Ceramic Slip Making

Reference guide to making and adjusting casting slip.

Ceramic slip making.

The more stain you add to the slip the deeper the color will be once it s fired. Decorating pottery or ceramics can be a very fulfilling pastime. Casting slips are pre made ready to use for pouring and making casts in plaster molds. A gallon of good ceramic slip should weigh 14 5 pounds plus a smidge.

The whole process is called slip casting done at techshop chandlerwww tech. And there are plenty of ways you could add some art to your pots and plates be it by using glaze and or wax resist or by making clay slip. Paint a strip of this slip mixture onto the tile and write on the tile that this is a 2 mixture. This is a guide on how to mix specifically a clay body i like called glacier white which is sold by laguna.

There are many ways you can decorate with clay slip if you haven t tried it yet you have been missing out on some real fun. Make a batch of slip out of the same clay body and add a small percentage of stain say 2. How to mix slip for casting ceramics. Let it slake for 24 hours then mix it by hand a little with a stick figure 2.

Mason stains come in powdered form. Liquid casting slips are available in low fire midrange stoneware high fire stoneware and porcelain. Preparing the casting slip. Which you can then use to cast objects from a mold into ceramics.

We also have dry mix casting slips available in 50 lb. Making good slip is the first and most vital step in a successful slip casting operation. The process of slaking clay to make it into slip is a simple one. First make a tile of clay out of your chosen clay body and let it go leather hard.

And it should have a gravity ratio of 1 75 to achieve this you should have a hydrometer and a scale. The simplest way to make colored slip is to add some ceramic stain into the mix. There are a lot of different ways to approach making a casting slip and we ll address some of the more simple techniques along with those that are more precise. Bags that require mixing with water and a deflocculant such as soda ash sodium silicate darvan 7 or darvan 811.

A popular brand of ceramic stains is mason stains though there are other brands of stain available. The gravity ratio is measured by the hydrometer and it tells you the amount of water in relationship to the amount of solids. Hello thanks for checking out my video.