Something a Little Different This Week | Behind The Scenes

Hey, everyone!

This week we’d like to show something a little different from the regular border or mural you’re probably used to seeing. Bear in mind, this is nowhere near the final stages, but we’d like to share our progress!

Here at the Wet Dog shop we’ve got a pretty nifty tool we use to recycle clay.

This machine is called a pugmill. Specifically, it’s the VPM-7 from Peter Pugger. Essentially it recycles clay! It takes in all clay (dry, wet, powder) that hasn’t gone in the kiln and it mixes, de-airs, and ultimately unloads 3″ diameter logs of useable clay. This saves us a ton of time, stress, and work.

What is special about this machine is that we are able to use extrusion dies to make the clay come out into specific shapes rather than the original 3″ log. With that in mind, we had special dies custom made by Peter Pugger that we are able to fasten onto the pugmill and, with those dies, we are able to create some pretty impressive ceramic border moldings!

Above you can see one of our first test pieces after using one of the custom dies on the pugmill. Our Wet Dog intern, Ophie, is meticulously inspecting the piece (and making sure there are no treats hidden near it).

While we are still in the very early stages of creating these moldings, this is a huge step towards being able to offer trim pieces to match our handmade murals. 

If you’ve followed us for a while then you’ve probably seen our Photos & Ideas page which shows hundreds of photos of our tile. Quite a few photos, like the one below, show a mural made by us, which was then framed with a stone molding, and surrounded by field tile. Our ultimate goal is to be able to provide both the mural and molding to match.

Hopefully we will be able to begin offering these in Spring 2019 but only time will tell! Until then, keep an eye out for updates, as we continue to work on perfecting them.

Have a great weekend, everyone!