How can I make clay not smell?

Question

There is clay in the woods and everytime I keep it for a few days it starts to smell kinda mildewy... how can i make it not smell??

Answer 1

spray it wit sum fabreez

Poll about toilets seats :)

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?...

Answer 2

The smell, as you may have guessed, comes from organic material in the clay. In order to make the clay not smell, you must kill the organic material. The easiest way to do it is to heat it. As long as you keep the temperature below 500 deg C, you won't damage the clay.

When processing naturally occurring clay, it's best to dry it to begin with anyway. Since you're drying the clay, take it up to a temperature that will kill the little organic critters. Once the clay is dry, break it up into very small pieces. Remove rocks, twigs, roots and other large pieces if you want, but they will come out in the next step anyway.

Place the dry clay in a barrel (gartbage can) and fill the barrel with water to about twice the depth of the dry clay. Let stand until all bubbling stops (probably an hour or so). Stir the clay/water to mix it thoroughly. There should be enough water that the mixture is very thin. It should pour like water. If you want to add a hedge against the smell, you can add bleach at this point. But I dislike the smell of bleach enough that I would rather have clay smell than to use bleach.

Let the mixture settle for about a minute and then pour off the liquid into another barrel that has a fine screen on top. The screen will remove small leaves, twigs and other debris. Heavy material, such as rocks, will remain in the bottom of the first barrel.

It is usually worthwhile to add more water to the first barrel, stir it again and pour off the liquid into the second barrel. In some cases you may want to repeat this step a third time. Discard the sand and rocks remaining in the first barrel.

Allow the second barrel, which now contains only clean clay and water, to stand overnight or longer. Do not disturb the barrel or you will have to wait longer for it to settle again.

After the clay settles, pour off the clear water from the layer above the clay. Try not to stir up the clay layer as you are pouring off the water. The very fine clay material at the top of the clay layer is very important to the quality of the clay, so you don't want to pour it off with the water.

You can let the clay settle again and pour off more water if you want.

After this, it's simply a matter of letting the clay slurry dry to a workable consistency. It's best if you can pour the slurry into plaster troughs to assist with the drying. Some people pour the slurry into an old pillowcase or pair of jeans with the legs tied closed.

The drying process is the hardest part, in my opinion. It can take a long time and mooshing the clay around to keep it more homogeneous is messy. But then, work in clay is always messy.

Try a small batch first to get used to the process

Good luck and have fun

Answer 3

I knew Clay in high school and I never thought he was very stinky, but that was a while ago. Just hose him down