Vegan

The clay pot is amazing!

LMAO it is most certainly not, but learning anything is about doing garbage at it until one day you don't.

Did you learn about purifying the clay online?

Yeah, I watched a youtube video by a guy making pots from clay on his potatoes a few years ago. It's basically just pouring off the light/water soluble stuff and settling it out.

I recently started taking a wheel pottery class and the instructor mentioned that clay came from my home town. That and how heavily clay my soil is at home got me thinking about if I could do something similar.

Oh cool! I've been looking for a class near me as making ceramics seems fun and practical. Wheels def seem more practical than coil building haha but harder to start than "huh I have a lot of dirt left over". Andy ward has some videos on wet processing (n.b. he does 'ancient' style and uses animal products like bone and leather as tools, his wet process videos are innocuous though). You'd need to add a ferment step to remove organics if there are any present.

I don't know if you'd need to do more purification to get stuff that fires to stoneware. Commercial clay is usually very homogeneous and often has additives for ease of working. Hone processed will have less uniform particle size/composition etc.

Do you have access to a kiln, or will you try and construct your own?

There's a local pottery club, but this might melt in a proper kiln. I was going to fire it in a charcoal fire to dull red. It won't be water tight but I'm just having a play really and I have lots of charcoal from blacksmithing. If you just want earthenware building a hot fire will do it, you can actually make some very beautiful stuff with techniques like smudging (incorporating carbon from the fire in the finish).