Recipe for Homemade Clay

Looking for a simple recipe for homemade clay? Find sample recipes here. Also, learn how to make homemade clay for your clay pot projects with a few simple tools .

Clay recipes can get kind of complicated. If you've looked at many you've probably noticed a fair number of names like Goldart Stoneware, E.P.K. Kaolin, Flint, or Ball Clay, just to name a few.

As with glaze, there are many, many ingredients that different potters use to achieve the type of clay that best suits their type of work.

However, if we look at clays from a simpler perspective, we'll find that they are all made up of about 10 main ingredients.

These are:
Kaolin or China Clay
Earthenware Clay
Ball Clay
Fire Clay
Stoneware Clay
Feldspar
Talc
Frit
Silica
Other Minerals (such as oxides, which change the color of the clay)

The different ingredients will be listed either by weight, volume, or percentages.

Sample Recipes

A basic stoneware clay might look like this:

55% Fire Clay
15% Ball Clay
10% Stoneware Clay
10% Feldspar
10% Silica

By increasing the fluxes and decreasing the high-firing clays it could be designed for a lower firing temperature. For example:

45% Fire Clay
10% Ball Clay
20% Earthenware Clay
20% Frit
5% Silica

These are just examples to give you an idea of how the ingredients can be adjusted to create different clay bodies.

The key is to determine what you want to do with the clay. For example, if you want a white clay body you will likely use more Kaolin. If you wanted a clay with less shrinkage you would use talc in the recipe.

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