@@AncientPotteryNorth West Tennessee, USA Red Clay is underfoot everywhere. Ya have to rinse 8t several times to get the Premium out of it, but there's also more premium locals, down by the M River. M = the Mississippi Come and take All You want. 😘
Thank you so much for addressing the signs of natural clay in a DRY environment. So many videos feature people reaching into a stream bed, grabbing a handful of clay and showing how to do a coil test. Some of us don't have a lot of water nearby!
I'm taking a ceramics class at my school, and I decided to look up some pottery RUclipsrs. I'm afraid I've become addicted to your channel... lol! Keep up the great work!
We fossil hunt at Wilson's Claypit in Grosvenor, TX. The clay is purple and green. Shades from lilac to aubergine and light sage to teal. As you drive to it you can see the purple and green hills of mined materials.
I went out clay hunting today. The creek I had my eye on was virtually inaccessible due to thick brush. Then I spotted a nearby irrigation ditch, bone dry...and it looked like the earth that the ditch-digger tossed up to the sides was clay. The bottom also looked like clay but was a little questionable in color. It was hard, but looked like the cracked clay; some was in odd shapes it had taken and dried. I gathered some and came home...felt good in the water. I've strained it (it had seashells in it because we live IN a prehistoric lake bed) and pillow-cased it and it's hanging. If it's clay, I've found a gold mine! lol
Sounds great, I hope it works out for you. Watch those seashells, if you get too hot in your firing they can turn into quick lime and cause spalls in your pottery.
@@darz_k. no. Lol It's extremely short, and when wet, the moisture seems to want to settle to the bottom rather than being uniform moistness throughout. I managed to work some lopsided pieces and they're okay. I had better luck at construction sites. Lol Takeaway: lacustrine clay is weird.
Ooo there's a place i know, a narrow concreted path that runs alongside a stream which leads to a river and it's always deep in sludge / silt but it dries with cracks like that river bed 🤔 hmmmm I'm super curious if it's very clay now, oooooo!
I dug into grey clay once about 4 or 5 feet deep . But i was grounds keeping at a cemetary . Digging graves .It was more at the bottom of a hill . Up the hill halfway was dry sandy dirt almost like styrofoam or cake . Youre on the clock working so everybody had no time to sample it .
Great video. You may also find gray clay on the sides of the rivers and streams. Clay sticks to your tools and is hard to wash off. Here you must be careful because darker, black colored sticky soil may be silver bearing soil, not a clay. Either way you win.
Wow! New subscriber here! I use to play with Alabama "mud". I told my mom it was fun because it was like Play Doh. I was about 12 or 13. She told me it was just mud. But I think it must have been clay. I'm 65. I am going to see if I can find some clay. Thank you so much for this video! ❤️ ❤️ ❤️
The gist of this video is this: to find clay=look for craggily ground where waterbeds are/were. This was very informative and will help me survive in the future.
Hi, I live in Oregon. We had one of the wettest springs on record. It rained the first 3 weeks of June 2022, almost every day. The last two years were like living in California, much warmer & dryer than normal. Even got evacuated for fires in 2020. I love putting in a vegetable garden and it was just too wet to plant my tomatoes & zucchini in my garden, except for a couple raised beds. It was 92° yesterday. I was out trying to amend my soil in the garden so I could plant some of my tomato plants. On average I would get my garden tilled by Mothers Day. I was wanting to go no till this year. All this additional rain has made gardening nearly impossible. As I was digging yesterday preparing soil to plant 2.5 foot tall tomato plants the soil was still hard & wet as it only stopped raining about 4 days ago. When I cut in with my shovel, it reminded me of clay in my pottery class my Senior year of high school, several decades ago. I thought, add water to mix in this compost because It's so hot now the tomatoes need to keep hydrated or they might die in this heat. What a mess! Bad idea. We will see how hard it is today. Last year I had an area of my garden I didn't plant so I tilled in wood shavings as an experiment thinking after a year it would break down and loosen the clay soil, No sign of it, it disapeared. I add compost and composted steer & chicken manure to the holes I dig for tomatoes every year. This year the clay is so expanded from months of rain I've decided I need to start extracting some of the clay every year and making things out of it. I have lots of buckets now. It's going to be 98°+ today. So I don't know if I will get much done, but your video has given me a whole new perspective on my clay dilemma. If life gives you lemons you need to learn how to make lemonade right? Who knows I may have some fantastic clay here, I know I sure have a lot of it. My garden has almost no rocks, I removed the few it had over the last 20 years. Pottery was my favorite class in high school. The only class I got A+ all year. Happy Summer everyone! I'm a new subscriber, Thank you for your videos!
Yes, clay can be a blessing to a potter and a curse to a gardener, I have personally been on both side so that. I hope your clay turns out to have good working properties.
I lived in Costa Rica for a long time and I had a house with red/brown clay, but when we dug we found deposits of white clay that the locals make stuff with a little. When we had a big hole dug with a backhoe we found enough to surprise me. I also found a lot of fragments of old pottery shards from the indigenous people there. It was all brown.
I am from (and still live) in New Mexico. I guess I’ve been looking at clay my whole life. It all looks so similar and very familiar to me now after seeing this. Can’t wait to get out and find me some. Thank you!
Where I live in southcentral Pennsylvania, I am located next to a creek, and off the side of the creek there is an old water raceway cut into the ground that feeds water into an old flower mill that was turned into a house. In that raceway, there is so much water, silt, mud, and broken-down leaves that have been collected over many years, from flooding all the way back to colonial times. It's so deep that if you walk in it, you will get stuck and sink into it up to your arms. The water raceway never drys out, so every year a new layer is added from flooding. I have used it for making clay once, and I was surprised at how well it worked. I just threw a bucket in and let it sink, then dried it out, crushed it up into a fine powder to separate it from any of the decomposing leaves and sticks, and then added water to it. Also, right next to this location, 120 yards away, there used to be a native village, and it would not be surprising if they even used it for making pottery.
you are my favorite youtube channel hands down! your videos have helped me in so many ways , financially,spiritually and, reconnecting with art and nature. sometimes personally, being in nature isn’t enough for me to get out my head. now everytime i go out, it’s an adventure. thank you
In my hometown, finding clay has never been the problem. Dealing with clay, now... I've spent most of my life hacking at clay, chopping at clay, tilling clay, spinning out on clay, swearing at clay, scraping clay off various possessions, declaring war on clay, losing to clay, and many other clay-related activities. And now, thanks to this channel, I'll be making things with clay. (Though I'll probably still be swearing at it while I do.)
I live next to a huge green belt (large strip of fields, protected by English law) and these videos have helped me realise that the dirt there has a lot of clay in it. I noticed a huge patch of clay last year while on a bike ride, and recently realised that the dirt cracks a lot when the farmers don't till it for a while, and their truck tracks stay for months. Definitely tempted to pick some up on my next bike ride now
I love your channel so much I enjoy creating art with clay so much for so long i was convinced that BUYING clay was the only way (and being honest i don't always have the possibility 💸) you opened my eyes! Not only that, but the idea of doing a little adventuring to find my own clay is amazing✨ Edit: I live in the Patagonia, and for a long time in ancient B.C. times a large portion of the land was completely under water I was living surrounded by clay!
Idk why your videos came up 3 years later. I'm not a potter or artist of any sort. But I'm sort of loving this and tempted to try to make something with natural clay all of a sudden!
i love your channel! just found you, and it gets me so excited to do some pottery. I grew up next to a river, and all our garden soil was extremly clay-y. i once tried making a little pot out of the garden soils just as it was, and fired it in the wood stove. it worked out, it had one crack, but otherwise held up, which for totally unprosessed clay with no added sand is pretty darn good. i gonna go visit my dad and steal a few buckets of dirt! :D
if you want to know if your area had a body of water a long time ago you can look up paleogeography for the area to see what the map was like a long time ago. Also if your area has lots of limestone and sandstone.
Oh my gosh. When I first saw the crackle ground, I was reminded of one of the empty lots from the neighborhood I grew up in. The cracks are deeper in this video though. Cool!
these are supremely well-planned videos! i love your content, and i was really shocked to see you only have 79K subs. please keep releasing great videos like these!!
Thank you. I stopped the video and went outside on my property and was able to identify clay right away on my road and in various other places around the homestead.
Thank you for the video Andy! I don't live in a dry region, I live in Pennsylvania with a lot of moisture but just the part where you talk about tire tracks etc was priceless for me. It's helped me identify the places on my property where I have clay. Fantastic. Thank you!
Great video, it was very informative, glad this randomly came up in my recommendations. I've Been thinking about getting into making my own clay for awhile now as I really want to try my hand at some sculpting but don't want to invest any money into it until I find out if I'm any good or not... came across your video tonight and after hearing about how clay can differ region to region I decided to run a quick search about finding clay in my area and discovered that the piedmont region of northwest Georgia where I'm from, is apparently famous for it's "red clay" also discovered that the dirt isn't Red everywhere else you go in the world..so that's neat. 😅 I remember being a little kid and visiting my aunt who lived down a long dirt road in the foothills of the smoky mnts and how my mom always warning me not to get into that "red clay mud" that made up the driveway cuz I'd ruin my clothes... I'd totally forgotten all about that until looking it up a earlier... Now the question is, will red clay be suitable for sculpting with? Maybe I'll find out while I'm off this weekend 😏
So happy I live around so much wet clay but also so happy that since I will live part time in a desert area in the next few years , I can now find clay there too❤
This video just helped me talk my husband into going on a clay hunting adventure here in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in Andalusia this weekend! Can't wait!!
Arizona my 500 flower pots of vegetables tomaties , carrots , lettuce , watermelons , kept dying . And later i emptied the pots , cups , pails , and had made bricks 😂 . Mayei should grow bricks
Andy, you really are just describing all the dirt in Oklahoma. Doing some research to find some natural clay to make some simple vessels as a hobby. Slowly finding out that I could likely dig a hole anywhere here in OK and find something usable.
Haha came to RUclips trying to find out how to identify clay after having a very hard time trying to dig a fire pit (also in Oklahoma), and yes, every single one of his clues could be found by walking 50 feet from my house in any direction.
Having taken pottery in college and then with job, household and kids I gave up on doing pottery, no time and no room or money for a wheel and kiln..... your videos are exciting! All I need now is to dig about a foot down in my back yard and see if that red clay would be any good😁
thank you so much for this entire channel, but specifically the tip to try dry ponds and lake beds, i found some bluish gray clay just below the surface of my friend's pond, and it gets purer gray as i dig deeper! so excited to process and age some of it. at the moment i'm doing small things, just practicing, but soon enough i'll be making the big stuff! thank you again for inspiring me and giving me a strong foundation for this burgeoning passion for pottery in me!
Aww man, all those years of my Mum cursing the chunks of pure grey clay in our back garden here in the UK - and I could have been using it? Fascinating stuff
Most of my clays have naturally occurring organic matter in them which does not effect the outcome but can leave a dark area inside the ceramic body that can only be seen when broken. This playa lakebed clay somehow does not seem to have any organic matter in it, which makes no sense to me.
So great! Thank you so much, gentle and connected to Nature knowledge you share with us. I appreciate your humanity in the way you show us this amazing activity called ancient pottery. Yeah! I will try to find mud when i get back in Canada and do a small fire! Thanks again
I found this video by accident and was surprised to see you at the Playa - I live on 5 acres in Hereford, AZ and the entire 5 acres is greasy, dark clay, with sand on the surface. Interesting stuff!
The county I live in actively puts clay on the otherwise sugar sand roads so all the roads have clay in them. There are large deposits in certain areas of my town which were the some of the original sources of the county's clay not sure who technically owns them since they're pretty much abandoned nowadays and are mainly a hangout for teenage stoners.
Oh how I wish your viewers who where looking for clay could visit my homestead 😊 it’s nothing but clay. Thick, sticky, and everywhere! We have dug several trenches through the 15 acres and gone as deep as five feet down and still, nothing but blue clay. So much so that we need to build raised garden beds because if you just amend the clay soil at ground level you end up with root rot because you essentially made a dirt filled pond. I’ve often wanted to utilize it but was unsure how. I’ll be watching your videos and getting educated 😁 thank you for sharing your wisdom with us!!!
Thank you for telling us about Identifying clay in Nature, when I have a chance to find clay in nature to identify here in my country. I do interest to know more about clay and making clay pots, mugs n others😀👍🙏
The soil here is called black gumbo or Montmorillonite. It seems to be rock hard or so sticky it will pull your boots off or pull your hip out of socket. I first encountered it on a dirt bike 35 years ago. I had a hard time getting it off the bike and its tires using a 1600 PSI pressure washer. When it dries you can twist your ankle in the cracks. I dropped a beer bottle in a crack one August and it fell out of sight. Is it useable for pottery.
Arroyo are good places to find clay laid down in the strata of the walls. We found clay in the creek on my sister's farm in Maryland. There is clay ranging from dark purple to white all over the region
I live in Tucson. LOVE your videos. I’ve successfully fired about a dozen pieces with help from your videos. Thank you for all the amazing information. I am curious about the legal/moral implications of harvesting clay. I would like to go to Wilcox playa as it’s close to me and seems to be a good place from your video. Do you have any tips or suggestions on where it is ok to harvest clay, how much should you take from one place at a time etc... ? Thanks a bunch Andy!
Interesting questions Sean. Most places I collect, a 5 gallon bucket worth of clay is not going to make a difference, so I take a little and then a smooth the ground over behind myself so it's not unsightly. Try to not ruin the area for other potters or any other land use, if people leave a big ugly hole people may get upset and put up no-trespassing signs. Roadsides are usually fair game legally, most Forest Service and BLM land will allow small amounts of minerals collected for personal use, but again, don't ruin things, don't disturb plants, don't leave a big hole, etc. The Willcox Playa is owned by the US Department of Defense and as far as I know is never patrolled by military police. Take a small amount and cover up the hole you left, nature will fill it in before long. You should try looking for clay around the old clay quarries on the north side of Marsh Station Road. If you want directions for how to get out on the playa, send me an email using the contact form on my website ancientpottery.how
I also live in Tucson. One of my friends has a mom who is really into pottery. She buys it from Marjon Ceramics, which is on Oracle Road, just north of Grant Road.
at a certain spot at the beach I go to, there is a patch of clay that is exactly how it is in art class. lol. it is so fine and already is moist to squish around and dries evenly very cool.
Super Informative. I have a question, where would I look in a forest area (I know you said you lived in Arizona but I was wondering if you had any tips, thanks!)
Thankfully i live in a city that used to be quite a large lake thousands of centuries ago. My bio teacher had mentioned that he was digging in his backyard, and after digging up the layer of dirt the grass was growing on, the first thing he saw was this great big layer of clay from when there was still a lake here. Now all I need to do is convince my dad to ruin our backyard with a shovel to get it.
Well, i thought this might be hard since i cant drive and live in an urban area, but then i remembered that i have already plastic clay in my yard that i used to dig up and make thigns with all the time. I still have a container full of clay balls cause i realpy loved rolling them out.
hi andy! I just found you here on yt, but I already love your videos. I live in Brasil, and in a city were most of the regular earth is red earth, a pretty sand free kind of dirt that has a lot of iron on it. In my home it has a HUGE inactive ant's nest that except for some plant roots, wood and insects, is very basically pure red earth. It feels pretty plastic. do you think it is any good for caly making, or the Iron can interfeer somehow in the oven process?
Saw your video and went to my front Ditch and boom! Super clay. I guess being surrounded by rice fields has one perk. Now I just gotta learn how to make stuff out of it.
@@AncientPottery thank you for that, I watched it and thought yeah I should have done it that way, I did the wet process before, and it wore me out lol. In the future I'm doing it the dry way. Thank you for making these videos, I'm a huge bronze age fan and want to do amateur historical reenactment at home, so bronze working, clothes, pottery etc, and your videos are helping me out a lot. Just before I watched the dry process video I made my very first "pottery" it's basically an ashtray and the ugliest thing ever mad by man. But I'd have never tried it until watching your video. Didn't even know I had clay, it's Texas black clay, not sure if it's any goof but hey we will see. Anyways thanks again for the link and for making these vids.
@@AncientPottery your right, great insight thank you. , it would be fun to try a one and done experiment and see if it would keep. Don't worry I wear all the PPE and live by the get out of the way rule. :) Bentonite is suggested and what I have used in the past as a binder with the sand.
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The one guy that didn't like this video probably found a bunch of potters, digging for clay in his front yard, the day after this was released. 😆
LOL, truth
2 buys at this time. They both meet your criterion. LOL
😂😂😂
Wish the dislike button was back. These jokes are no longer available to be made based on dislikes.
Lmao 😂😂😂😂😂
What a super cool guy, simply teaching the world about self sufficiency and craftsmanship.
Cheers to you bud 🤎
Thank you kindly
@@AncientPotteryNorth West Tennessee, USA
Red Clay is underfoot everywhere.
Ya have to rinse 8t several times to get the Premium out of it, but there's also more premium locals, down by the M River.
M = the Mississippi
Come and take All You want.
😘
You sent him a clay heart! How adorable
There’s this creek by my house that has veins of PURE gray clay! It even comes with a bit of sand mixed in!
Thank you so much for addressing the signs of natural clay in a DRY environment. So many videos feature people reaching into a stream bed, grabbing a handful of clay and showing how to do a coil test. Some of us don't have a lot of water nearby!
No kidding. I live in Arizona and clay is almost never naturally wet here.
I'm looking for video that show where to find clay in wet climate...
Yes, it seems to be more complicated in a wet climate. Nearly everything sticks together here.
I'm taking a ceramics class at my school, and I decided to look up some pottery RUclipsrs. I'm afraid I've become addicted to your channel... lol! Keep up the great work!
Awesome, thanks for watching.
There are worse things to be addicted to! 😂
I adore his channel also, just discovered it last night. 😊
WHAT IS THAT PROFILE, EXPLAIN DEMON!!!!
@@jennibeck1 😈
We fossil hunt at Wilson's Claypit in Grosvenor, TX. The clay is purple and green. Shades from lilac to aubergine and light sage to teal. As you drive to it you can see the purple and green hills of mined materials.
I gotta place to visit now!
What colors does it fire into?
I went out clay hunting today. The creek I had my eye on was virtually inaccessible due to thick brush. Then I spotted a nearby irrigation ditch, bone dry...and it looked like the earth that the ditch-digger tossed up to the sides was clay. The bottom also looked like clay but was a little questionable in color. It was hard, but looked like the cracked clay; some was in odd shapes it had taken and dried. I gathered some and came home...felt good in the water. I've strained it (it had seashells in it because we live IN a prehistoric lake bed) and pillow-cased it and it's hanging. If it's clay, I've found a gold mine! lol
Sounds great, I hope it works out for you. Watch those seashells, if you get too hot in your firing they can turn into quick lime and cause spalls in your pottery.
..how did you get on?
Was it pay dirt?!
@@darz_k. no. Lol It's extremely short, and when wet, the moisture seems to want to settle to the bottom rather than being uniform moistness throughout. I managed to work some lopsided pieces and they're okay.
I had better luck at construction sites. Lol
Takeaway: lacustrine clay is weird.
Ooo there's a place i know, a narrow concreted path that runs alongside a stream which leads to a river and it's always deep in sludge / silt but it dries with cracks like that river bed 🤔 hmmmm I'm super curious if it's very clay now, oooooo!
I dug into grey clay once about 4 or 5 feet deep . But i was grounds keeping at a cemetary . Digging graves .It was more at the bottom of a hill . Up the hill halfway was dry sandy dirt almost like styrofoam or cake . Youre on the clock working so everybody had no time to sample it .
Am I the only one that wants to hang out and run around the desert with this guy 😆 🤣 😂 Absolutely awesome 👌 👏 👍
Great video. You may also find gray clay on the sides of the rivers and streams. Clay sticks to your tools and is hard to wash off. Here you must be careful because darker, black colored sticky soil may be silver bearing soil, not a clay. Either way you win.
Not much of that around here in the desert, but no doubt a great tip for people with good rivers and streams.
A bit of silver in your pottery doesn't sound that bad.
how do you identify silver bearing soil?
Wow! New subscriber here! I use to play with Alabama "mud". I told my mom it was fun because it was like Play Doh. I was about 12 or 13. She told me it was just mud. But I think it must have been clay. I'm 65. I am going to see if I can find some clay. Thank you so much for this video! ❤️ ❤️ ❤️
@@babystepsgarden6162 the red stuff? Yeah, that's just red clay, man. I live in southeast alabama, the dirt roads are made out of it.
The gist of this video is this: to find clay=look for craggily ground where waterbeds are/were. This was very informative and will help me survive in the future.
Glad you found this useful.
I live in East Tennessee and all our dirt is clay, thankful it's finally useful
Hi, I live in Oregon.
We had one of the wettest springs on record. It rained the first 3 weeks of June 2022, almost every day. The last two years were like living in California, much warmer & dryer than normal. Even got evacuated for fires in 2020.
I love putting in a vegetable garden and it was just too wet to plant my tomatoes & zucchini in my garden, except for a couple raised beds.
It was 92° yesterday. I was out trying to amend my soil in the garden so I could plant some of my tomato plants. On average I would get my garden tilled by Mothers Day. I was wanting to go no till this year. All this additional rain has made gardening nearly impossible.
As I was digging yesterday preparing soil to plant 2.5 foot tall tomato plants the soil was still hard & wet as it only stopped raining about 4 days ago. When I cut in with my shovel, it reminded me of clay in my pottery class my Senior year of high school, several decades ago.
I thought, add water to mix in this compost because
It's so hot now the tomatoes need to keep hydrated or they might die in this heat.
What a mess! Bad idea. We will see how hard it is today. Last year I had an area of my garden I didn't plant so I tilled in wood shavings as an experiment thinking after a year it would break down and loosen the clay soil, No sign of it, it disapeared.
I add compost and composted steer & chicken manure to the holes I dig for tomatoes every year. This year the clay is so expanded from months of rain I've decided I need to start extracting some of the clay every year and making things out of it. I have lots of buckets now.
It's going to be 98°+ today. So I don't know if I will get much done, but your video has given me a whole new perspective on my clay dilemma.
If life gives you lemons you need to learn how to make lemonade right?
Who knows I may have some fantastic clay here, I know I sure have a lot of it. My garden has almost no rocks, I removed the few it had over the last 20 years.
Pottery was my favorite class in high school. The only class I got A+ all year.
Happy Summer everyone!
I'm a new subscriber, Thank you for your videos!
Yes, clay can be a blessing to a potter and a curse to a gardener, I have personally been on both side so that. I hope your clay turns out to have good working properties.
I lived in Costa Rica for a long time and I had a house with red/brown clay, but when we dug we found deposits of white clay that the locals make stuff with a little. When we had a big hole dug with a backhoe we found enough to surprise me.
I also found a lot of fragments of old pottery shards from the indigenous people there. It was all brown.
this video and channel is a such a blessing, clay is truly an incredible technology from nature
yes it is, thanks
I am from (and still live) in New Mexico. I guess I’ve been looking at clay my whole life. It all looks so similar and very familiar to me now after seeing this. Can’t wait to get out and find me some. Thank you!
There is a lot of great clay in New Mexico, have fun!
Where I live in southcentral Pennsylvania, I am located next to a creek, and off the side of the creek there is an old water raceway cut into the ground that feeds water into an old flower mill that was turned into a house.
In that raceway, there is so much water, silt, mud, and broken-down leaves that have been collected over many years, from flooding all the way back to colonial times.
It's so deep that if you walk in it, you will get stuck and sink into it up to your arms.
The water raceway never drys out, so every year a new layer is added from flooding.
I have used it for making clay once, and I was surprised at how well it worked.
I just threw a bucket in and let it sink, then dried it out, crushed it up into a fine powder to separate it from any of the decomposing leaves and sticks, and then added water to it.
Also, right next to this location, 120 yards away, there used to be a native village, and it would not be surprising if they even used it for making pottery.
you are my favorite youtube channel hands down! your videos have helped me in so many ways , financially,spiritually and, reconnecting with art and nature.
sometimes personally, being in nature isn’t enough for me to get out my head. now everytime i go out, it’s an adventure. thank you
Glad to help, this is the same for me, it gives me a reason to get outdoors and think about other things, it is very good for mental health.
In my hometown, finding clay has never been the problem. Dealing with clay, now... I've spent most of my life hacking at clay, chopping at clay, tilling clay, spinning out on clay, swearing at clay, scraping clay off various possessions, declaring war on clay, losing to clay, and many other clay-related activities. And now, thanks to this channel, I'll be making things with clay. (Though I'll probably still be swearing at it while I do.)
Thanks man for inspiring me to do what i always wanted. We have this blue clay near the sea. Its increadebly fine and everywhwre
I live next to a huge green belt (large strip of fields, protected by English law) and these videos have helped me realise that the dirt there has a lot of clay in it. I noticed a huge patch of clay last year while on a bike ride, and recently realised that the dirt cracks a lot when the farmers don't till it for a while, and their truck tracks stay for months. Definitely tempted to pick some up on my next bike ride now
Oh wow, you might have a real treasure there in that green belt.
In Illinois I would go to creeks to find pure grey clay. Sometimes you have to dig a bit. Other times you can find it in the creek banks
That's cool
Man, this is amazing info. Thank You! Watched your other vid about processing wild clay too - I had no idea clay is simply defined by particle size!
I love your channel so much
I enjoy creating art with clay so much
for so long i was convinced that BUYING clay was the only way
(and being honest i don't always have the possibility 💸)
you opened my eyes!
Not only that, but the idea of doing a little adventuring to find my own clay is amazing✨
Edit:
I live in the Patagonia, and for a long time in ancient B.C. times a large portion of the land was completely under water
I was living surrounded by clay!
That's great, I am glad I could inspire you to try wild clay.
Patagonia Argentina or US?
Idk why your videos came up 3 years later. I'm not a potter or artist of any sort. But I'm sort of loving this and tempted to try to make something with natural clay all of a sudden!
Homie spent like 30 min hammering that lake. Bed for the clip love the dedication thank you for the information my guy
You bet
I live in northern georga where it's a very humid climate and most of the ground has high clay content.
I grew up in Willcox; dad was always teaching me of the history and geology of the area whenever we would be out hunting.
i love your channel! just found you, and it gets me so excited to do some pottery.
I grew up next to a river, and all our garden soil was extremly clay-y. i once tried making a little pot out of the garden soils just as it was, and fired it in the wood stove. it worked out, it had one crack, but otherwise held up, which for totally unprosessed clay with no added sand is pretty darn good.
i gonna go visit my dad and steal a few buckets of dirt! :D
Awesome, thanks. Isn't it funny how our minds always go back to playing with mud as a child.
In wet climate sides of roads are a great place to find clay
Works the same anywhere
if you want to know if your area had a body of water a long time ago you can look up paleogeography for the area to see what the map was like a long time ago. Also if your area has lots of limestone and sandstone.
Thanks for the tip
Thank you so much!🙏
Everywhere had a body of water when the whole world was flooded
I live in norway and i will for sure be trying this out next year when the frost is gone!
Oh my gosh. When I first saw the crackle ground, I was reminded of one of the empty lots from the neighborhood I grew up in. The cracks are deeper in this video though. Cool!
these are supremely well-planned videos! i love your content, and i was really shocked to see you only have 79K subs. please keep releasing great videos like these!!
I gain more subs every day. Thanks
Thank you. I stopped the video and went outside on my property and was able to identify clay right away on my road and in various other places around the homestead.
Cool
loved the video the songs were amazing too. Keep it up
Thanks
Thank you for the video Andy! I don't live in a dry region, I live in Pennsylvania with a lot of moisture but just the part where you talk about tire tracks etc was priceless for me. It's helped me identify the places on my property where I have clay. Fantastic. Thank you!
Glad I could help.
Great video, it was very informative, glad this randomly came up in my recommendations.
I've Been thinking about getting into making my own clay for awhile now as I really want to try my hand at some sculpting but don't want to invest any money into it until I find out if I'm any good or not... came across your video tonight and after hearing about how clay can differ region to region I decided to run a quick search about finding clay in my area and discovered that the piedmont region of northwest Georgia where I'm from, is apparently famous for it's "red clay" also discovered that the dirt isn't Red everywhere else you go in the world..so that's neat. 😅
I remember being a little kid and visiting my aunt who lived down a long dirt road in the foothills of the smoky mnts and how my mom always warning me not to get into that "red clay mud" that made up the driveway cuz I'd ruin my clothes... I'd totally forgotten all about that until looking it up a earlier...
Now the question is, will red clay be suitable for sculpting with? Maybe I'll find out while I'm off this weekend 😏
So happy I live around so much wet clay but also so happy that since I will live part time in a desert area in the next few years , I can now find clay there too❤
I hope this man is appreciated cuz this right here is quality content
This video just helped me talk my husband into going on a clay hunting adventure here in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in Andalusia this weekend! Can't wait!!
Great, have fun
I live on red clay and rock (a small mountain in the Ozarks). I have to garden above the land in raised beds.
Oh yes, clay is not good for gardening in. But you might be sitting on a treasure trove of good pottery clay.
Arizona my 500 flower pots of vegetables tomaties , carrots , lettuce , watermelons , kept dying . And later i emptied the pots , cups , pails , and had made bricks 😂 . Mayei should grow bricks
Thanks for this video, I was able to identify clay because of this!
I'm going to try making something out of it now
Thanks!
Thank you so much Sandra!
Andy, you really are just describing all the dirt in Oklahoma. Doing some research to find some natural clay to make some simple vessels as a hobby. Slowly finding out that I could likely dig a hole anywhere here in OK and find something usable.
LOL, yes, I have lived in Oklahoma and can vouch for that.
OK... so OK soil is OK? Got it :p
Haha came to RUclips trying to find out how to identify clay after having a very hard time trying to dig a fire pit (also in Oklahoma), and yes, every single one of his clues could be found by walking 50 feet from my house in any direction.
Ey! I live in Arizona and wondered where exactly to find clay. This video is perfect for me!
That's great!
Wow your channel is so underrated! I can tell that you really love making videos and pottery. I hope you become more popular.
Thank you. I am passionate about the subject.
Very apt comment. I've been looking for such content for a long time - professionally prepared and engaging.
thank you - on my land in Italy there area few types of clay depth - the blue layer is the strongest
Excelente trabajo 👏
Having taken pottery in college and then with job, household and kids I gave up on doing pottery, no time and no room or money for a wheel and kiln..... your videos are exciting!
All I need now is to dig about a foot down in my back yard and see if that red clay would be any good😁
Glad to provide some inspiration for going back to the clay.
Thanks for the information and details!!! From Germany
Glad it was helpful!
thank you so much for this entire channel, but specifically the tip to try dry ponds and lake beds, i found some bluish gray clay just below the surface of my friend's pond, and it gets purer gray as i dig deeper! so excited to process and age some of it. at the moment i'm doing small things, just practicing, but soon enough i'll be making the big stuff! thank you again for inspiring me and giving me a strong foundation for this burgeoning passion for pottery in me!
You're welcome, glad you are enjoying my content.
I get plenty of that in my backyard here in Phoenix.
i don't no how I come here but intersting to see. good explained
Thanks for watching
I now know how to find natural clay, thank you!
You’re welcome 😊
It's really helpful. I didn't know that I have so much clay around..
Glad it was helpful!
Aww man, all those years of my Mum cursing the chunks of pure grey clay in our back garden here in the UK - and I could have been using it?
Fascinating stuff
How well does lake bottom clay perform? Does the organic matter in it cause blackening or other detriments to the finished pot?
Most of my clays have naturally occurring organic matter in them which does not effect the outcome but can leave a dark area inside the ceramic body that can only be seen when broken. This playa lakebed clay somehow does not seem to have any organic matter in it, which makes no sense to me.
So great! Thank you so much, gentle and connected to Nature knowledge you share with us. I appreciate your humanity in the way you show us this amazing activity called ancient pottery. Yeah! I will try to find mud when i get back in Canada and do a small fire! Thanks again
So nice of you
I found this video by accident and was surprised to see you at the Playa - I live on 5 acres in Hereford, AZ and the entire 5 acres is greasy, dark clay, with sand on the surface.
Interesting stuff!
I used to live in Hereford and I grew up in Sierra Vista. There is a lot of good clay in the Hereford area.
I am 100% going to have to try this
Funny i recognize your area. From bisbee. Miss the desert.
Great video. Now I know where and how to look for clay!
Glad it was helpful!
The county I live in actively puts clay on the otherwise sugar sand roads so all the roads have clay in them. There are large deposits in certain areas of my town which were the some of the original sources of the county's clay not sure who technically owns them since they're pretty much abandoned nowadays and are mainly a hangout for teenage stoners.
Sounds like it would be easy to grab some of that clay and try it for pottery
Great share, beautiful work.
Lovely Voice and Excellent instructions.
Thank you 🙏
My pleasure 😊
Oh how I wish your viewers who where looking for clay could visit my homestead 😊 it’s nothing but clay. Thick, sticky, and everywhere! We have dug several trenches through the 15 acres and gone as deep as five feet down and still, nothing but blue clay. So much so that we need to build raised garden beds because if you just amend the clay soil at ground level you end up with root rot because you essentially made a dirt filled pond. I’ve often wanted to utilize it but was unsure how. I’ll be watching your videos and getting educated 😁 thank you for sharing your wisdom with us!!!
Some people are more blessed than others.
Thank you for telling us about Identifying clay in Nature, when I have a chance to find clay in nature to identify here in my country. I do interest to know more about clay and making clay pots, mugs n others😀👍🙏
You are welcome, have fun
Thank you for this great in depth information 🙏
You’re welcome
The soil here is called black gumbo or Montmorillonite. It seems to be rock hard or so sticky it will pull your boots off or pull your hip out of socket. I first encountered it on a dirt bike 35 years ago. I had a hard time getting it off the bike and its tires using a 1600 PSI pressure washer. When it dries you can twist your ankle in the cracks. I dropped a beer bottle in a crack one August and it fell out of sight.
Is it useable for pottery.
you are a wonderful guy!! watching 4 videos of yours have solved my issues, thanks so much I have learned a lot!!🙏
Arroyo are good places to find clay laid down in the strata of the walls.
We found clay in the creek on my sister's farm in Maryland. There is clay ranging from dark purple to white all over the region
Awesome
The area where you live is so beautiful! 🌞🌵🌵
I think so too!
This is the video I've been looking for haha
Great
You had me at strata ❤
Thanks finaly i know what to search
Glad to help
Nice video.
Those top layers of playas sure turn "clay like" when they get wet. Probably mostly clay and easier to harvest.
Get the man to 100k!
Yes please.
I live in Tucson. LOVE your videos. I’ve successfully fired about a dozen pieces with help from your videos. Thank you for all the amazing information. I am curious about the legal/moral implications of harvesting clay. I would like to go to Wilcox playa as it’s close to me and seems to be a good place from your video. Do you have any tips or suggestions on where it is ok to harvest clay, how much should you take from one place at a time etc... ? Thanks a bunch Andy!
Interesting questions Sean. Most places I collect, a 5 gallon bucket worth of clay is not going to make a difference, so I take a little and then a smooth the ground over behind myself so it's not unsightly. Try to not ruin the area for other potters or any other land use, if people leave a big ugly hole people may get upset and put up no-trespassing signs. Roadsides are usually fair game legally, most Forest Service and BLM land will allow small amounts of minerals collected for personal use, but again, don't ruin things, don't disturb plants, don't leave a big hole, etc. The Willcox Playa is owned by the US Department of Defense and as far as I know is never patrolled by military police. Take a small amount and cover up the hole you left, nature will fill it in before long. You should try looking for clay around the old clay quarries on the north side of Marsh Station Road. If you want directions for how to get out on the playa, send me an email using the contact form on my website ancientpottery.how
I also live in Tucson. One of my friends has a mom who is really into pottery. She buys it from Marjon Ceramics, which is on Oracle Road, just north of Grant Road.
made a list of a few places I can look! pretty sure I might have some good spots in my area
at a certain spot at the beach I go to, there is a patch of clay that is exactly how it is in art class. lol. it is so fine and already is moist to squish around and dries evenly very cool.
sounds cool
@@AncientPottery definitely is, haven't been in that particular spot in a while though. Gatta check if it is still there and take some home
Super Informative. I have a question, where would I look in a forest area (I know you said you lived in Arizona but I was wondering if you had any tips, thanks!)
Thank you for the guide. This really helps to know what to look for.
Glad it was helpful!
Thankfully i live in a city that used to be quite a large lake thousands of centuries ago. My bio teacher had mentioned that he was digging in his backyard, and after digging up the layer of dirt the grass was growing on, the first thing he saw was this great big layer of clay from when there was still a lake here. Now all I need to do is convince my dad to ruin our backyard with a shovel to get it.
Well, i thought this might be hard since i cant drive and live in an urban area, but then i remembered that i have already plastic clay in my yard that i used to dig up and make thigns with all the time. I still have a container full of clay balls cause i realpy loved rolling them out.
Great info, thanks for sharing
You're welcome
Thanks Ward. You're helping me really. Greetings from other side of the planet.
other side of the planet? I,m in New Zealand
@@hugoamkreutz2081 Turkey
You are very welcome. All you Kiwis, Turks or whatever. Clay is universal.
I see I'm going to be watching your videos for some time to come.
I certainly hope so, thanks!
hi andy! I just found you here on yt, but I already love your videos. I live in Brasil, and in a city were most of the regular earth is red earth, a pretty sand free kind of dirt that has a lot of iron on it. In my home it has a HUGE inactive ant's nest that except for some plant roots, wood and insects, is very basically pure red earth. It feels pretty plastic. do you think it is any good for caly making, or the Iron can interfeer somehow in the oven process?
Iron will not cause a problem, many of the clays I use have iron in them, it makes the clay red.
On the PNW so over saturation is typically the problem. Excellent videos with pratical info. Sub'ed♥️🇨🇦❤
We used to find clay in the creek that felt just like store bought. Like it was ready to use! I live in north West Florida though.
That's cool. I had someone just today leave a comment that there was no clay in Florida. I said northern Florida had it.
It was either natural clay or someone was canoeing with their giant collection of Play-Doh and spilled it all in the creek!
Super informative! Thank you!!
You're welcome
Thank you for sharing this beautiful ideas to make some things nice again thanks ❤
You are so welcome!
Awesome, thank you. Now i'm wondering if i have clay in my back yard! The adventure awaits :)
Maybe so, one way to find out...
As someone who lives in Michigan. I just have to dig 2 or 3 feet down. But this was a really cool video! Nice
That's cool.
Saw your video and went to my front Ditch and boom! Super clay. I guess being surrounded by rice fields has one perk. Now I just gotta learn how to make stuff out of it.
Now you need to process it, check out this video ruclips.net/video/u6RlHSG4cY4/видео.html
@@AncientPottery thank you for that, I watched it and thought yeah I should have done it that way, I did the wet process before, and it wore me out lol. In the future I'm doing it the dry way. Thank you for making these videos, I'm a huge bronze age fan and want to do amateur historical reenactment at home, so bronze working, clothes, pottery etc, and your videos are helping me out a lot. Just before I watched the dry process video I made my very first "pottery" it's basically an ashtray and the ugliest thing ever mad by man. But I'd have never tried it until watching your video. Didn't even know I had clay, it's Texas black clay, not sure if it's any goof but hey we will see. Anyways thanks again for the link and for making these vids.
This video is Awsome! 😊
Thanks! 😄
So here in KY. there is alot of it .
Excellent.
Thank you for this 🙂
You're welcome 😊
Great work Andy 👍🖐
Thanks 👍
can be useful even for civil engineers
Man you have me thinking now on how I can get clay together for adding to sand casting and other projects !
The trouble with castings is that it gets really hot and you need a clay that will stand up to that heat
@@AncientPottery your right, great insight thank you. , it would be fun to try a one and done experiment and see if it would keep. Don't worry I wear all the PPE and live by the get out of the way rule. :) Bentonite is suggested and what I have used in the past as a binder with the sand.