Hi guys and welcome back to my channel, Blue Nose Trading. My name is Tori Solis and today I'm throwing with a new clay body. This clay body is kind of weird because it can never be found again. This is a mixture of probably 12 different cone 6-ish clay bodies from the Dallas Creative Arts Center. It's their recycled, pugged clay. Everybody that is working there just kind of throws their bits and pieces into a bin all together, and then that gets slacked down, recycled and pugged into blocks. Then they resell it to help fund the art center.
It's a really cool mix. I thought it was fun. They were like, "well it's going to be different every time. It's a mixture of speckled clays, red clays, white clays, porcelains, basically everything that's around cone 6 to cone 10, you name it, it's in there.
Since I don't know a whole lot about what I'm throwing here, I just know it's probably going to be brown to beige and have some speckles in it. I have no idea what the absorption rate is going to be. I'm not doing any test tiles because I can't ever get this again, it's going to be different every time I buy a bag of this recycled mystery clay. I'm going to throw some basic planters with it, because you can't go wrong with a good planter. It doesn't really matter what the absorption rate is, it doesn't need to be fully vitrified, and I just want to see how it comes out. It's a really fun concept to have a clay that's just going to do whatever it's going to do. And like I said, I'm expecting something kind of dark buff with some speckles in it.
It threw really really well. I actually really enjoyed throwing this mystery clay. Not that it matters, because I am never going to be able to get an exact kind again. The only downside was that there were some pieces of like, bisque, like sharp, little tiny bits. Not very many, but enough to be slightly frightening because when you're throwing and you find a big, sharp piece of sharp ceramics, it's a little unnerving because you could cut your fingers. I almost cut my pinky, but, I managed to pull it out and then I didn't find another piece after that.
I was trying to make something kind of simple. I'm not going to do any real testing. I'm just going to thrown em, trim em, and then I'm going to end up carving them, then I will end up just throwing them into the kiln to see what comes out. I'll do a series review with this set of stuff once I get it pulled out of the kiln.
I said I was going to make simple things, and that I wasn't going to make it complicated, and then I ended up sitting down and carving every single one of these planters. So now, they are more complicated that I initially planned. That's fine. I'm making these just so that I have a little bit of inventory for the upcoming local markets that I'm going to be doing. These probably aren't going to be online. Depending on how cool this mystery clay turns out, I might keep one for myself because I tend to do things like that.
Depending on how this works out, I think I will end up buying more of this, even though I know that my next batches are always going to be different. I don't really mind the inconsistency, and I kind of like the adventure of seeing just what's going to come out whenever you finish up firing it.
I might even start a 5 gallon bucket of Frankenstein recycled clay in my own studio. Right now I'm actually separating all of my recycled clays into different buckets so that I can reclaim then and know what I'm going to get. But I think it might be kind of fun to just make some, you know, random, mystery clay that comes out different every time.
Consistency isn't super important for me. Especially not when it comes to just the pottery. I would like some reliability when it comes to my sculptural work. But as far as pottery, every pot I make is basically a test tile. I like to experiment, explore and just see what comes out. I haven't really considered productions with consistency to be something that I'm super interested in at this exact moment. Although, I do see the benefit of it, and how it could be useful, for sure. I just haven't really gotten into that personally.
When I was carving these, I did a few with the cactus design that I worked on earlier in my work. But it didn't really work out. That piece kind of broke, and then I hadn't revisited that kind of carving. So I did two this time, and hopefully they will both turn out. But maybe hopefully at least one if I don't get both of them. I also did some of my normal kind of designs with the straight lines, the loop tool, a little bit of crater, a few of the sharper arrow designs. Then I made a random vase with a sad, wilting flower on it. Something just kind of experimental. I don't really love, that last vase isn't my favorite shape. But the cactus I put on the two pots that were my favorite shapes. I'm hoping that those work out well.
I'm not sure how I'm going to finish these. I know that I'm not going to have any tiles to test, so I'm just going to have to see how glazes work on this clay body. I'm hoping that if I use the studio glazes that I was using already at the creative arts center, since most of those glazes fit most of the clays that all of this clay is made of, then they should fit this mystery clay. That's not exactly how the science works, but you know, it's a decent theory. So we will just see how it works out. I was thinking about maybe doing some underglazing in the carvings, but really, I haven't decided yet.
I have, as of doing this editing and all of that, put these in the bisque kiln, actually, today. So they are on their way to getting done. As always, I'm pretty excited to see how these different pieces are going to turn out. If you like this video go ahead and give it a thumbs up. If you'd like to see how these pots turn out, as well as get other weekly art videos, you can subscribe to my channel, Blue Nose Trading. If you'd like to gain early access to all of my videos, access to exclusive content, as well as help to support my channel, you can find me at patreon.com/bluenosetrading. I will see you guys next week with another art video, and here in a few weeks with the results from this series of mystery work.
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