Earning My Keep

The school ceramics program (read: Jocelyn) is very generous to me. I don't pay for clay, which at Cornell, where I go in the summers, is like $40 for 25 lb, which will only make six or seven pieces, depending on size. Anyway, today it was time for me to do work to repay the studio for letting me use the clay, and that work is making clay, or reclaiming it really - pugging, to be precise. Everybody chuckles at that word. I don't know why. But go ahead and chuckle and now be done. 

Below you see the pug mill. Normally five or six people pug at once, loading the mill, catching the clay, and ferrying it to the bats. But because I am a boss, I can do the whole thing.

The belly of the beast is below. It has a rotating blade which will not maim you for life but will hurt like hell if you get your fingers in it, which I have done. I fill it with clay from the slop bucket, which is already full of clay which has become too hard to use (but has never been fired) submerged in water to un-harden it, which really turns it into a sloppy ugly mess.

I fill that up, plug the thing in and turn it on, which is not easy, because one must first locate the "on" switch, and I never remember where it is, and have difficulty finding it, as the whole contraption is coated with centimeters of dried clay. Once it is on, you push the clay into the blades, which churn it up and smooth it out and force it through the machine's opening, which is below. 

The clay is very wet at this point and must be caught before it falls and carried in lumps out of that room into the main room, where you slap it down onto the plaster bat and then run back to the pug mill to catch the next lump of clay before it falls on the floor.

When finished, I spread the clay over the bat (actually over all four plaster bats; the 8th period class wasn't happy with me) so that the greatest possible area of clay is touching the plaster, which, if you remember, saps water out of it and makes it manageable. If you put just-pugged clay on the canvas bat it would be a disaster.

Then I wedge and bag the clay. Tomorrow I should be able to throw. This week I am going to try and make larger forms, and just take the risk of them cracking in the pit. Lidded jars are also on my list of what to make, but they don't exactly go with my egg theme. But Jocelyn suggested them.