I work from neither a house nor a group studio. I work from a two-bedroom apartment that I share with two other people. I have a yard, but I share it with approximately 15 other tenants. I wish there were more info out there for someone with the limited space and use requirements that I have, but there really doesn’t seem to be.

What the Internet Did and Didn’t Tell Me About Working With Ceramics:

1. Rehydrating Clay.
I found lots of different methods of how to do this. Most of them involved smashing the dried clay with a hammer prior to hydrating, and/or drying it in thin layers on big plastic racks after it had been hydrated. The first seemed too messy and I didn’t have the equipment/supplies for the second. I ended up just putting a whole block of clay in a bucket full of water, covering it, leaving it in the sun, and mushing it up with my hands after a few days. This worked pretty well, but would have worked better if I’d used less water and left it alone longer.

Of course that also would have been a lot easier if my back yard included something everyone else takes for granted: a hose, or a spigot, or some kind of running water. But, no, all the water I needed had to be lugged down three flights of rickety old stairs.

Following another internet suggestion, I next tried drying the muddy stuff by putting it in a pillowcase and hanging it to drip-dry. After three days in the sun, this only resulted in one ruined pillowcase. I then moved the clay back into the bucket and left it in the sun for a few more days. This once again worked well, and would have worked better if I’d had the time to leave it there a few days more.

But by then I just really wanted my clay. I brought it upstairs and spread it in thin layers on some upholstery fabric samples I had laying around. I left some of these out for about a day and it turned out perfect, but I really wanted some of that clay that night.

So following more internet directions, I took the least-wet clay I had and formed it into a bunch of small, clumsy little coils. I made the coils into small arches on a baking pan, and baked them for 5-10 minutes at 250 degrees in my oven.

With most of them, this made very workable clay, but it was a lot of effort for a very small amount of clay. I really do not recommend getting that impatient. With the rest, the clay got too dry–which was okay, I just stuck it in a bowl with water and it was rehydrated the next day.

2. Kilns

My dad offered to buy me a kiln. I wanted a medium-sized one, but had to settle for the smallest high-fire one I could find, due to space issues. My boyfriend had to haul it up the stairs for me.

I got it installed okay, but my one roommate has had all these questions: about the noise level, about fumes, about smells, about heat. Many of them are valid but I don’t necessarily know how to answer her. Before my old roommate moved out, I worried about him getting drunk and stumbling into the kiln on his way out to have a smoke, getting second-degree burns along the way.

I have the kiln in a very well-ventilated room, that’s sealed off from the rest of the house, and the kiln isn’t very big…but I haven’t yet been able to get a clear verdict on whether or not I also have to use the vent system it came with. I have the vent set up, and I can use it, but…it’s loud. And the kiln room is right next to the kitchen. And I don’t want to drive anyone, including myself, crazy. And the ventilation ducting, by necessity, must rest on potentially flammable materials, and I can’t figure out if it gets too hot for that to be safe.

The internet appears to have failed me on this one.

And I can’t make stuff until I rehydrate all the clay that I got for free. I could have bought some fresh, but this was free, you know? And I can’t rehydrate it until I clean the buckets that I also got for free. I could have bought some clean ones, but these were free.

Free is good. But free also sometimes requires some extra steps. Which are annoying.

Point A and point B feel like they’re getting increasingly further away.

Not that it was very organized to begin with. There’s two big Rubber maid boxes stuffed with supplies, and two smaller blue boxes, and piles of papers and bags of packing supplies and way more beads than I can fit in my three supply boxes. And now of course I have a kiln, which hasn’t even been installed yet, but already I’ve got bags of glaze, and downstairs in the (communal) yard I’ve got a ventilation system that I don’t even know if I need, and stacked on top of that I’ve got a half-dozen bags of dried-up clay I got for free, that I need to rehydrate, but don’t have any buckets to do it in.

So today I’m working on my plan to make a big modular shelving system in one of our room’s alcoves, out of free wood found on the street. It won’t solve all my organizational problems, but one would at least hope it would be harder to lose stuff. Plus, it’d look a hell of a lot better. I think.