ART
BEAUTY & WELLNESS
CRAFT
CULTURE & HISTORY
ENTERTAINMENT
ENVIRONMENT
FOOD & DRINKS
REVERSE ENGINEERING
SCIENCES
SPORTS
TECHNOLOGY
WEARABLES
Bone-Dry Clay Vessels: Formed, Dried Slowly, Ready to Fire
A pot must be bone dry before it is fired: dried until it is porous, no longer plastic and very fragile. On the way it passes leather-hard, when shrinking stops. Dry it slowly and evenly so it does not crack, and finish the last water off gently in the kiln.
The picture: a large unfired pot, bound round with fibre while it dries, at Nwenyein, Myanmar.
Beginner
One to two weeks
Instructions
1
1
Form the vessels
Form the vessels
Build the pots as in the coil pot blueprint, up to the end of shaping; do not fire them.
2
2
Dry slowly under cover
Dry slowly under cover
Stand the pots on a cloth-covered board out of sun and draught, loosely covered, so rims and bases dry at the same pace.
Tools needed:
Damp Cloth Cover
Plastic Sheet
Canvas Work Surface for Pottery3
3
Leather-hard
Leather-hard
When the clay is firm enough to handle and has stopped shrinking, it is leather-hard: trim and burnish now, and join handles with slip.
Materials for this step:
Pottery Slip (Liquid Clay)50 mlTools needed:
Clay Tool Set4
4
Uncover and dry to bone-dry
Uncover and dry to bone-dry
Uncover the pots and let them dry in a warm room until they turn pale and light. A pot that still feels cool against the cheek is still damp (our test). Handle bone-dry pots gently: they break easily.
Tools needed:
Balance Scale5
5
Is it dry yet?
Is it dry yet?
Loading Jupyter Notebook...
6
6
Limits
Limits
Leather-hard and bone-dry are as the Wikipedia ceramics glossary defines them; the cover, the cheek test and the weighing are ours. Kilns finish the last water with a slow, low first stage (candling).
Materials
1- Placeholder
Tools Required
5- Placeholder
- Placeholder
- Placeholder
- Placeholder
- Placeholder
This blueprint makes
Related Blueprints
These blueprints share knowledge with this one — techniques, materials, or principles that connect them in the learning graph.
CC0 Public Domain
This blueprint is released under CC0. You are free to copy, modify, distribute, and use this work for any purpose, without asking permission.
Support the Maker by purchasing products through their Blueprint where they earn a Maker Commission set by Vendors, or create a new iteration of this Blueprint and include it as a connection in your own Blueprint to share revenue.