OK Clay demonstrates how to create a beer stein
Although people travel from all over Northeast Mississippi to visit OK Clay in Saltillo and pick up some of the original pottery pieces created there, Tim Kinard believes making pottery is something anyone can do.
It's just a matter of learning the steps.
"You just have to be patient, and you've got to put the time in," says Kinard, who co-owns the business with his wife, Elizabeth Owen.
Much of the time is spent in prepping the clay before throwing it on the pottery wheel. Using a proprietary formula, Kinard makes his own clay and glazes.
He starts by with a dry clay powder, fused with other ingredients in a clay mixer. The structure and moisture content has to be just right.
On this day, he’s experimenting with colors. In the end, he creates a chocolatey-red color clay.
"You've got to be sort of a closet chemist to figure this stuff out," Kinard says.
After mixing the clay in a clay mixer, he takes it over to a pug mill, which vacuums the clay and ages it before it's used to make pottery.
Now, it’s time to create. Kinard said he plans to make a stein.
The process starts with weighing out one and three-fourth pounds of clay. Kinard's clay shrinks about 14% during the drying and firing process, so he makes every piece that much larger than the final product should be.
Once he heads over to the pottery wheel, he wets the clay and begins centering. It's the hardest step for beginners, Kinard says. He pushes with the heels of his hands to center the clay and then cones, or wheel-wedges, the clay, spiraling it up and down several times before pressing it into the shape of a hockey puck.
"That's going to be the basis of my piece," Kinard says.
Next, he uses his fingers to create an indention in the center of the piece, pressing as far down as he wants the base to be. That's followed by a technique called pulling, which involves lightly pinching the inside and outside of the piece and pulling it upward to get the wall of the stein to the proper height and thickness as the wheel spins.
After pulling, he shapes the stein, adding a groove toward the top with his fingers. He uses a custom tool to shape the bottom.
"It needs to be nice and round," he says. "It needs to be smooth, and it needs to have just the right contour for the corners of your mouth, otherwise it's going to be an awkward experience every time you drink out of it, and you're not going to like it."
After getting the stein's shape just right, he uses a heat gun to dry it both inside and out. He adds indentations to the bottom using his fingers before pulling a wire under the bottom of the piece to remove it from the wheel.
He then shapes a handle and attaches it by pressing it into grooves at the top and bottom, adding indentations for comfort while holding the stein. Finally, he stamps the OK Clay logo and year to the bottom.
After a piece is finished, it sits on a shelf for about a week to dry before being fired in a kiln.
"It's a giant toaster oven," Kinard said of the kiln, which heats the pottery to a set temperature over a set amount of time.
After "bisque firing" the stein, which hardens the clay and removes moisture but leaves it semi-porous so that the glaze will stick to it, the piece is ready to be glazed.
For the stein, he dips the pottery in the glaze to coat it, but Kinard can also brush or spray the glaze onto pieces. After the glaze is applied, Kinard fires the piece a second time. The final product is a beautiful clay stein with a blue and green glaze.
