how to wedge?

Wedging is not only removing air but also evenly distributing the water to
allow an even pressure on the wheel to be evenly distributed throughout the
clay. There is also the suggestion that spiral wedging lines the clay
particles up against each other making the clay denser and therefore
stronger.
I tend to think of kneading dough in terms of stretching the gluten but I
doubt that much air is trapped just more evenly distributed.
Steve.
"jedi" wrote in message
...

"Slgraber" wrote in message
...
wedging strikes me as being very similar to kneeding bread dough. is it?
i
keep thinking one day i'll wedge some dough and make some pizza...

see ya

steve

I once made the mistake of claiming that with kneeding dough you want air
pockets in the bread but with clay you want air pockets out of the clay.
I
was chastized and told that what puts 'air' in the bread is the yeast so I
will rephrase it. With the end product of bread you don't care if you are
folding in pockets of air since you want air in the end product anyway.
You
are kneeding to develop 'gluten' - to make the molecules in the bread
longer. With clay you don't want pockets of air folded into the clay as
you
are wedging so you have to be careful not to pull large pieced of clay
over
'folds' of clay that have air between the layers. So with bread you are
folding one half over the other half with no regard to air being caught
between layers. With clay you are not folding over but 'pulling' into the
body of clay and then pushing away with the heal of your hand to push out
any air, blend the 'mixture' and align the particles of clay.


Subject: Google
From: "Eddie Daughton"
Date: 12/18/2004 12:33 PM Pacific Standard Time
Message-id:

Best place to learn to wedge is from someone who knows how..... Must be
someone in India (probably near to you) who could teach you.... Perhaps
one
of the potters in a local village? Kill two birds with one rock that
way,
learn how to wedge and find out about local resources... Just a matter
of
asking in the right way...
Hugs
Eddie
wrote in message
roups.com...
Oh I googled it for hours; believe me, the last place I try to get
this
type of information is on a newsgroup.
In this case, I've found several hundred courses [in the US
naturally] that offer "wedging clay" or "how to wedge clay" or
several other combinations of words, as part of their lessons, but no
information useful to me.
That's when one resorts to usenet...
Thanks for the links; some information has been gleaned. If anyone has
more, I'd be grateful.
Regards,
Mark Holden











steve graber