I have a recipe for someone out there who, like me, just wants to know if it's possible to be constructive and creative without being toxic or harmful. I'll get to that recipe and I'll make sure that you don't have to read the entire blog post in order to understand it or search it by scrolling right at the end of this first paragraph here. If you read on, you might additionally come across reasons to opt for such a recipe without having first considered why it would be relevant to come up with such a thing as an alternative to what already exists on the internet or what is available to purchase online or in-store labeled similarly. There are definitely reasons and they were the motivation to work diligintely over a year to ivent, experiment, modify, and refine until the studio was able to produce this very simple and satisfying final version.
When the studio opened, Melissa (who is a pioneer of this endeavor) and I were keen to provide opportunities for successful art endeavors that utilized natural, non-toxic materials . Anticipating the degree to which we would be able to apply the rules of engagement was very difficult and a real moral struggle. Wanting to sort of revolt in a way from what we'd both been relegated to as teacher's in Early Ed meant that bottom line, we'd be moving as far away from glitter as possible, avoiding coloring in the lines, considering re-inventing the marker, and trying to understand how some of the ubiquitous ingredients in preschool artworks might be formulated from scratch in ways that were either archetypicical (like tempera paint certainly used to be made from eggs in the past and a recipe for it is surely wrapped up somewher on the web) or experimental, like what would end up happening with the air-dry clay recipe.
We had to get to work pretty quickly putting together currciulum packages for the hoardes of kids we imagined would be flooding in who we imagined were, in turn, lured by the prospect of art-empowerment and a novel agency that it provided. This empowerment, we imagined would be the result of understanding materials and media formulation and the entailing freedom to abandon toxic necessities such as glitter, solvents, plastic adhesives, sunthetic bristles, and pre-fabricated foundations such as a canvas gessoed with acrylics or those myriad foam shapes and plastic sequins associated with mixed-media pieces. When brainstorming the kind of multi-faceted artworks we hoped to entice friends to participate in constructing, we quickly understood that there would be a few key materials present in the majority of works we'd embark upon which would require us to explore all that might be revealed from historical accounts, relevant science, modern experiences, and innevitably, the intuition earned from trial, error, experimentation, modification, and refinement.
When it came to air-dry clay, the unfortunate reality was that it's history as an art-medium does not seem to extend back very far into the past and it's iterations are either full of modern synthetic chemicals used as drying agents, plasticizers, preservatives, and adhesives or they are decidely food based. If you have been reading through the blog, there's a good chance it's because you're interested in the formulas. There's a good chance that you have explored a number of them. In that case, you may very well be familiar with the most prolific base-recipe for "eco-friendly" or "non-toxic" air-dry clay, which will be some version in which baking soda and starch are the primary constituents. It's absolutely gorgeous stuff, resembling porcelain in so many ways. Nothing against it, really; we've found that it can produce beautiful objects of particular size and thickness which can be fortified with other mediums such as an eco-varnish in order to prevent it from chipping or cracking if you blink too hard or sigh. It certainly is not going to come out of the oven without disintegrating, will not submit to coiling and slabbing, and doesn't take well to an armature or other scaffolding. To these ends, utliizing wheat flour (and to lesser degree, other food flours) may very well satisfy the criteria for a "bakeable" clay, except, of course, that "clay" isn't really present in the recipe.
Potter's clay, which is Earth sediment, is, as far as the internet seems to be concerned, not for baking. We'd love to have a kiln out back to "fire" the stuff, as this is considered the proper method for ensuring potter's clay become structurally stable and that it achieve "ceramic" status. Unfortunately, we don't and can't have a kiln but do have a compulsive obsession with potter's clay. This meant that we would be pressed to invent a recipe and method to utilize it, without any toxic manipulation, to achieve a bakeable/dryable form that satisfied criteria for durability, workability, texture, appearance, and forgiveness (our recipe seems very resistant to measurement discrepancies). It is thanks to a potter that we satisfied the criteria and persisted in persuit of the final recipe which really does include potter's clay and is as simple as can be.
Without further ado, here's the recipe:
Air-dry Potter's Clay:
To make any amount of this clay you'll want to follow a ratio of 3:2:1 Clay to Fiber to starch and adjust to scale. This recipe will amounts of fiber and starch to combine with 1 cup of potter's clay. It is much easier to make large portions of fiber/starch mixture and then portion it out to mix with smaller amounts of clay than it is to make amount for this small single portion recipe. You'll have to have a high-speed blender or food processor to work with the fiber in this recipe.
ingredients:
Potter's clay: 1 Cup
Carton fiber (egg-carton and related cardboards): 1 empty egg carton or equivalent amount of soft cardboard.
Starch (arrowroot, tapioca, or corn etc.): 1 Tbs.
Water: 1/3 Cup
* optional drying oil (linseed, poppy, walnut, etc): up to 1 Tbs
process:
strip any removable wrappings from the empty egg carton, tear it into pieces that will fit loosely in your high-speed blender or food processor and blend on high until the fiber looks cottony/fluffy. Let his sit for a few minutes while you cook the starch so that the fibers have time to settle in the container. I suspect they aren't the best thing to breathe in.
It's easier to cook a larger portion of starch than you'll need for this small recipe, so scale it up if you agree but otherwise, you'll need to place cool water in a small pot and stir the starch in. Turn up the heat as high as you like and stir the starch around continuously while it comes to a simmer. When the liquid is the thickness of familiar white school glue, pull it from the heat and set aside.
Carefully remove the lid from the blender and slowly transfer the fiber fluff to a mixing bowl attempting to create as little airborne debris as possible.
Immediately add the hot liquid starch goo and (if desired) the drying oil to the fluff and stir it slowly with a wooden spoon or other durable instrument. The mixture will become very sticky and viscous. The more you can treat this material like it is in a mortar by squashing and grinding like a pestle might, the better. The smoother the resulting paste, the better. The addition of the drying oil creates an amazing smooth texture to the clay, an additional water resistance, and a slight polymerization but it may extend the drying time.
Allow the resultant paste to cool before adding to the clay. The longer it reconstitutes the fibers, the better. Overnight on the counter or in the fridge is perfect.
Create a crude bowl shape with the cup of potter's clay and place a blob of fiber paste roughly 2/3 the volume of the clay into the depression formed.
sqaush the sides of the "bowl" around the fiber paste wad to encapsulate it and then begin to work the materials together in any satisfying way. This process will take some time and you will know you are done when you tear the clay open and it is uniform in appearance. If it's not ready, you will see distinct clumps of fiber embedded everywhere.
Use:
The clay is ready to use. We keep a container of shallow water nearby to ensure that edges and impressions can be smoothed down. The addition of so much fiber in the clay can make impressions somewhat jagged and "hairy" looking and it helps to wet the edges of tools and fingers while working.
This clay can readily be formed over wire scaffolding and even very small pieces/protrusions seem to maintain a reasonable strength when air-dried.
Bonding seperate pieces of this clay to one another can be done aproximately as one would with normal clay; scoring and slipping, but it seems that the fibers do a reasonable job when firm pressure and a little water is used even without scoring and slip.
This clay takes readily to egg-tempera painting when dried. Look for our favorite paint recipes elsewhere in this blogoverse. We've found that a topcoat of our favorite eco-varnish is an amazing way to finish the process and an additional way to provide a level of durability. The clay is not ceramic, as it won't be "fired" in a kiln at very high temperatures, but you can bake it to accelerate the drying process. We've baked at low temp 200-250° F for 30-60 minutes. This bake time may not completely finalize the drying process but our recommended egg-tempera paint can go on at this point. It's recommended that the clay be left to fully "cure" for up to a week before and varnish is applied.
The success of this simple recipe involved so many attempts with so many different ingredients and most of the recipes attempted incorporated ingredients that are not a part of the final recipe. There could be many other modifications to this recipe or even overhauls that produce something even better than what we have come up with. We'd love to hear from anyone who tries this, modifies this, comes up with their own, or just can't seem to make any of it work out!
Chris and crew at Cloud Belly
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