Hey there and welcome back to my channel, Blue Nose Trading. My name is Tori Solis, and today I am going to be sharing my personal first impressions and experience with a new clay body: Dragon Fruit by Industrial Minerals Company. This is a cone 6 body that fires white with black specks. It’s made by Industrial Minerals Company out of Sacramento, California. The shrinkage for this clay is about 13% and the absorption, when I tested it, was under .1% at my hot cone 6.
When I came across this clay, it’s beauty immediately blew me away and I had to find out how to get some. As it turns out, Industrial Minerals Company was able to ship me a 50lb flat rate box to Texas. I love clay bodies that create their own visual or textural interest for exposed partially raw body work. I like to leave parts of my pots unglazed to demonstrate the beauty of raw clay as part of my designs in many cases.
For me, throwing this clay was a bit more challenging than other bodies that I have worked with in the past. This clay is very dense. It’s a lot like a porcelain with sand in it, but you get the worst parts of both worlds. It’s sensitive, dense and prone to sagging and flopping if over-worked, and gets over-worked pretty quickly, much like porcelain. It’s gritty and can rub the side of your palm against the wheel as many gritty clays are prone to do. The grains are pretty coarse and you can see the black specks in the raw clay body.
Because it took me a while to get around to this project, my clay was a little hard starting out, which is nobody's fault but my own. This made it more difficult to center. Especially on my wheel, when I have to apply a lot of pressure, the wheel creates a sort of wobble. It's this aspire, it really doesn’t feel capable of handling the amount of force I am putting onto it. I don’t know if I told you guys yet, but I ordered a new wheel. It’s a big kid wheel, but it is on backorder. That will be an entire episode, so be sure to subscribe to my channel if you want to find out what kind of wheel I ordered and see the unboxing, review and all that fun stuff with that.
I found it personally challenging to get the same height with this clay that I can achieve with different clay bodies. It just felt so resistant to going up, and had such an insistence on slumping down. Super frustrating for me.
In this series, I am going to be making my usual gambit of forms: mugs, cups and planters. I plan to do some carving and make some bonsai pots. More or less, I am going to apply my style to this body of clay.
Finishing takes a bit of extra care on the wheel with this body. If you are finishing the outside with a rib, you can sometimes wipe back a lot of the fine white clay, and leave a grittier surface with heavier black flecks. I also found that in compressing my bottoms I had made the bottoms of most of my cups extra-speckly. This isn’t really a good or a bad thing, just something to be aware consciously of as you make your own design choices if you're working with this clay.
Trimming is very much like trimming porcelain. At leather hard it is a very thick, dense body. If you try to dig too deep, you can catch the pot on the wheel and pull it off or distort it, or give it a crack. It likes to crack. The best approach I have found is to have a very sharp tool, and to take the trimming in tidy, delicate ribbons.
This clay stiffens quickly, but it also dries fairly slow. The clay loses plasticity quickly as it dries, and becomes much more likely to crack when it has stiffened even slightly. Despite stiffening rather quickly, this body is very dense and can take a little longer than some of my other clays to dry completely.
Pulling handles for these was pretty straight-forward. Pepita was all up in my business while I was doing this but that’s fine, so long as she doesn’t get into danger or trouble, I’m pretty unphased by her adorable shenanigans at this point in my life. I mean, she's still adorable, but, thing got to get done, whether the bird's cute or not.
I’m still no expert on pulling handles, but I am at a point where I am finding “my handle” so to speak. I have noticed I lean towards a consistent shape and placement. I like a handle that is a smooth bass clef, with the top slightly lower than the rim of the cup, that makes them ideal for storing upside-down in a cabinet and for the functional use of pour over coffee makers.
I alter how many fingers fit in a handle by how far the handle swoops out off the mug. I find that I like to keep a variety of sizes, as find the opinion on how to hold a mug is such a personal choice. I also find that the variety of handle sizes helps add to the personal experience of choosing the perfect mug.
This clay is sensitive to cracking if you apply too much pressure to the bottom or any side. This is important when you are trimming, applying stamps, attaching handles or any manner of attachments, or punching holes for planters. Go slow, and don’t apply to much force to warp or distort your sides as possible. Avoid warping or distorting the sides. It does not like that. Even if it looks fine, it might crack in the bisque, or in the glaze. It's very sensitive, so be gentle with it.
When carving, the sharper the tool you have the better. Which is obviously true in pretty much every case, but it's almost a necessity with this clay body. If your tools aren’t sharp, you are going to have a bad time. You're going to get a substantial amount of resistance and drag while you're carving, which leads to a rough carved surface that will need additional refinement.
Even my tool wasn’t really sharp enough, so I had to wipe over my carving with a wet paintbrush or damp sponge so that I could soften the edges. I want to make these cups feel great to hold and touch, not ones that could cut up your fingers.
Many of these carving designs are some of my old favorites. I really like simple line designs that offer a chance for strength and contrast, especially when it comes to glazing later. I like strong vertical lines of glaze inlaid beside the raw clay body. I like to create cratered or slippy surface textures that allow the glaze to move and break. I like the combination of textures to create enjoyable tactile sensory experiences when using the cup in its most functional sense.
If you have a glaze that might run, it will run on this clay. If you have a glaze that is more or less stable, test it, because it might still run on this clay body. If you are too lazy to test your glazes then use some kiln cookies, or keep an angle grinder handy. Because these glazes are probably going to run. They run a lot.
Now because I enjoy body work anyways, for a lot of the glazes I thought were suspect to running, I only glazed the top half of the piece. Even still, I really messed up a kiln shelf from all the dripping and running I got when I fired this series. But that’s all fine, because now I will get to make a video on using an angle grinder to repair the kiln shelf, which is great. But if you would rather not have to ever watch that video, try to receive my warning here and take extra caution and do some testing before you glaze.
If you want to see how this series turns out, be sure to subscribe to my channel Blue Nose Trading. The series review for the Dragon Fruit project is coming out this Sunday at 10am central time. If you’d like to help to support my channel and get early access to all of my videos and ceramics, consider becoming a patron of my work at patreon.com/bluenosetrading.
Thank you for being here, remember that you have some really great ideas, drink lots of water and hug all of your friends pretty often. I will see you guys next week.
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