Mixing the clay

Mix the clay

To mix clay you can either mix it with a food processor or by hand
I use a mixture of both (excuse the pun)

I start by cleaning out the food processor and every part that the clay could touch, and let it drip dry. The last thing you want is to add fluff and dust to your clay, so make sure it it perfectly clean.

Place both types of clay into the food processor and chop it up. You will most likely find that the clay turns into lots of little balls of clay, depending on the type of blade you use.

Once the clay is nicely chopped up its time to start kneading it back together

Knead the clay
Again cleanliness is the most important part here. If you aren’t clean your clay will get dirty when you do this step. So follow these tips:

• Don’t wear dark fluffy clothes like polar fleece
• Keep your hands washed and drip dried
• Use a piece of old clay to roll around your hands to pick up any pieces of dirt/fluff
• Cover surfaces with cling-wrap
• And the biggest tip – dont stop! Don’t go off halfway to check your email, answer the phone, settle a child, or anything. Every time you leave your task, be it mixing clay or sculpting, you risk bringing back fluff and dust with you – so dont stop!

Now that you have your site nice and clean you can start kneading the clay. This is best done by rolling bits into long sausages, then fold them over and twist together, then roll back into sausages.

Keep doing this until the clay is a perfectly consistency with no streaks.

Pack the clay
When you have made your nice clean sausages of clay they can be packed away for future use.

I have made up three, which I then wrap in cling-wrap and place in a plastic zip-lock bag for safe, clean, keeping.

As you can see I have only the one photo of this process. And that is due to the 5th tip above – dont stop! If I stopped to take pictures of the process I would have ended up with dirty clay. But hopefully the instructions are good enough to follow without the aid of pictures.

One last note – mixing the clay like this is a great way to condition the clay. When you work with clay you need to work and knead it first, conditioning the clay makes it easier to smooth and avoids  moonies (little fingermark moon shapes that can appear in cooked clay