body chemistry instead. That is where copper reds, celadons, shinos and the deep iron saturates come from. You can get near-equivalents at cone 6, but not identical ones.
- **Depth and variation.** High-fire reduction glazes break over texture in a way that is hard to fully reproduce.
- **Body toughness.** Cone 10 porcelain in particular is denser and more translucent.
- **Tradition and training.** Many programmes teach it, and many potters' recipe books are in it.
Note that reduction, not temperature, does most of this work. An electric cone 10 kiln fires in oxidation and gives you the cost of high-fire without the reason for it.
## Cones are not thermocouples
Your kiln controller reads a thermocouple, which measures temperature at one point at one moment. It does not know how long the kiln held there, and thermocouples drift with age — an old one can under-read by 20 °C or more.
Put witness cones on a shelf every firing, at least occasionally in each zone of the kiln. A three-cone pack (one below, target, one above) tells you at a glance whether you hit your cone and whether the kiln is even top to bottom. This is the cheapest diagnostic in ceramics.
## Do not mix cones in one load
Firing a cone 10 body to cone 6 leaves it porous and weak. Firing a cone 6 body to cone 10 turns it into a puddle — mid-fire bodies bloat, slump, and can weld themselves to your shelf. Bisque firings are the exception: bisque temperature is independent of the eventual glaze cone.
## Choosing, in practice
If you are buying your first kiln, or firing at a community studio, **fire cone 6**. The economics, the equipment and the modern [glaze palette](/blog/what-is-ceramic-glaze-made-of) all point that way, and nothing you make will be worse for it.
Move to cone 10 when you specifically want a reduction effect you cannot get otherwise, and you have access to a gas kiln. Chasing the temperature without the atmosphere is paying for the expensive half of high-fire and skipping the interesting half.
## What changes in practice when you switch
Moving between cones is not just a controller setting, and it helps to know what else moves with it.
**Your clay body must change.** A cone 10 body at cone 6 stays porous and weak; a cone 6 body at cone 10 bloats and can slump onto the shelf. There is no overlap to exploit here.
**Every glaze recipe changes.** Flux packages are chosen for a temperature window, so a cone 10 recipe fired at cone 6 comes out dry and unmelted. Reformulating is real work, not a substitution.
**Your firing schedule changes.** Mid-fire work often benefits from a slow cool through the range where crystals form, which affects matt and satin surfaces noticeably. Many disappointing cone 6 mattes are the result of a fast cool rather than a bad recipe.
**Your test tiles do not transfer.** A tile fired at one cone tells you nothing about the other, so a change of cone means rebuilding your tile wall from scratch.
None of this is a reason to stay where you are if the move is right. It is a reason to change once, deliberately, rather than drifting between cones and wondering why results are inconsistent.
## Where to go next
Your cone decision constrains your clay, so read [stoneware, porcelain or earthenware](/blog/stoneware-porcelain-earthenware) next. If you are choosing glazes to match, [what is ceramic glaze made of](/blog/what-is-ceramic-glaze-made-of) explains why a glaze only works in a narrow window. No kiln yet? [Firing clay without a kiln](/blog/firing-clay-without-a-kiln) covers the realistic options.
---
# Stoneware, Porcelain or Earthenware: Choosing a Clay Body
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/stoneware-porcelain-earthenware
Published: 2026-04-22
Category: Pottery basics
Tags: Pottery basics, Clay bodies, Firing, Wheel throwing
Summary: Start with a grogged mid-fire stoneware. It throws forgivingly, survives uneven drying, vitrifies at cone 6, and works for tableware. Move to porcelain later.
A clay body is a recipe, not a raw material: clays blended with fluxes and fillers to hit a firing range, a colour, a shrinkage rate and a working feel. The categories below describe how far they vitrify, which drives everything else.
> **From the studio:** I switched to porcelain far too early, because the pots in the books I liked were porcelain. Three months of tearing walls and warped rims later I went back to a grogged stoneware and improved faster in six weeks than in the whole porcelain period. The material was not the problem; the timing was.
## Earthenware
Fires low, roughly [cone](/blog/cone-6-vs-cone-10) 06 to cone 02 (1000–1100 °C), and never fully vitrifies. Absorption stays around 5–15%, so an earthenware pot depends on its glaze for water resistance. Terracotta is the familiar red version; white earthenware is the base of most commercial dinnerware.
**Good for**: bright low-fire colour, majolica, terracotta planters, sculpture, school and community settings with low-temperature kilns.
**Watch for**: crazed glaze lets water into the body, where it can eventually seep, harbour bacteria, or crack the piece with freeze–thaw. Not a good outdoor choice in a frosty climate.
## Stoneware
Fires cone 5–10 and vitrifies to under 1–2% absorption. Chunky, forgiving, strong, and the default for functional pottery. Colours run from white and buff through speckled brown, depending on iron content and firing atmosphere.
**Good for**: essentially everything — mugs, bowls, plates, planters, garden work, sculpture.
**Watch for**: match the body's rated cone to your kiln. Cone 10 stoneware fired to cone 6 is porous and weak.
### Grog changes stoneware more than the colour does
[Grog](/blog/what-is-grog-in-clay) is crushed pre-fired clay added back into the body. More grog means:
- lower shrinkage and fewer drying cracks
- better resistance to warping in big or flat pieces
- more tooth, so slabs and coils hold up
- a rougher surface, harder on your hands and on trimming tools
- more open texture, so a thin wall feels less smooth
A fine-grog throwing body is the sweet spot for beginners. A heavily grogged sculpture body is unpleasant on the wheel and excellent for large hand-built work.
## Porcelain
Fires cone 6–13, vitrifies hard, and goes translucent when thin. Made from kaolin plus feldspar and silica, with almost no iron, which is where the whiteness comes from.
**Good for**: white grounds that make glaze colours sing, fine translucent work, crisp forms.
**Watch for**: it is genuinely harder to use. Porcelain has short plasticity (it tears rather than stretches), warps readily, slumps if thrown thin and wet, and shows every drying inconsistency. Modern "porcelaineous stoneware" bodies are a good halfway house.
## Specialist bodies worth knowing
- **Raku body**: heavily grogged, open, built to survive thermal shock from being pulled glowing out of a kiln. Never watertight.
- **Paper clay**: cellulose fibre mixed into any body. Extraordinary green strength, joins wet to dry, and burns out in the firing. Brilliant for repairs and sculpture.
- **Black clay**: heavy manganese or iron stain. Handsome, and manganese fumes in the firing warrant good kiln ventilation.
## How to actually choose
1. **What cone can you fire?** This eliminates most options immediately. Your kiln or your studio decides for you.
2. **Functional or sculptural?** Functional means you want vitrified — stoneware or porcelain. Sculpture can be anything.
3. **Wheel or hand built?** Wheel wants finer grog and good plasticity. Hand building wants more grog.
4. **What colour ground do you want under the glaze?** White shows colour truly; buff and iron bodies mute and warm it, and speckle through pale glazes.
## Test before you commit to a bag pile
Buy one bag. Make a shrinkage test bar: roll a slab, cut a strip, mark exactly 10 cm with a needle, and record the length at bone dry and after glaze firing. That gives you shrinkage percentage — usually 10–14% total — which you need for sizing lids, tiles and anything that has to fit something else.
While you are at it, fire a small unglazed tile to your cone, weigh it, boil it in water for two hours, cool it submerged overnight, dry the surface and reweigh. The percentage gain is your absorption. Under 1% for tableware is what you are looking for, and that one test tells you more about a clay body than any product description.
## Two tests worth running on any new body
A clay body's datasheet tells you what the manufacturer measured. These two tests tell you what happens in your kiln, and both take minutes of actual work.
**Shrinkage.** Roll a slab, cut a strip about 12 cm long, and scribe two lines exactly 10 cm apart with a needle. Measure the distance again when bone dry, and again after the glaze firing. Total shrinkage of 10 to 14 percent is normal. Above that, expect cracking and warping, and consider a more grogged body. You also need this number to size lids, tiles and anything that must fit something else.
**Absorption.** Fire a small unglazed tile to your cone. Weigh it dry, boil it in water for two hours, leave it submerged overnight to cool, dry the surface and weigh it again. The percentage gain is the absorption: under 1 percent is fully vitrified, around 3 percent is acceptable for most functional work, and 5 percent or more means a porous body that depends entirely on its glaze.
Write both numbers on a card and keep it with the clay. Two minutes of measuring saves you from discovering a body's real behaviour on a piece you cared about.
## Where to go next
Your kiln and your cone constrain this choice, so read [cone 6 vs cone 10](/blog/cone-6-vs-cone-10) alongside it. To understand what the grog is actually doing, see [what is grog in clay](/blog/what-is-grog-in-clay). And when you are ready to buy, [where to buy clay for pottery](/blog/where-to-buy-clay-for-pottery) covers what to ask a supplier for.
---
# Glaze Crawling: Why It Happens and How to Stop It
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/glaze-crawling-causes-and-fixes
Published: 2026-04-08
Updated: 2026-08-01
Category: Glazing
Tags: Glazing, Troubleshooting, Firing
Summary: Crawling means the glaze did not wet the surface. Clean the bisque, thin the application, and check for high-shrinkage materials or dusty studio air.
Crawling looks dramatic: bare islands of clay with thick, rolled-up beads of glaze around them, as if the glaze deliberately backed away. That is exactly what happened. Molten glaze has surface tension, and if it cannot bond to the clay underneath, it pulls itself into blobs the way water beads on a waxed car.
> **From the studio:** I lost a whole shelf of mugs to crawling one winter and blamed the glaze for weeks. It was the studio. I had been sanding [bisque](/blog/clay-stages-leather-hard-bone-dry) on the same bench where I glazed, and every pot picked up a fine film of dust before it ever hit the bucket. A damp sponge, wiped over each pot the same morning I glazed it, ended the problem entirely.
So every fix comes down to one question: **what stopped the glaze from sticking?**
## Cause 1: A dirty or greasy bisque surface
The most common cause by a wide margin. Fingerprints from carrying bisque, oil from a workbench, dust that settled during the week, or kiln wash that transferred from a shelf.
**Fix**: Wipe every bisque piece with a damp (not soaking) sponge and let it dry fully before glazing. Handle glazed-to-be surfaces by the foot or with clean hands. In a shared studio, glaze on the same day you wipe.
## Cause 2: Glaze applied too thick
A thick layer shrinks more as it dries and as the binders burn out. If the dried glaze layer cracks before it melts, the melt closes those cracks into beads instead of healing them.
**Fix**: Check for dry cracks in the raw glaze before firing — if you can see a crazed pattern in the unfired coat, it will crawl. Thin the glaze, dip for less time, or let the piece dry between coats. Bisque that is very porous (underfired bisque, cone 08) grabs glaze fast and thick; firing bisque a cone higher gives you more control.
## Cause 3: Dusty or over-sanded bisque
Sanding bisque leaves fine powder in every pore. That powder is a release layer.
**Fix**: Sand, then rinse or wipe thoroughly. Sand outdoors or with a wet method — dry silica dust is a genuine lung hazard, not just a glaze problem.
## Cause 4: High-shrinkage materials in the glaze recipe
Plastic clays and colloidal materials shrink hard on drying. Recipes heavy in raw kaolin, ball clay, or bentonite are crawl-prone, especially over 20% total clay content.
**Fix**: Substitute part of the raw kaolin with calcined kaolin. Calcined clay has already lost its chemical water, so it does not shrink. Replacing a quarter to a third of the raw clay usually cures a chronic recipe without changing the fired result.
## Cause 5: Glaze over glaze, or glaze over slip
Two layers means two shrinkage rates and a weak boundary. Layering is a legitimate technique, but it doubles the [thickness](/blog/how-to-glaze-pottery-at-home) problem.
**Fix**: Apply the under-layer thin, let it dry completely, and keep the total thickness at roughly what a single dip would give. Do not layer over a slip that has itself dried and cracked.
## Cause 6: Soluble salts and hard water
Some clays and some tap water carry soluble salts that migrate to the bisque surface as it dries, leaving a scum that the glaze will not wet.
**Fix**: If you see a whitish bloom on dried bisque, wipe it. Mixing glazes with distilled or filtered water eliminates a whole category of intermittent problems in hard-water areas.
## Diagnosing yours in five minutes
1. **Where is it?** Crawling only on rims and edges points to thick application. Crawling in random patches points to contamination.
2. **Was the raw glaze cracked?** If you did not look, look next time. This one observation splits the causes in half.
3. **One glaze or all of them?** One glaze means the recipe. All glazes means your bisque prep or your studio air.
4. **New bag of anything?** New clay, new glaze batch, new water source, new shelf wash.
5. **Did anything sit around?** A pot glazed and left for three weeks in a dusty studio picks up a fresh dust layer *on top* of the glaze, which also crawls.
## Using it on purpose
Crawl glazes — sometimes called lichen or beading glazes — are recipes deliberately loaded with magnesium carbonate or high raw clay content to produce controlled crawling. They are beautiful on vertical surfaces and terrible anywhere food touches, because the beads leave unglazed clay exposed and the texture harbours bacteria. Keep them on the outsides of vases and sculpture.
## Preventing it, rather than diagnosing it
Once you know the causes, prevention collapses into a short routine that costs almost nothing.
1. **Wipe every bisque piece** with a damp sponge and let it dry before glazing. This alone removes the single biggest cause.
2. **Handle bisque by the foot** once it is wiped, or with clean hands.
3. **Glaze on the same day you sand.** Sanding dust settles on every horizontal surface in the room.
4. **Sieve glaze that has been standing** for weeks, and stir every bucket right to the bottom before use.
5. **Look at the raw glaze** before the piece goes in the kiln. If you can see a fine crazed pattern in the dried coat, it will crawl. Wash it off and reapply thinner.
6. **Keep total thickness to about one dip**, even when layering.
7. **Use filtered water** for mixing if you are in a hard water area, which removes an entire category of intermittent problems.
That routine takes perhaps two extra minutes per firing. Set against a shelf of ruined pots, it is the best trade in the studio.
## Where to go next
Most crawling traces back to application, so [how to glaze pottery at home](/blog/how-to-glaze-pottery-at-home) is the practical companion to this post. If the fault is in the recipe rather than your bisque, [how to make ceramic glaze](/blog/how-to-make-ceramic-glaze) covers substituting calcined kaolin. And [what is ceramic glaze made of](/blog/what-is-ceramic-glaze-made-of) explains why high-clay recipes crawl in the first place.
---
# Centering Clay on the Wheel: A Method That Works on Day One
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/centering-clay-on-the-wheel
Published: 2026-03-18
Updated: 2026-07-02
Category: Wheel throwing
Tags: Wheel throwing, Beginners, Technique
Summary: Fast wheel, elbows braced against your hips, wet clay, and pressure that only ever increases or holds — never wobbles. Cone up and press down twice before you open.
Most people fail at centering because they try to overpower the clay with their arms. Clay is stronger than your arms and it spins 180 times a minute. What actually centres clay is **a hand that does not move**. Your job is to build a rigid structure out of your body, put it in the right place, and let the wheel do the work.
> **From the studio:** I spent my first two months trying to muscle the clay into submission, and my forearms gave out long before the clay did. The session it clicked, I had my elbows jammed into my hips and I was almost bored — the clay just went quiet and stayed there. That is what centering feels like when you stop fighting.
## Set up before you touch the clay
- **Seat height**: your shoulders should be above the clay so you can press down as well as in. If you are level with the wheel head, raise your seat or lower the wheel.
- **Stance**: knees against the splash pan or wheel frame, elbows tucked into your hips or braced on your thighs. Every joint from the wheel to your hands should be locked.
- **Speed**: fast. A wobble at high speed averages into a blur your hands can hold; the same wobble at low speed knocks your hands around.
- **Water**: enough to keep the clay slick, not enough to soften it. Re-wet whenever you feel drag.
## Attach the clay properly
Dry the wheel head and the base of the ball. Throw the ball down hard, once, as close to the centre as you can eyeball. A ball attached off-centre by 2 cm is a fight; the same ball within 5 mm is nearly centred already. Slap the sides with a cupped hand while the wheel turns slowly to rough it in before you ever add water.
## The two moves
Everything in centering is a variant of coning up and pressing down.
### Coning up
With the wheel fast, squeeze from both sides with the heels of your hands, hands touching each other, and pull upward as you squeeze. The mass rises into a cone. This does two things: it homogenises the clay by dragging it through itself — which is where [wedging errors](/blog/wedging-clay-properly) get fixed — and it lets you feel where the mass wants to go.
Keep squeezing until the cone is roughly twice as tall as it is wide. Do not let it get so tall that it whips.
### Pressing down
Left hand (for a counter-clockwise wheel) braces the side. Right hand goes over the top, heel of the palm on the peak, and presses **down and slightly toward the left hand**. The cone collapses into a low dome. The two hands are a closed system: side pressure and top pressure balancing each other.
Do this cycle **at least twice**. One pass is almost never enough, and the second pass is where the clay stops arguing.
## The rule that fixes everything
**Pressure only ever increases or holds. It never decreases suddenly.**
Every off-centre lump you have ever made came from a hand that flinched. When you finish a pass, keep the pressure and slowly, over two or three full rotations, ease your hands outward and off. Slick your hands with water first so they release rather than grab.
## How to know it is centred
Do not stare at the clay — your eyes will lie to you about a symmetrical wobble. Instead:
- Rest a knuckle lightly against the side. A centred mass feels like continuous contact. An off-centre one taps.
- Hold a pin or needle tool steady near the surface without touching. The gap should not change.
- Close your eyes and feel. This works better than looking, every time.
## Finishing the centred mound
Before opening, flatten the top and press down firmly on it with a flat palm or rib. That compression is what prevents [S-cracks in the base](/blog/drying-pots-evenly) later. Then set the width you want: a low, wide dome for bowls, a taller narrower one for cylinders.
## Common failure modes
| Symptom | Cause | Fix |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Clay spirals off to one side | Hands drifting with the clay | Brace elbows on hips; stop chasing |
| Surface goes slimy and slips | Too much water, too long | Sponge off, work faster, use less water |
| A hard lump keeps reappearing | Uneven wedging or an air pocket | Cone up two more times to homogenise |
| Centred, then wobbles when you open | Released pressure abruptly | Ease off over several rotations |
| Arms exhausted after one ball | Muscling instead of bracing | Lock joints; use body weight, not biceps |
## How long this takes
For most people, reliably centring 500 g takes somewhere between three and eight hours of wheel time. That is normal. Centre and recycle the same ball twenty times in a session rather than trying to make twenty pots — the repetition without the outcome pressure is what builds the feel.
## A practice session that actually builds the skill
Most people practise centering by trying to make pots, which mixes two hard skills and teaches neither well.
A better session looks like this:
1. **Take one ball of about 600 g.** That is all you need for an hour.
2. **Centre it. Then wire it off the wheel head, re-wedge it, and centre it again.** No opening, no pulling, no pot.
3. **Do that twenty times.** It sounds tedious and it is the single fastest route to a reliable centering hand.
4. **Close your eyes for the last five.** Removing sight forces you to feel the clay instead of watching it, and almost everyone finds their hands are better judges than their eyes.
What this removes is the outcome pressure. When every ball must become a pot, a wobble feels like a failure and you tense up — which is exactly what puts the clay off centre. When the ball is going back in the bag regardless, you relax, and relaxed bracing is the whole technique.
Two or three sessions like this typically do more than a month of trying to make mugs.
## Where to go next
Centering is much easier on well-prepared clay, so [wedging clay properly](/blog/wedging-clay-properly) is the post to read alongside this one. Once you are opening pots, [drying pots evenly](/blog/drying-pots-evenly) explains where most thrown work is actually lost. And if you want to practise form away from the wheel, [the pinch pot](/blog/pinch-pot-guide) teaches the same wall-thickness discipline with no equipment.
---
# Baking Polymer Clay Without Burning or Cracking It
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/baking-polymer-clay-without-burning
Published: 2026-03-02
Updated: 2026-07-19
Category: Polymer clay
Tags: Polymer clay, Troubleshooting, Beginners
Summary: Bake at the brand's stated temperature for at least 30 minutes per 6 mm of thickness. Verify with a separate thermometer and tent the piece with foil to stop scorching.
[Polymer clay](/blog/modeling-clay-vs-polymer-clay) is PVC particles suspended in plasticiser. Baking does not "dry" it — it fuses the particles into a solid mass. That process needs a specific temperature held for a real length of time, which is why the two failure modes are opposites: **scorched outside** (too hot) and **snaps in your fingers** (not long enough).
> **From the studio:** I ruined three pieces in a row before buying a five-pound oven thermometer. My oven, set to 130 C, was peaking at 168 C every time the element cycled — comfortably close to scorching. The dial was not lying exactly, it was just describing an average I could not see.
## Your oven is lying to you
A domestic oven set to 130 °C typically cycles between roughly 110 °C and 155 °C as the thermostat switches the element on and off. Polymer clay scorches somewhere around 175 °C. The set point is fine; the *swing* is what burns your work.
**Buy an oven thermometer.** A cheap dial thermometer sitting next to the piece is the single most useful polymer clay tool there is. Preheat properly, let the reading stabilise, and adjust the dial until the thermometer reads what you want — not what the knob says.
## Temperature and time
Follow the brand on the packet; they genuinely differ:
| Brand | Typical temperature |
| --- | --- |
| Sculpey III | 130 °C |
| Premo | 130 °C |
| Fimo Professional | 110 °C |
| Cernit | 130 °C |
| Kato Polyclay | 150 °C |
Time is where people go wrong. The common "15 minutes" on the packet is a minimum, not a target. Use **at least 30 minutes per 6 mm of thickness**, and measure thickness at the thickest point. An hour at the correct temperature harms nothing and produces a far stronger piece. Underbaked polymer clay is weak, chalky and snaps cleanly — that is the signature.
## Stopping the scorching
Heat reaches your piece three ways: hot air, conduction from the tray, and direct infrared from the element. The last one is what burns edges and thin points brown while the middle is still curing.
- **Tent it.** Cover the piece with an inverted foil tray or a loose foil tent. This blocks radiant heat and evens out the air temperature dramatically. It is the fix for nine out of ten burning problems.
- **Insulate the tray.** Bake on a ceramic tile with a sheet of plain paper or cardstock on top. Tile evens out heat; paper prevents shiny flat spots.
- **Stay off the top rack.** Middle rack, always.
- **Skip the fan** if your oven's convection setting blasts. Gentle convection is fine and actually evens things out; aggressive fans dry surfaces.
## Supporting shapes
Polymer clay softens slightly before it cures, so unsupported thin arms and overhangs droop. Bed delicate pieces in cornstarch, polyester fibrefill, or a nest of foil while they bake. All three brush off afterwards.
## Cooling and finishing
Let the piece cool completely before you judge it. Polymer clay is flexible and disappointingly soft while hot, and reaches full strength only when cool — plenty of people rebake perfectly good pieces because they tested them at 100 °C.
Once cool, you can sand wet with 400 through 1500 grit, buff on a soft cloth for a natural sheen, or apply a compatible varnish. Do not use nail polish or generic craft varnishes: many react with the plasticiser and stay tacky for years.
## Troubleshooting quickly
| Symptom | Cause | Fix |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Brown edges, pale centre | Radiant heat from the element | Tent with foil, move down a rack |
| Snaps easily, chalky break | Underbaked | Rebake for longer at correct temperature |
| Bubbles or blisters | Air trapped during [conditioning](/blog/how-to-sculpt-with-polymer-clay), or too hot | Condition thoroughly, roll out trapped air, lower temperature |
| Shiny flat patch | Direct contact with the tray | Bake on paper or cardstock |
| Darkened translucent clay | Slight overbake — translucents darken first | Drop 5–10 °C, tent, use them as your canary |
| Sticky surface after varnishing | Incompatible varnish | Remove with rubbing alcohol, use a polymer-specific finish |
## Conditioning is half the battle
Under-conditioned clay bakes weak no matter what the oven does. Work each block until it is uniformly soft and pliable — by hand for five to ten minutes, or run it through a pasta machine on the thickest setting, fold, and repeat twenty times, folding the same way each time so you do not trap air. Well conditioned clay stretches before it tears; badly conditioned clay crumbles at the edges when you fold it.
## A reliable baking routine
Once you have an oven thermometer, the rest is a routine you can repeat without thinking.
1. **Preheat properly** and give the oven ten minutes past the beep to stabilise. The thermostat overshoots badly during the initial climb.
2. **Check the thermometer**, not the dial, and adjust until the reading matches the brand's temperature.
3. **Set the piece on a ceramic tile** with a sheet of plain paper under it, on the middle rack.
4. **Tent it** with an inverted foil tray or a loose foil dome.
5. **Support any overhang** with cornstarch, polyester fibrefill or crumpled foil.
6. **Time it from when the oven is back at temperature**, not from when the door closed — opening the door drops it by 20 °C or more.
7. **Bake 30 minutes per 6 mm** at the thickest point, and round up.
8. **Let it cool in the oven** with the door shut, then judge it cool.
The two steps people skip are the tent and the cooling, and between them they account for most of the burnt edges and most of the pieces wrongly declared underbaked.
## Where to go next
If the piece is bigger than a coin, build it over an armature first — [how to sculpt with polymer clay](/blog/how-to-sculpt-with-polymer-clay) covers that and the bake-in-stages technique. For storing what is left of the block, see [how to store polymer clay](/blog/how-to-store-polymer-clay). And if you are still deciding which material you need, [is modeling clay the same as polymer clay](/blog/modeling-clay-vs-polymer-clay) settles it.
---
# Wedging Clay: Ram's Head vs Spiral, and Why Both Beat Kneading
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/wedging-clay-properly
Published: 2026-02-19
Category: Pottery basics
Tags: Pottery basics, Wheel throwing, Technique
Summary: Wedge on a porous surface with your body weight, not your arms. Ram's head is easier to learn; spiral is faster once you can do it. Cut and check for air pockets.
Wedging does three jobs at once: it drives out air pockets, it evens out moisture through the mass, and it aligns the plate-like clay particles into a spiral that helps the clay rise on the wheel. Kneading bread dough, by contrast, deliberately *folds air in* — which is why bread technique on clay makes things worse.
> **From the studio:** For a year I wedged on a bench that was slightly too high, and my wrists complained about it every single session. Dropping the bench by fifteen centimetres so I could lean over it with straight arms fixed the pain completely, and my clay came out better as well, because I could finally use my weight instead of my joints.
## Your surface matters more than your technique
Wedge on something porous and unyielding: a plaster bat, a slab of concrete, a hardwood bench, or a canvas-covered board. Plaster and unsealed concrete pull a little water out, which is useful for softening clay. Canvas is kind on your wrists but sheds fibre into the clay over time and holds dry dust — wipe it down wet, never dry-brush it.
The surface should be at a height where you can lean over it with straight arms. If you are bending your elbows to press, the bench is too high and your shoulders will be finished in ten minutes.
## Ram's head
The easier method to learn, and perfectly adequate for anything under about 2 kg.
1. Place a rough ball on the bench. Both hands on the far side, thumbs on top, fingers wrapped underneath.
2. Rock forward, pressing down and away with the heels of your palms and your body weight. The mass flattens forward into a wedge.
3. Roll it back toward you a quarter turn, lifting the near edge, so the flattened section folds under.
4. Press again in the same spot.
Repeat 20–40 times. The characteristic ram's-head shape — two horns and a snout — develops as the outer edges fold in. Keep the mass compact; if it spreads sideways you are pressing outward rather than forward.
## Spiral wedging
Faster, handles larger masses, and produces the particle alignment throwers care about. It is harder to learn because the two hands do different things.
1. Left hand cradles and rotates the mass roughly 30° counter-clockwise on each cycle.
2. Right hand presses down and forward with the heel of the palm, always on the *same spot* relative to the mass.
3. Because the mass turns and the press does not, the clay folds into itself in a spiral. A conical shell with a shell-like spiral seam develops on the side.
The mistake everyone makes is pressing in a new place each time, which just flattens the clay repeatedly. Pick one spot, keep hitting it, and let the rotation do the folding.
## How to tell when it is done
- **Look**: uniform colour, no marbling. Marbling means uneven moisture.
- **Feel**: uniform resistance across the mass. Any hard or soft patch means keep going.
- **Cut**: slice the ball in half with a wire. The cut face should be featureless — no voids, no streaks, no lighter dry seams. Slam the halves back together and carry on if it is not.
Cutting is the only honest test. Do it every few sessions until your hands learn the feel.
## Blending clays
Wedging is also how you mix clay bodies or bring [reclaim](/blog/how-to-make-slip-for-pottery) back to a consistent stiffness. Cut a soft block and a stiff block into slices, stack them alternately like a deck of cards, compress the stack, and spiral wedge the result. Twenty rotations turns a striped block into one homogeneous body.
To dry over-wet reclaim, spread it 3 cm thick on plaster, wait until the surface stiffens, turn it over, and wedge once it is uniformly throwable. Never add dry powder to wet clay to stiffen it — it never fully hydrates and you will find the lumps later, usually with a rib, halfway up a wall.
## Looking after your body
Wedging injures more potters than any other task. Keep the bench low, keep your arms straight, drive from your legs and hips, and stop before your wrists complain. If you have a wrist injury, a slab roller and repeated cut-and-slam (lift the block, cut it, slam the halves together, repeat) removes air and homogenises clay with no wrist load at all. It is slower, and it works.
## Reclaiming and blending on the wedging table
Wedging is not only preparation. It is also how clay gets repaired, blended and brought back into use, and these three jobs come up constantly.
**Softening stiff clay.** Poke deep holes into the block with a dowel, fill them with water, re-bag it tightly, and leave it for a few days. Then wedge. Adding water to the outside alone gives you a slippery skin over a hard core, which is worse than what you started with.
**Stiffening soft clay.** Spread it about 3 cm thick on a plaster bat or a dry wooden board and leave it until the surface firms, turning once. Then wedge. Never add dry powder to wet clay — it never fully hydrates and you will find the lumps later with a rib, halfway up a wall.
**Blending two bodies or two moisture levels.** Cut both blocks into slices with a wire, stack the slices alternately like a deck of cards, compress the stack, and spiral wedge the result. Twenty rotations turns a striped block into one uniform body.
Cut and check the face each time. A featureless cut is the only proof that any of these worked.
## Where to go next
Wedging feeds straight into [centering clay on the wheel](/blog/centering-clay-on-the-wheel) — a badly wedged ball is a fight you cannot win with your arms. If you are wedging reclaim, [how to make slip for pottery](/blog/how-to-make-slip-for-pottery) covers the slaking stage that comes before it. And if your clay is arriving too stiff or too soft in the first place, [choosing a clay body](/blog/stoneware-porcelain-earthenware) is worth ten minutes.
---
# Why Air-Dry Clay Cracks (and the Fixes That Actually Work)
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/air-dry-clay-cracking
Published: 2026-02-04
Updated: 2026-08-12
Category: Troubleshooting
Tags: Air-dry clay, Troubleshooting, Beginners
Summary: Cracks come from uneven drying. Keep walls under 1 cm, keep thickness consistent, and slow the drying with a loose plastic tent for the first 24 hours.
Air-dry clay cracks for one reason: **the outside shrinks before the inside does**. Everything else — thin lips, thick bases, radiators, fans, joins that open up overnight — is a variation on that theme. Once you see cracking as a moisture-gradient problem rather than a clay-quality problem, the fixes get obvious.
> **From the studio:** The pot that finally taught me this was a slab box I left half-built overnight. The base had gone firm and the walls were still soft, and by morning there was a hairline crack running the length of every seam. Nothing was wrong with the clay. I had simply built one object out of two different moisture levels.
## What is actually happening
As water leaves clay, the particles pull closer together and the piece shrinks. Air-dry clay typically shrinks 5–8% by volume. If the surface loses water in two hours and the core takes two days, the skin is trying to occupy a smaller volume than the wet mass underneath it. Something has to give, and clay has almost no tensile strength, so it tears.
That tearing shows up in predictable places:
- **Rim cracks** — thin edges dry first and pull against a wetter wall.
- **Base cracks (an S or a straight line)** — a thick floor holds water while the walls tighten around it.
- **Join cracks** — two pieces at different moisture levels shrink by different amounts.
- **Surface crazing** — a skin that dried in minutes over a soft body.
## The five fixes, in order of impact
### 1. Keep the wall thickness even
Consistency beats thinness. A piece that is 8 mm everywhere dries better than one that runs from 3 mm at the rim to 20 mm at the base. Aim for **6–10 mm** and check by pressing a needle through a scrap area or by feel.
### 2. Hollow anything thick
Solid forms thicker than about 2.5 cm are asking for it. Build over a crumpled paper or foil armature, or build two halves and join them. A hollow form dries from both faces and the gradient stays shallow.
### 3. Slow the first 24 hours
This is the single highest-leverage habit. Tent the piece loosely with a plastic bag — not sealed, just a lid on the airflow — for the first day, then uncover it. You are not stopping the drying, you are letting the core catch up.
Never dry near a radiator, in direct sun, or in front of a fan. Heat accelerates the surface only.
### 4. Turn the piece
A pot sitting on a nonporous table dries everywhere except the base. Set work on a wire rack, a wooden board, or a piece of drywall, and flip or rotate it once a day. Drywall in particular pulls moisture out of the base at roughly the rate the air pulls it from the sides.
### 5. Join wet to wet
Never attach a soft coil to a leather-hard wall. Bring both parts to the same stiffness, score both faces with a needle or a serrated rib, wet them, and press until a small bead of clay squeezes out. Blend that bead in — a join that only touches is a crack waiting to open.
## Repairing what has already cracked
Small hairlines are cosmetic and fillable. Structural cracks through a wall are worth repairing properly:
1. Widen the crack into a shallow V with a needle tool. A filled hairline pops back open; a filled V has something to grip.
2. Dampen both faces with a wet brush and wait a minute for the water to soak in.
3. Press in a slurry of the same clay mixed to a thick toothpaste. For a stronger repair, mix in a few drops of PVA glue — this is not cheating, air-dry clay is already a polymer-bound body.
4. Overfill slightly, tent under plastic, dry slowly, then sand flush with 220-grit once bone dry.
## Two habits that prevent almost everything
**[Compress every surface](/blog/drying-pots-evenly) you make.** Run a rib, the back of a spoon, or a damp finger firmly over rims, bases and joins before they stiffen. Compression aligns the clay particles and closes micro-voids that later become crack origins.
**Finish the piece in one session, or wrap it.** Clay left half-built overnight becomes a two-moisture object. If you must stop, wrap the whole thing airtight and let it equalise for a few hours before you carry on.
## When it is not your technique
Old air-dry clay that has been opened and re-bagged loses binder and dries short and crumbly. If a fresh block behaves and the old one does not, it is the clay. Knead a little water and a few drops of PVA into an old block before you write it off — five minutes of wedging revives most of it.
## A quick pre-flight check
Before you set a piece down to dry, thirty seconds of checking prevents most losses.
- **Pinch the wall at three heights.** Rim, middle and base should feel the same. If the base is double the rim, thin it now while you still can.
- **Look for a thick spot.** Anywhere solid over about 2.5 cm should be hollowed or built over a core.
- **Run a wet finger round the rim**, firmly. Rims tear first, and compression is what stops it.
- **Check every join** for a blended bead of clay. A join that only touches is a crack that has not happened yet.
- **Is anything thin and sticking out?** Wrap it in a scrap of plastic before you cover the piece.
- **Where is it going to sit?** Wire rack or drywall, not a plastic table, and not near a radiator or a window.
That list takes less time than making a cup of tea, and it catches the four faults responsible for nearly every crack described above.
## Where to go next
If your piece is thicker than a couple of centimetres, read [how to build hollow with pinch pots](/blog/pinch-pot-guide) before you start the next one. If the crack appeared where two parts meet rather than in open wall, the problem is the join, and [score and slip joins](/blog/score-and-slip-joins) covers it properly. And if you are weighing up air-dry against the alternatives, [is modeling clay the same as polymer clay](/blog/modeling-clay-vs-polymer-clay) lays out what each material can and cannot do.
---
# The Stages of Clay: Slip, Plastic, Leather-Hard, Bone Dry, Bisque
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/clay-stages-leather-hard-bone-dry
Published: 2026-01-21
Updated: 2026-06-30
Category: Pottery basics
Tags: Pottery basics, Beginners, Firing
Summary: Clay passes through five workable states. Trim at leather-hard, join at soft leather-hard, never carve bone dry, and never fire anything that still feels cool.
Almost every piece of pottery advice contains a hidden condition: *at the right stage*. Attach a handle at the wrong stage and it falls off. Trim at the wrong stage and you tear the pot or blunt your tool. Learning to read the stages by touch is the single fastest way to stop making mysterious mistakes.
> **From the studio:** The cheek test sounds like folklore until you try it on a pot you were sure was dry. Mine felt bone dry in the hand and distinctly cool against my face, and the extra day I gave it is probably the reason it came out of the bisque in one piece rather than three.
## Slip
Clay suspended in water, from a pourable cream to a thick slurry. Used for casting into plaster moulds, for decorating (engobes), and — thickened — as the glue in [score-and-[slip](/blog/what-is-slip-in-pottery) joins](/blog/score-and-slip-joins).
**You can**: cast, paint, trail, join.
**You cannot**: build anything that holds its own shape.
Slip made from the same clay body as your piece shrinks at the same rate. Slip from a different body does not, and that is where decoration flakes off.
## Plastic (workable)
The stage clay arrives in. It holds a shape but bends without tearing. Roll a coil and wrap it around your finger: plastic clay makes the bend with no cracks along the outside of the curve.
**You can**: throw, coil, pinch, slab-build, press into moulds.
**You cannot**: trim, carve detail, or stack anything on it.
Too soft is as much a problem as too hard. Clay that slumps under its own weight has too much water — wedge it on a plaster bat or a dry board for twenty minutes.
## Leather-hard
The most important stage, and really a range. The clay is stiff enough to hold its shape when handled but still holds moisture. It cuts cleanly rather than smearing, and a fingernail leaves a mark without sinking in.
It is worth splitting into two:
**Soft leather-hard** — cool to the touch, slightly yielding, darker in colour. This is when you attach handles, spouts and feet, and when you join slabs. Both halves of any join should be at this stage.
**Firm leather-hard** — holds a crisp edge, barely yields, lighter in colour. This is when you trim on the wheel, carve, burnish and stamp.
**You can**: trim, carve, join, burnish, apply slip decoration.
**You cannot**: reshape the form, or re-wet a whole piece evenly without risking cracks.
If a piece stiffens past the stage you need, wrap it in plastic with a damp cloth (not touching the clay) and leave it overnight. Moisture equalises through the wall and it comes back down. Spraying the surface does not work — you get a wet skin over a dry body, which is exactly the gradient that cracks.
## Bone dry (greenware)
All the free water has evaporated. The clay is pale, brittle, chalky, and roughly the same temperature as the room. This is the fragile stage — a bone dry pot will snap if you look at it wrong.
**You can**: sand lightly with a damp sponge or fine mesh, and fire it.
**You cannot**: carve, join, or add anything wet. Water on bone dry clay causes it to swell locally and crack.
**Do not fire clay that still feels cool.** Chemically bound water is driven off around 500 °C, but *free* water turns to steam near 100 °C, and steam trapped inside a wall will blow the piece — and its neighbours — apart. If in doubt, wait another day, or candle the kiln at 90–100 °C for several hours before the real climb.
## Bisque
The first firing, usually to cone 06–04 (roughly 1000 °C). The clay has passed through quartz inversion and the chemical water is gone, so it can no longer be dissolved back into slip. It stays porous, which is exactly the point: porous bisque sucks glaze water out of the glaze and leaves an even coat on the surface.
**You can**: glaze, sand safely, handle without fear.
**You cannot**: reclaim it, carve it, or re-join it.
Bisque ware that has been handled with greasy fingers will resist glaze in patches. Wipe with a damp sponge before glazing and let it dry.
## After bisque: vitrification
The glaze firing takes the body to maturity, where the clay particles partially fuse. Stoneware fired to its rated cone absorbs under about 1% water and rings when tapped. Underfired stoneware absorbs water, stains, and can eventually crack from freeze–thaw or from moisture reaching a crazed glaze.
## A quick reference
| Stage | Feel | Colour | Do this |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Slip | Liquid | Dark | Cast, decorate, join |
| Plastic | Bends without cracking | Dark | Form and build |
| Soft leather-hard | Cool, slightly yields | Darkish | Attach and join |
| Firm leather-hard | Cuts crisply | Lightening | Trim and carve |
| Bone dry | Room temperature, chalky | Pale | Sand, then fire |
| Bisque | Hard, porous, gritty | Body colour | Glaze |
The whole skill is patience plus one test: touch it to your cheek. Cool means water. Water means wait.
## Moving clay backwards through the stages
Until it is fired, every stage is reversible, which is more useful than beginners expect.
**Firm leather-hard back to soft.** Wrap the piece in plastic with a damp cloth inside the wrapping but not touching the clay, and leave it overnight. Moisture equalises through the wall. Spraying the surface does not work — it gives you a wet skin over a dry body, which is the exact gradient that cracks.
**Leather-hard back to plastic.** Cut it up, wedge it, and it is workable clay again.
**Bone dry back to slip.** Break it small, cover with water, and it collapses on its own within hours. Bone dry clay slakes faster than any other state.
**Slip back to plastic.** Spread it on plaster until it stiffens, then wedge.
The one-way door is the kiln. Above roughly 500 °C the chemically bound water leaves the mineral structure permanently, and no amount of soaking will bring it back. Everything before that point is recoverable, which is why a pottery studio produces almost no waste.
## Where to go next
The stage that causes the most trouble is drying, and [drying pots evenly](/blog/drying-pots-evenly) goes deeper on it. For the joining stage specifically, see [score and slip joins](/blog/score-and-slip-joins). And once your work reaches bisque, [how to glaze pottery at home](/blog/how-to-glaze-pottery-at-home) picks up where this leaves off.
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# The Pinch Pot: The Fastest Way to Understand Clay
URL: https://myclay.online/blog/pinch-pot-guide
Published: 2026-01-09
Category: Hand building
Tags: Hand building, Beginners, Technique
Summary: Press a thumb into a ball, then pinch from the base upward in rotations, keeping walls even at about 8 mm. Compress the rim last and dry it slowly.
Every clay skill you will ever need is present in a pinch pot: making walls an even thickness, compressing surfaces so they do not crack, and drying at the right speed. No wheel, no tools, no kiln required to practise. If you are new to clay, make five of these before you do anything else.
> **From the studio:** My first five pinch pots all cracked at the rim, and I was convinced I was pinching too hard. I was not — I was leaving the rim thinner than the wall, so it dried first and tore. Ten seconds with a wet fingertip round the rim of pot number six, and that was the end of it.
## Making one
**Start with a well-shaped ball.** Roll it between your palms until it is genuinely round with no folds or seams. Folds become cracks.
**Open it.** Hold the ball in one cupped hand and press your thumb straight into the centre until about 1.5 cm from the bottom. Do not go through. Use your other thumb as a depth gauge on the outside if you are not sure.
**Pinch from the bottom up.** Thumb inside, fingers outside, squeeze gently and rotate the pot a small step. Work in rings: complete a full rotation at one height, move up, do another. Squeezing randomly makes a lumpy wall — the discipline of rings is the whole technique.
**Keep the pressure light and the rotations many.** Twenty gentle rotations beat five hard ones. Hard pinching thins one spot, and you cannot put clay back.
**Let it firm up if it slumps.** If the walls start to sag outward, set it down for fifteen minutes. Clay stiffens as it loses water and will hold a shape it could not hold when soft.
**Shape the outside.** Once the walls are close to final thickness, refine the profile by cupping the pot and pressing gently, or by rolling the base on the table to flatten it.
**Compress the rim last.** Run a wet fingertip or a small piece of soft leather around it firmly. This closes the torn particles at the edge, which is the single most common cracking point.
## Aim for 8 mm
Thick pots feel dead in the hand and dry unevenly. Very thin pots crack and warp. Around 8 mm — a bit thicker than a pound coin's diameter — is a good target for a first pot, and consistency matters more than the number. Check by pinching the wall between thumb and finger at several heights. If the top is 5 mm and the base is 15 mm, the base is where your work is.
## The three mistakes
**A thick base.** Almost everyone leaves too much clay at the bottom. The base takes twice as long to dry as the walls, shrinks late, and cracks. If yours is thick, press your thumb down into the interior floor and work it outward.
**Working too fast.** Clay from your hands loses water surprisingly quickly. If your pot goes from soft to stiff in ten minutes, your hands are warm and dry — work faster, or re-wet slightly. If it stays soggy and slumps, your clay was too wet to begin with.
**Drying it in the open.** Once finished, cover the pot loosely with plastic for a day so the rim does not race ahead of the base. Then uncover, set it on a wire rack or an upturned yoghurt lid, and let it go to bone dry over two or three days.
## How long each stage takes
One of the hardest things to judge at the start is how long to wait, so here are realistic timings for a cup-sized pinch pot in an ordinary room.
| Stage | Time | How you know |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Building | 20–40 minutes | The wall is even and the rim is compressed |
| Firming to leather-hard | 1–3 hours | Holds its shape, cool to the touch, cuts cleanly |
| Adding a foot or texture | at leather-hard | A fingernail marks it without sinking in |
| Tented under plastic | 24 hours | The whole pot is one uniform colour |
| Open drying to bone dry | 2–4 days | Room temperature against your cheek, pale and chalky |
| Bisque firing and cooling | 1–2 days | The kiln is below 100 °C before opening |
The timings stretch in a cold or humid room and shorten in a warm dry one, which is why every instruction here is written as a condition to check rather than a fixed number. A pot in a heated kitchen in winter can go from soft to leather-hard in under an hour, and the same pot in an unheated garage might take a full day.
If you need to pause part way through, wrap the pot in plastic. Clay left half-finished in open air becomes a two-moisture object, and that is the state that cracks.
## Where to go next
**Two pinch pots make a sphere.** Make two hemispheres of the same size, let them firm to [leather-hard](/blog/clay-stages-leather-hard-bone-dry), score and slip the rims, press them together, and blend the seam. You now have a hollow closed form — the basis of rattles, bud vases and most sculptural work. **Pierce it** before it dries, or trapped air will expand in the kiln.
**Add a foot.** Roll a coil, [score and slip](/blog/score-and-slip-joins) it onto the base at leather-hard, and blend it in. A foot lifts the pot visually and gives the base a path for even drying.
**Texture it.** Leather-hard pinch pots take stamps, carving, and slip decoration beautifully, and the slightly irregular surface of a hand-pinched wall makes texture read better than it does on a machine-even one.