Micaceous Pottery

Hi, I'm Tony Soares. Today I'm going to show you how to make micaceous pottery, kind of a commercial style, even though this is all hand-dug clay. You can see the sparkles on there. It's really pretty, comes out really pretty. Pretty simple process. I'm going to use some baby oil. It's just mineral oil. I'm going to put it on these pots and I'll be slipping these pots with a micaceous slip. I'll show you how to do that and where to get that. Pretty simple process. The baby oil keeps the moisture from the micaceous slip from absorbing into the pot and causing it to crack. In the olden days, if they were using a micaceous slip, you would apply it probably while the pot is still leather hard, but I like to let my pots dry and then I get them all oiled up. Did he say baby oil? Did he? Yes, I did. Baby oil is a great friend to pottery, although it does smoke if you try to preheat it in your house oven and probably not good to breathe. You can use vegetable oil, but it tends to repel a little bit of the slip, so I like the mineral oil the best. I'll let this all soak in, get these pots all oiled up. If you use a plastic bag, they do tend to help quite a bit. If you use a paintbrush, and I'll just be putting one coat on these. The bigger the pot, you might want to do two coats just to be careful. I'll get these oiled up and then we'll let it soak in for a little while, probably about a half an hour, and I'll be back. Okay, I'm back. So I have purchased some vermiculite from Home Depot, and what this is, it's in the garden department. It's for keeping moisture in your planters and gardens and whatnot, but it is puffed mica, so they heat it up and somehow it puffs up and I'm not quite sure of the process. It's very cheap. It beats going out and getting micaceous rocks and burning them and then pounding them up. At least out here where I'm at, some of the clays have mica in it. Not tons, but there is some clays with mica and there is some rocks that you can crush up and it has loads of mica in it, but this is the easy way. And we are going to use an old coffee grinder and go outside and I'll grind some of this mica up and then I'm going to sift it through this sifter right here into this bowl. All right, so I'm going to just put some of this mica in the coffee grinder and see if this thing still works. Always do this outside, maybe in the breeze. Have a fan blowing so you don't breathe this crap. It's not good for you, I'm sure. You can see it's quite dusty. You don't want a lung full of vermiculite. You don't need very much. Probably just do these two. So I have a bowl and I've got some water and some old vermiculite and just a little bit of clay, liquid clay water. You don't really need much but it'll help it stick. So I'll just mix this around, probably add a little bit more water to it and then just grab one of the pots and just kind of smear it on there. Now if you have a bigger pot you might want to do it in sections. Just do like a quarter or the bottom. Let it dry for a while and then do the upper half or vice versa. That just ensures the pot isn't getting too hydrated. Depending on what kind of clay you're using it might absorb too much moisture and want to crack on you, especially around the lip areas. You got to be kind of careful. So I'm going to just rub that on there and what that's doing is letting all them particles of mica kind of lay flat and then I'll come in with either a plastic bag or a cloth. I'm going to let it set for just a little bit. I'll come in with a plastic bag or a cloth and just kind of buff it and that'll help shine up those particles a little bit and when they fire they reflect the light once they're fired on there. Very cool pottery. I know it was made in other parts of the country like Taos, New Mexico. Some of the Apache people made this style. I have some Kumeyaay pottery, Pai Pai pottery from Baja and it's very micaceous and parts of Mexico and I'm not sure about other parts of the world but I'm sure they did. You can buy mica either from a New Mexico clay company also. They have it in different particulate and Laguna Clay Company carries it. I'm sure Aardvark Clay Company carries it. Get this one covered and I'll start buffing the first one. The bigger the particles it seems to look a little bit better. When it gets real fine it's almost like a fine fine makeup glitter so I like the bigger a little bit bigger particles. I did notice this pot wasn't dry all the way and I put some of that oil on there so you want to make sure you let your pots dry all the way. It did cause it to crack but we'll just see what happens if I can fill it in with some mica and cover it up. Let's see what the first pot will do. If you have a whole bunch of clay mixed in with your mica it's gonna kind of cover the shiny particles but I guess once you fire it and wash it off it'll be all right. That or you can use one of these old oily bags. So it's starting to get some sparkle to it now. I'll finish up the rest of these and get them fired up and see what happens. Right here are the micaceous pots cooking being fired in my beehive oven. Put underneath wood on top. Got some cookie trays around them just trying to keep the heat in there. All right next morning. Not a micaceous one. Neither is that. Pretty. I'll get these washed up and show you what they look like in just a second. All right so here they are washed off and nice and sparkly. This is what the clay looks like without the mica which is super beautiful. Cooked bowl. All right so here's a about a 25 year old maybe 30. Pye Pye or Kumeyaay micaceous pottery. Try to focus in on there. This one the clay is just micaceous itself and they burnished it which makes it look really nice. Good size pot. Here's a blackware piece that I've done and that one had a crack in it so I kept it. Once in a while get some cracked pieces.