March Tip by Rachel Whetzel

My tips for you today involve this cold and snowy or wet weather so many of us are having. I myself live in Oregon. It's beautiful and GREEN, but being green means it's also WET. Wet doesn't really help when you're drying clay, and you don't want to wait a week for that to happen. A lot of times, I use my oven to help speed up the process, but there are some tricks to doing that without mass amounts of cracking.

• LAYERS Don't try and dry one huge project in one fell swoop. Dry one thinner layer at a time. Use water on your dry piece and apply new clay to the wetted dry one. This creates a good bond between your layers. 
• LOW HEAT Keep your oven at THE LOWEST temperature you can. My stove only goes down to 170 degrees, but I have a small toaster oven that goes down to 150 degrees. Set your oven as low as you can. 
• AIR CIRCULATION This is huge. I have a convection toaster oven, and cracking has become nearly non existent with the low temps, and hasn't lost dry time because of the air circulation! If you don't have a convection, putting a fan in front of a cracked oven door, or using a dehydrator work also. So does placing a space heater facing shelves with your project on them. 
• CRACK A DOOR If your oven only goes to 180, or 200 degrees, you can help reduce heat by cracking the door on your appliance! 
• FILL IT IN Of course, if you bake a piece to speed up your dry time, and you still have cracking, you can wet your dry piece, and smear some Creative Paperclay® into the cracks. Once your piece has dried again, and you sand it, there will be no telling it was cracked. 

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