It’s been one of those [it’s 12:00pm, I have the day off and nothing to do. I am not in the mood to read or learn, everyone else is working, I’ve exhausted my current activities to do with my daughter, now what] days.
Alice was outside playing with bubbles, I saw a shovel leaning against the fence and decided to dig up some clay. I recently had a discussion with Stuart about how easy it was to prepare clay as opposed to buying it ready for use. So let’s see
A quick search on my phone (hurray technology) and I arrived at this website:
http://practicalprimitive.com/skillofthemonth/processingclay.html
At first I skimmed the site through for ideas, then I went at it more or less the same (it’s common sense?) For the record, I have a basement bathroom that is never used for anything other than weird experiments like this. This was very messy
Backyard is in a similar state to the ‘Dandelion Tea’ era of 2014
Mixing the gathered clay with water, the roots and rocks trapped in the clay become loose, and next the mixture is poured through the mesh strainer to catch them. The resulting mixture you need to filter over and over to separate the clay from non clay solids. This is easy, clay is lighter than the other kinds of dirt like sand. If you put the mixture of soils and water into a clear glass and let it sit for an hour, you can see all the layers and it’s a matter of skimming them off the top.
There’s a step missing (picture wise) but this happens after that. You pour your essentially pure clay + water into an old t-shirt or finely woven fabric and suspend it by rope. The water will eventually drip out but the clay will stay inside. When the water is gone we’ll move on to the next step.
In this case, instead of suspending it by rope, the top of this carboy was sawed off and turned upside down. The T shirt is put in place, and the clay poured in. The water will drip through the neck of the carboy into the base below. The water in this picture has been dripping for approximately 10 hours.
You can see where the water was originally to where it is now after 10 hours. and the clay bunching up an inch or so above where the water currently sits. This carboy method is a bit more practical indoors, as I felt my shower curtain rod may one day be destroyed if I keep this up.
After about 24 hours, as well as this system is going, it does seem slower in comparison to the hanging method. Therefore I decided to hang it up instead.
The first batch was untied and inspected.
The outside was dry-ish, but the inside was still quite wet and sticky, wrapped with another T-shirt and hung to dry. This time from the showerhead.
The set-up
The aftermath of the shirt, I had a great idea to wash and reuse this shirt
I immediately regretted that idea, getting that shirt wet was a terrible decision. Not only a waste of clay (I could have salvaged a lot from that in terms of clay-water) but also potentially pipe clogging, and just goddamn messy. Lesson learned.
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