Review of the plates so far

First big decorating night - Crail Beach plate

Slipping Crail clay plates

Crail Beach clay plate footring

The base of the plate is now dry enough, after two days, to have the footring added without collapsing.

Drying the base of Crail clay plates

The rims of plates tend to dry out first and so shrink slightly, hich causes them to rise up a little. In order to get the middle of the plate to catch up with the drying rim, I flip the plates over and put a dry bat (the disk potters throw on) on top and then flip the plates back over again. The dry bat draws out some of the moisture in the base.

A good day's work

Both of these clays were lovely to use.

Plate making with Crail clay

Crail beach clay

This batch of Crail beach clay is lovely and, well, clay-like. It is taking an age to dry though, as it is so fine and not settling out. One batch out, next batch in. These will be wedged together later.

Clays from Fife!

Here are six of the clays we dug and collected from around Fife. It has been dried, slaked down to a creamy consistency, sieved, settled out, dried out and wedged. Now it is resting. From a potters point of view, in terms of workability, plasticity and strength, clay "improves" with ageing or souring. It is normally recommended that clay needs two weeks to sour, but potters in Chine and Japan used to keep clay in this plastic state to pass on to future generations. Clay also improves with being wedged (similar to kneading bread dough) or pugged (similar to passing through a sausage machine).

Still drying clay...

It has been wet. The plaster bats are wet. The clay is wet.

Yet more clay prep

The heavier clay from the bottom of the bucket has dried out quickly. That's because there wasn't much clay in it it was mainly sand.

More clay drying

The Crail Beach clay was very difficult to dry out, since it didn't settle out of the water very readily. I think that means the clay particles are very fine. This is why I needed to get the pipes and stockings out...

Sieving Crail beach clay

Breaking up and slaking more dried clay

Clay drying and slopping out

Clay drying and settling

Sieving and drying out clay

Crail Beach