The Great Clay Harvest

I got into keeping plants over the past year. I started thinking in December that I wanted to replant my leafy buddies in custom plant pots that match my personal aesthetic. I considered that it might be fun to make them from scratch out of clay. And, the more I thought about it, I thought it would be exciting to both collect the clay and fire it myself.

This, of course, was merely a pipe dream until the circumstances aligned this spring. I had a lot more free time than I would’ve otherwise following the completion of coursework this semester and my parents happened to be having some excavation done at their house which is on land that was previously the ancient lake bed of Lake Michigan, and pretty much 90% clay. I was able to harvest more clay than I could lift on my own and set out to refine it for pottery use.

Clay mountain

I filled this galvanized steel washbasin 2/3rds of the way and it was almost too heavy for me to move.

Saturating the clay to separate it from sand and organic matter.

Was careful not to crush these beauts with the hose.

I filled a five gallon bucket with more clay, while the rest was soaking.

After soaking it and filtering out as much organic matter as I could, I let the sand settle and poured the slip into an old pillowcase, and then an old bed sheet, to settle and filter out. I hung them up to dry.

I tied the pillow case and hung it on my photography tripod.

I learned that this pillowcase was actually a cotton/polyester blend. While it got wet on all sides, it only drained liquid through the corner seams.

I drained more clay through a 100% cotton bed sheet. This steady stream shows how the looser weave of the natural fiber is beneficial in this instance.

The clay that splashed out was usually the really fine particles suspended in the water, so I ultimately had to hose down the deck to get it out of the grain of the boards.

It rained the next day, so the humidity level has kept them from drying as fast as I would have liked. I hope to start working these clay bodies later this week and process more of the clay I harvested.