How to Make Slip For Making Pottery

Video Transcript

" Hi! This is Roy Stringfellow for expertvillage.com. What we’re going to do now is make some slip. Slip is something of an adhesive that causes clay to bond together, bind itself together, so that when it does dry it doesn’t crack away from itself. That’s an important element in putting pieces of clay together. It’s just kind of an insurance. Sometimes you don’t need it but for what we’re going to do as far as making coil pots, I think it’s probably a little better to have that insurance. Slip is simply water and the same clay body that you’re going to be using to make the object that you’re going to be making. It’s a mixture of water, and I’ll add a little bit water. I already have a little bit of slip in here, but we’ll take some of the clay from the clay body and try to grind it up as much as you can into small pieces like this. Put it in a little container. It doesn’t have to be gigantic, whole lot of anything. After you have those pieces in there, you add a little bit of water. Then you add the magic ingredient, which is vinegar. I know that may sound odd to some people, but we’re going to cook a little clay here. Put a little vinegar in there. What the vinegar does is break down some of the chemical composition that’s in clay and makes it a little more pastey and easier to manage. What you want by the time that you’re finished here is not a real watery thing, which we have a little bit too much of there, but something of a thick, mucky, pastey, heavy cream type of substance. What we’re going to do with that is as we make our coils and put our coils together, we’re going to apply a little bit of slip between each one of them, particularly at the beginning and the end of each one the coils. This is what you sort of have here, and as we work, that’s going to decompose even further. I’m going to make sure that we stir it pretty frequently. It just kind of breaks down itself. You can see it’s getting a little more cream like consistency, so we’re going to use that to put our pots together. That’ll do it. "