To Wedge or Not to Wedge

Cheating BIG Time, but Don’t Tell Anyone!

I have a confession to make, and I’m not really ashamed of it!  I really don’t like wedging clay for our stoneware pottery. I spent years cutting, slamming kneading and massaging clay before I weighed it and formed balls out of it to throw on the potter’s wheel.   Our studio is in the basement of our home and the cutting and slamming would reverberate through the whole home… wake up early and go down to the studio and work?  forget it! 

I was watching the big mill work at the old Axner Pottery factory in Orlando one day and was fascinated by how the clay came out of the pugging machine (A large machine that mixes the clay and pulls the air out of it with strong vacuum pumps) and thought to myself… ‘So why am I wedging this clay to get the air out when they already do it here?”  That was the day my cheating began.  Any potter worth his salt, will extol the virtues of hours of wedging clay to make it smooth and take the air out…it’s a time honored part of the process which the clay gods decree you cannot forego, after all.

And here I find myself, cutting clay off the 25 pound bricks into 22 ounce chunks, balling them up and throwing them on the wheel. I can tell no difference. Surely, the pots will explode spectacularly in the kiln as penance to an angry deity of all things clay.  They didn’t. Surely all the glaze will slide off the pots because the clay wasn’t properly prepared. Didn’t happen, either.

So now I’m a confirmed cheater, and I admit it. There, it feels better. (maybe) I’ve added one step in the years following this revelation that made it even better.  Before I open a bag of clay for the first time, I slam it on the floor on each side of the bag, even top and bottom. For some reason that makes it even easier to work I think it shocks the clay inside, which has more moisture and distributes it to the whole bag. I’m not an expert, but it does kind of take the place of all the banging and slamming from regular wedging.

If you’re learning pottery, give it a try!  Not that it will work for you, but constantly learning and trying new techniques can lead to some pretty cool tricks!

Small Things Make a Big Difference

How 2 Cents Worth of Clay Became the most Commented Part of my Stoneware Pottery.

It’s sometimes awkward to say that I have a job, since during the days and many nights, I’m in full-time ministry. I don’t consider it a job, but a calling.  I LOVE what I do, and it takes me some interesting places. I happened to be at one of our church’s campuses in Downtown Orlando one day when the campus pastor came out of his office with one of our mugs. The conversation as one that I often hear repeated:

“I really love the mug you made me but the best thing (Here it comes, I think to myself) The best thing is the little clay thumb rest you put on the handles.” I hear it time and time again… it’s the thumb rest... if they only knew the real story. It’s literally a little ball of clay that I smash with my thumb and put where the mug body meets the handle, and it happened quite by accident. 

Early in my potting adventure, I fell into a routine that I still follow. I spend the evening in the studio throwing mugs or batter bowls or casserole dishes and the last thing I do is make a batch of handles in my extruder (like a giant play dough press) for the next morning. It’s sometimes challenging because you have to gauge the feel of the clay, the temperature outside and most importantly the humidity so the clay handles will be workable in the morning, not so wet they flop everywhere, not so dry they crack. It’s a balancing game and most times I win, but this morning, I lost. It was cool and wet. Not a great combination for the handle material I made the previous evening. The clay was almost workable, but the handles started to flop when I attached them and I didn’t have time to wait for the clay to dry some more, and by the time I got home that evening, they’d be too dry to work. Bummer.

So, I tried some good old-fashioned improvisation.   I decided that if I could hold up the top of the handle while it dried with a piece of clay, then I’d just pop it off that evening and save the day. So that’s where the thumb rest began.  I made all the mugs and took a small piece of clay and flattened it with my thumb and attached it like a bridge between the top of the handle and mug.   Repeat about 20 times and get on the road to work. I had every intention of popping them off that evening and smoothing the clay out.

I forgot. It didn’t happen and by the time I returned down to the studio, the mugs were way too dry to attempt pulling the clay off. In the middle of being annoyed with myself, I thought I’d at least see how the handles felt (I’m really picky about how my handles ‘feel’ and how they look). I picked one up and my thumb just naturally went to the small ball of clay, and it felt GOOD!  I don’t think I’ve intentionally made a mug in the last 15 years since that didn’t have a thumb rest. I made one slight modification when I started making coffee pour-overs, moving the thumb rest to slightly below the rim rather that above it so the pour over will sit squarely on the rim.

So, two cents of clay, put on a stoneware mug became one of the things people like about our Crazy Jugs mugs. Go figure.