The Green Potshop

Here a few everyday disposable items that can be used in every clay studio.

Your daily newspaper has so many uses in the studio. Use it to help keep your clay from sticking to your work surface. Use it to ease cleanup when glazing. Stuff it into forms to help stay it rigid while constructing. To make a one time use mold for slab work.

The pages in last years phone book make a convinent tear off dispenser for paper to use under your work to keep it from sticking.

Empty cardboard wrapping paper rolls, paper towel rolls, and toilet paper rolls make nice forms for slab work. You can lay slabs over them, wrap clay around them, even use them to cut a hole in your clay in place of a cookie cutter.

When many household items live out their lives as a usable household item they can be reborn in the studio as a clay tool. Before you toss give that item a new look, what can it become.

Old stained wooden spoons can become clay paddles. Perhaps that wooden spoon's handle broke off, whittle that handle into custom shaped wooden modeling tool.

Old wire cheese slicers can make excellent clay cutters. If the wire happens to snap, replace the wire with a bit stiffer wire that will hold an interesting bend pattern to slice your clay in interesting ways.

Thin plastic bowls like the ones butter, sour cream, and cool whip come in can be cut up in interesting shapes to make flexible throwing ribs and clay smoothers.

Used drinking straws are very useful to make circular holes for amulets and ornaments.

Unwanted nut picks can be used as a clay surface incising tool.

Used Gift Cards, a gift that keeps on giving. Those plastic gift cards that Uncle John or Aunt Suzy gave you at Christmas or your birthday can be made into excellent throwing ribs after you have used their gift buying value up. You can use a pair of sissors to cut a custom shape for you throwing pleasure. Nice sloping curves work the best but play with your cuts and see what shape you like the best.

Back in college we always had a bucket of spray booth glaze. This was glaze scrapings taken from the spray booth. We would scrape off and collect the over spray that would accumulate on the spray booth walls, store in a bucket until we had enough to make a batch of glaze.

We would then add water, mix and screen it. Then a test tile would be made and as long as it didn't look too bad or run too awfully we would set it out to use in the studio. No two batches were ever the exact same colors but in my time at the college it always came out a shade of green. Sometime it was a wonderful translucent forest green sometimes a not so wonderful semi-matte olive green but usually something in between. If the color was ever something too awful we'd just keep adding booth scrapings and give it another mixing and fire another test tile. I heard rumors that the spray booth glaze in the studio at one time normally was brown but I think the students used more copper based glazes while I was a student.

Here are some household items that you might want to reuse to help you glaze.

Old toothbrushes make excellent additions to your glazing tools. They scrub unwanted glaze off nicely. Also dipping the toothbrush in glaze and running your fingernail across the bristles while holding it over your work to be glazed makes a nice spatter effect.

Used kitchen sponges can be put to use apply glaze or oxides. Cut the sponges into shapes and dip into glaze or oxides for glaze decoration. Of course old kitchen sponges can be used as glaze area clean up sponges too.

Melted candles used in your house can be reused to wax your dry footed ware. Take your puddled candle wax and just place it in what ever device you use to melt your wax(I use an electric skillet) and melt it just as you would regular wax. It doesn't matter if it is colored or scented as it will burn off in the kiln.