Can you bake natural clay in the oven at home?

Question

My daughter collects and has sculpted with natural clay found at the beach. How can we make it last?

Answer 1

Go ahead and give it a try, but if you want it to be stronger you'll need to fire it in a kiln.  They get up in the thousands of degrees- a little hotter than your oven ;)

Answer 2

You can bake "earth clay" in an oven BUT it will never be as hard or strong as firing it in a high-temperature kiln.

Some "clays" " from the ground are stronger than others though.  And you might also be able to have the items fired at a clay place or college campus, etc. that offers it.

Otherwise, the best you can do is keep the items away from stress, perhaps on a shelf or even under a glass dome or acrylic box.  Small items and items that are rounded and don't have many projections will tend to last longer too.

You might also get a bit more strength from painting them with a clear polyurethane, or with other paints.

There are all kinds of "clays" that your daughter might enjoy sculpting with though that could be stronger and last longer.  Some other "air-dry" clays are plant-based so won't break as easily (though they'll all have to be sealed to make them waterproof) --things like Creative Paperclay, Makins or Hearty, Celluclay, or even salt dough clay, or bread clay, etc.

Another type of air-dry clay would be a clay made from sand and either thinned permanent white glue or cornstarch and glue (can't remember, but I had the young kids in my class sculpt with it once, and remember having to stir it in an old pot on the stove to prepare it... it got really hard though after drying!)

"Polymer clays" are great, but will need to be baked at a low temperature in a home oven to harden (they're not air dry clays), but they can be quite strong ...the strongest would be Premo, Kato Polyclay, FimoClassic, or Cernit, followed by FimoSoft... and then and SuperSculpey--Firm for the strongest of the one-color polymer clays).  

There's loads of info (plus lessons, examples, etc.) on using polymer clay for sculpting or for all kinds of other things on my website, if your daughter is interested (this is the "Table of Contents" page for the whole site):

http://glassattic.com/polymer/contents.h...

(there's also a page specifically for Kids & Beginners )

Other kinds of clays would be "epoxy" clays like MagicSculpt, Aves Epoxy Sculpt, and Apoxie Sculpt, and even something called hypertufa if she's interested in natural materials.

HTH,

Diane B.

Answer 3

bake it at 365 until its hard and if you want glaze it