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Make Pottery At Home Without a Kiln (Or Anything Else)

Make Pottery At Home Without a Kiln (Or Anything Else)

Learn to make pottery at home without any special tools, kilns or other equipment. In this video I show how anyone can easily make pottery using just basic tools you already have, can easily purchase or can make yourself. Follow along as I take you through the whole process of making a bowl from forming with clay through firing in my driveway.

๐Ÿ”ฅ Resources mentioned in this video
Pottery tools on Amazon
Target wooden bowls
My newsletter (get the puki making lesson)
New Mexico Clay pukis

๐ŸŽฅ Videos referenced in this video
How To Get Into Pottery Cheap
Making Primitive Pottery in the City With Store Bought Materials
How To Make a Traditional Gourd Rib
What is a Puki and How Is It Used to Make Pottery?
Harvesting & Processing WILD CLAY in Arizona
Backyard Pottery Firing, How To Fire At Home Without a Kiln

0:00 Tools for making pottery at home
3:59 Work area setup for pottery at home
6:00 How to fire pottery without a kiln?
7:05 Forming pottery at home
11:30 Where do pukis come from?
13:10 Smoothing pottery at home
15:12 Firing pottery at home without a kiln
19:01 The big reveal, pottery made and fired at home

#potteryathome

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Check out my in-person pottery workshops and online masterclasses to improve your pottery making skills.

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Andy Ward PO Box 43601 Tucson, AZ 85733

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43 Comments

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  1. Have you ever made a s bird bath? How long did it take? I want one so bad but I don't have the money for stuff like that. I'm also not sure I could make one, becuase I think a solid item would be to heavy to move. Can you ever fire something that big?!?

  2. As a kid, my parents' backyard was full of clay, which I used to mix with water and roll into balls, and put them into the backyard fire pit in the hopes that i would find marbles amongst the charcoal the next morning. Needless to say, it didn't work. However, I've always wondered where the link between what i found in the ground and modern art class kilns was, seeing how our ancestors made a great many things out of clay. This video has been super informative, and I hope to use your techniques one day when I have a yard to fire in!

  3. Thank you. So is it ready for cooking? Can you dry the clay under the sun for several days and bring it in the house at night to prevent moisture then take it out again under the sun next day in and out for several days?

  4. As an educator who helps homeschooling parents, often cost is what limits most education. I love ideas that help turn what we have into working models. Thank you for this.

  5. Thank you so much I always love pottery but never knew were to start now with your kind generosity I will start to bring my clay to life .. thank you sir , from the Caribbean Trinidad. โค

  6. Was fine until I needed a driveway, that I do not have…
    Wonder if I can modify my Trangia, if the temparature can get high enough to turn the clay ceramic (900 C), but I think the aluminium will melt first (660 C) ๐Ÿ˜€
    Too bad.

  7. holy smokes I'm so glad this popped up in my recommended! I've been trying to figure out how to fire and refine clay in a cheap and easy way for a year or so now but I keep getting discouraged when I'm inevitably told I need to make some big expensive purchase. Very excited to watch your other videos and give this a go myself

  8. We relocated to Texas last year and got a little patch a heaven for some chickens, garden and small orchard. While my husband was digging holes for his trees and grapevines, he found soooo much clay, we joked around and said we hit a pot of gold and should sell the clay.
    I have always wanted to take a pottery class but they always filled up so fast and getting wait listed wasnโ€™t fun.
    Pottery and stained glass windows have always been something I have admired.
    Bonus: many loose bricks were left on this property and now all I need to do is figure out the gourd delio and my new adventure can begin.
    Thanks so much, what a treasure you are. ๐Ÿ™๐Ÿค ๐Ÿชท

  9. Great video….I will try your way very soon may be. But apart from using credit card in pottery making at home, the greatest information you gave is the clay we should choose. Do you think clay River Ganges can be used for this?

  10. I'm a baby in this area. I've been diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome, and I can't crochet anymore. The first thing that came to mind was pottery, but of course, I don't have any fancy tools and essentials to start. This video is a life saver. I can't wait to try it out. Thank you ๐Ÿ˜Š

  11. I'm sculpting with polymer clay, silently wishing we could use real clay, but no kiln, right? A few hours later and no research, this video pops up.
    I love spirit!
    Thank you ๐Ÿ˜Š

  12. Why couldnโ€™t you roll it out as thin as you want it and then press it into the mold for the roundness. Wouldnโ€™t you get a higher bowl that way? Just asking if it is just another way or if rolling it out would fail it. Iโ€™m a very beginner.

  13. There's lots of interesting comparisons between clay and alchemy.

    You can make pottery out of the dirt lying all over the place, but it's impure; prime materia. So you take it and filter out all the muck by adding water, drying it, putting it through filters, etc. Only, when you've finally gotten all the impurities out, the clay is actually too pure, too albedo, to survive the heat of the salamander, so you actually have to work some impurites back in again. You could, hypothetically, just shape and fire a hunk of dirt fresh off the bakc yard without doing anything to it at all if it was already contaminated with exactly the right temper, but even in cases where that might not even be all that unlikely, you have no way of knowing. And so you have all of these circuitous, almost ritual steps of purification, separation, kneeding, recombining, blasting, making sure that all of the steps are applyed evenly just so to ensure that the pot doesn't crack from being differentially dried or tempered, before finally reaching the rubedo of the finished pot.

    Alchemy is understood as a process of evolution of the cosmos and of the psyche through the processess of transformation in matter. All these things were seen as being interrelated long before the post modernists began talking about conflating them again by process of deterritorialization. So it is not insignificant that man is shaped into being out of clay in multiple creation myths, such as that of Promethesus in ancient Greece or Adam out of the dust of the Earth in Christianity.

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