There's nothing wrong with half a ton of mud!
The day before our exhibition, we had to prepare the clay we were going to use, so it was just the way we liked it. It's a big task to mix 400 kg of clay, but it's nothing compared to the annoying-ness of wasting time on bad prepared clay.
I'm just too lazy not to do it right the first time ;-)
We thought, we had 250 kg of clay, but we found some more in the back of a shelve; we ended up with 500-ish kg. which was much better! 250 may sound a lot, but it really isn't. Clay is so heavy that even a ton doesn't look like much. I have often ordered big amounts of clay and then when arriving wondered if that was all. We used a nice crank clay. I'm a very tolerant person, but I would never use buff clay for something like this. Although it's cheap, it's messy, unpleasant to work with and it's not worth reclaiming. It would be like serving McDonald's take-away for your dinner guest...cold.
