How to Make 32oz of Magic Water for Pottery Joints

all right I thought I would do a quick tutorial on Magic Water and what you need Magic Water for is really attaching any two clay bodies together it really I know more often than not I have previously used slip which is just a combination of water and Clay to attach two things together but what I've found is that often times you get cracking and the clay shrinks and what magic water does is really help the two clay the two pieces of clay to stick together in particular when they don't have the same hydration and really prevents cracking in that way so let's go ahead and make it and it's a really simple recipe it's water it's sodium silicate and it's soda ash so um first let's go ahead and just label this jar because we don't want anyone to think it it is anything um else but Magic Water so I will go ahead and make a label for this and stick it on the side of the jar you can use really any jar you want um I know a lot of times people make this up as a gallon and um that's well and good but a gallon might see me out so I think you know really using 32 o of water which is what I have measured here so it's four cups of water that I went ahead and put uh in this jar and um all right and here's my lid actually which was all the way over here and then we are going to go ahead and add um 3/4 of a tablespoon of liquid sodium silicate now 3/4 of a tablespoon is an odd measurement I get that because it is in fact um just using 32 o of water but I really find that this is kind of the right proportion for me so 3/4 of a tablespoon is also 2.25 tpoon so I'm going to use this here and I'm going to go ahead and um go ahead and add liquid so silicate here um this sodium silicate actually came from clay King uh which really has kind of everything online um for pottery and so it's a good place to to get it so that was the first teaspoon here is the second teaspoon all right and I mentioned either 3/4 of a tablespoon or 2.25 teaspoons which means this is a/4 teaspoon so that is 2.2 five okay so that is all of our sodium silicate get that last little drop in there all right and then I'm actually going to just um kind of clean this out a little bit because I need to use it again okay so that was the sodium silic let me put the lid back on this before I spill it and in case you needed to know what it looks like that's what it looks like all right and then soda ash which um we need a very tiny amount for this um this is soda ash I got from the ceramic shop um you certainly can get it from lots of different places I would be careful with this you don't want to aerosolize it um but I'm going to be um rather quick and only get a little amount and put it directly into water so so for the soda ash you need 38 of a teaspoon okay so that means essentially 1 and 1/2 1/4 teaspoon that's what you need so there's the first one and then and you know it doesn't have to be perfect right there's half of the second one and that is 38 of a teaspoon let me go ahead and close this up so again I don't kind of spill it going to go ahead and stir that going to put the lid onto the magic water and we're going to shake it up and you can see um that soda ash in there and as soon as it is all dissolved that is all you need and this will last a really long time so you can use this for any joints between Pottery um and in particular uh it really helps with cracking that happens from shrinkage and different hydrations so um get yourself some ingredients make some magic water and get out of the messy business of using um water down clay as slip to join your um to join your clay together all right hope that was helpful