I’m no good at throwing the same thing twice, so decided in order to make shot glasses, I needed to slip cast.
(finished cups available on my ETSY Store: FlusterMakes)
My third attempt at a slip-cast mould was a success, but how about the slip?
I don’t have much space in my tiny flat; most of my pottery kit fits into a toolbox, so there is no way I can get a 5-liter container of pre-made slip. Also, I’m a massive bodger, so I just made my own by making clay runny.
If I do it properly, I’m supposed to add a carefully measured amount of deflocculant. Well, we will see…
As I have been throwing and building pots, I have been keeping casts offs and scraps in jars with water. It felt like the right thing to do. So starting with the white stoneware, I added more water and more clay till I got a sort of single cream consistency. No Idea if it would work. Mashed it up with a fork and shook it a lot. LET’S GO!
I was impatient with the first pour, and the mould was still a bit damp, so I didn’t know how long to leave it. In the end, I left it an hour and the combo of damp mould and too long testing gave me slightly too thick walls.
So I blasted the mould in the oven before trying again.
Anyhow, the short version;
- Dry mould
- Pour in slip, leave for 10/12 minutes.
My mould has no neck, so has to top it up a couple of times to keep it level at the top. - Invert mould and leave to drip for a bit – 30 mins?
- Trim the top so you get a nice edge
- Leave it to dry – in the sun works best.
- One part moulds, so just give it a wiggle when gaps start to appear around the edge and it pops out.
- Leave to dry.
- Clean up and bisque fire before a glaze fire.
Take aways: slip-casting is fun and easy. I needed to clean up the interior of the cups while the clay was wet, because my slip was uneven and lumpy, to fix it, I got me a coffee whisk to mix it better, and I saw a good tip to pour it into the mould through a sieve to keep any lumps out.
Finished cups are available on my ETSY Store: FlusterMakes