Diving into the clay

Decorating with slip (with a nod to Hannah McAndrew)

One of my students last night asked about whether cake decorating tools could be used to apply clay to pots as a form of surface decoration. She had intuited the gorgeous tradition of slip trailing, with strong traditions in Britain and Germany.

Hannah McAndrew, a contemporary Scottish potter, blogged about her latest work yesterday, sharing several images of the pots in process here, which gives a lovely taste of what’s possible.

Slip is added to wet or leatherhard pots typically, the idea being that by the time a pot is bone dry or even bisqued, the disparity in shrinkage rates between it and the slip are too great to insure success.