Pottery! at Lucas Centre Ceramic Studio North Vancouver Continuing Education Open House! Classes! Drop In! Studio Membership! Sale! Qpen House - Sunday September 18, 71:00-12:30 pm Classes Beginners: Monday & Wednesday 7:00-10:000m September 19 (10 sessions) Intermediate: Tuesday 7:00-10:00pm September 20 (10 sessions) Advanced: Thursday 7:00-10:00em September 21 (10 sessions) A Taste of Clay |: Wednesday 9:00am-noon September 28 (4 sessions) A Taste of Clay Il: Wednesday 9:00am-noon October 26 (4 sessions) STUDIO MEMBERSHIP! Tuesday - Seotember 20 - 10:00-3:00pm (10 sessions) SALE! Saturday November 19, 10:00am3:00pm Lucas Centre Ceramic Studio 2132 Hamilton Ave., North Vancouver, B.C, Please contact us for more information at: Tel: 604-908-3333 Fax: 604-903-3334 Web: www.conted44..com | xy oN NVSD CONTINUING EDUCATION September 2005 Breaking all the Rules with Paper Clay Paper clay is simply regular clay with added cellulose pulp (paper). The addition of the paper fibres increases your working vocabulary and allows you to do some outra- geous things with the clay. I am not entirely sure of how it works, but the cellulose fibres seem to act like capil- lary wicks and allow a differ- ent sort of drying and bond- ing action. This allows you to join two completely dry pieces of paper clay with paper clay slip. I have even joined bisque with paper clay! Another very useful property is greatly increased. working and green strength. It is possi- ble to roll out and manipulate very thin slabs and when the work is dry (greenware), it not only has greater strength but is also easy to repair if broken. OK, so there are the advan- tages, what about the disad- vantages? It’s extra work to add the fibres and if it sits around for a while it gets smelly! One way around this is to keep it in dried flat cakes and soften what you need by wrapping in wet towels. It will wet down more readily than regular clay due to the capillary action of the cellulose fibres. Another is to make up only what you need as you go. Another disadvantage is that the strength of the fired piece is reduced. proportionally with the amount of fibre added. If 20% pulp is added then after firing there will be 80% clay left. The flip side of course is that the piece is lighter! Rosette Gault has written a book on Paper Clay, (A&C Black, 1998) which details intricacies and ideas. Initially I Potters Guild of British Columbia Newsletter used to make up batches from clay slip and pulped paper. Now I either throw an unwound roll of toilet paper into my mixer along with approximately the equivalent of 2 boxes of clay that I am recycling from the soak buck- et (and then dry on a plaster bat) or I will add toilet paper to clay from the bag by slicing it up like a sliced loaf, sand- wiching a layer of toilet paper, spraying with water and then wedging it. It gives an ade- quate amount of paper to get a useful effect from the added cellulose fibres. It’s not rocket science! Where everyone will find it a blessing is for greenware repairs. Using your hand mixer (see ‘Clay for Dummies) mix up a slurry of your clay from slops in the soak bucket or from dry clay. Add some toilet paper, remix and you have paper clay slip. To join broken greenware, wet both pieces with water (a quick dip or brush on) then put a generous brush of slip on both surfaces while they are still damp and push together. Do any clean-up when it has almost dried. Bisque as normal. If you want to try joining bisque, follow basically the same procedure: ie. thorough- ly wet both pieces, join with the paper clay slip, allow to dry and re bisque. Because of the green strength and ease of repair, I have also used paper clay for figure sculptures over an aluminium wire armature, allowing it to burn out in the firing. Good luck with your own experiments! Keith Rice-Jones