My partner and I recently started renting a pottery wheel from a local pottery school so we can practice at home. We bought one 20 lb bag of clay with the intent to recycle it.
We wash our hands and our tools in a bucket and then dump that water into a larger bucket. This larger bucket also holds all our scrapped work, trimmings, etc. The clay will sink to the bottom and we can decant the water on top, allowing us to keep adding to it.
After a while, my partner scooped up the clay and placed it on pillowcases on a sheet pan and we let it dry for a week or so, flipping it one time.
Many people make plaster bats for this, but it's too cold to do work that dusty right now.
After it became dry enough, we tag teamed slam wedging it. We formed blocks and then sliced the blocks, alternating the newly sliced slabs to build new blocks...and then slam wedged those. This is to incorporate all the clay together and get as homogenous of a mix as possible.
I'm going to spend some time throwing from the recycled clay today!
That's pretty cool. I don't know anything about throwing clay or recycling it so if this is silly forgive me-
Is the recycled clay still something you could use to make finished pieces with or does it get contaminated or something with repeated throwing?
Yeah, it's still totally okay to use. It's possible it get contaminated if you aren't careful, so you need to make sure to keep paper, dust, etc out of it. Organic materials will burn away in the kiln but if it's in the clay it can create air bubbles or fuck with the way it dries. Those things can make it explode in the kiln.
This about it this way - the process to make reclaim clay isn't that far off from how clay is taken from the earth. It's a process of separating the clay from other materials (usually using water) and then drying it enough to still be workable. As long as you don't fire it, you can recycle clay with this method indefinitely.
Interestingly some contamination can improve the properties allegedly. Many potters insist that mouldy clay, while somewhat disgusting to work with, has better plasticity!
I've been meaning to test the air bubbles claim, it confuses me because even stonewear is not air tight and I have difficult imagining that it would cause cracking on its own. I tried to find papers examining it and couldn't. Structural weakness? yeah sure but I feel like uneven heating or uneven particle distribution would be the significant factors for failure on firing. Unfortunately I lack the ability to heat and cool in a repeatable way with a fire in the yard :(