To begin my journey with Primitive Pottery, the first thing I need is some clay. Grabbing a shovel and cart, I head over to a nice craggy patch of dirt and start digging. One cart of dirt later, I head over to where the 5-gallon buckets and hose are and fill the buckets with dirt and water.
Now, if you have never tried to stir a bucket of water filled with dirt, let me tell you: it takes a lot of effort to break up the lumps and mix them into any sort of consistent texture. After a making a few buckets of this slurry, I decided to look into a better way. Eventually I came to the conclusion that I should use a tool designed for mixing plaster or concrete, which would surely work just as well for mixing clay.
After the mixture has become homogeneous, I used a series of three metal sieve in sizes of decreasing order to strain out anything that isn’t clay —rocks, plant-matter, insects etc. Finally, I pour the filtered clay into an pillowcase and hang it from a tree so the remaining moisture will drip out and leave the pure raw clay.
After a few days of drying, I can remove the clay from the
pillowcase and fill a nearby bucket. The first step toward
making pottery is complete, but we are not quite ready
to start making things just yet.
I like what u r doing