Not the poop emoji

[offcntr]

This is not poop.

It's clay scrap, just pulled out of the recycling bat and ready to pug-mill. Except I don't have time just now, so it's gonna get bagged and set aside until next week, maybe.

I produce a lot of this stuff: wet slop from the throwing bucket, dry scraps from trimming, the occasional broken, cracked or trimmed through piece of greenware. It all goes into four-gallon plastic buckets in front of my wheel where it slakes down to the consistency of, well, poop. Wet cow poop, fresh from spring pasture.

It has some of the smell of poop, too, anaerobic bacteria digesting oil and skin flakes from my hands and traces of organics from the clay. I sometimes wish I'd contacted Mike Rowe back when he was still doing Dirty Jobs. He'd have loved this stuff.

I love it too; I get two or three hundred pounds of recycled clay every time I empty the buckets. After enough time.

Traditional pottery recycling bats are plaster tubs. They're heavy, fragile, but do an excellent job of removing excess water from clay slurry. If you're not in a hurry, though, you can go lighter and easier.

This is my recycling bat: A frame of 2x6" pine, with a mesh bottom: plastic window screen over 1/4 inch galvanized hardware cloth, supported with 1x2" furring strips around (and across) the bottom. The whole thing is mounted on casters, so I can wheel it in and out from under the ware rack.

When it's time to recycle clay, I wheel it out, line it with a thrift-store bed sheet, folded double, and ladle in all the slop. Once it's heaping full, I fold the sheet edges over the top to keep out dirt and bugs and roll it away. Four to six weeks later, (twelve, this time. It was a wet winter) it's ready to come out of the bat and run through the pug mill.

Then back on the wheel. It's the circle of (a potter's) life.