How to Create Colorful Ceramic Jewelry Using a Carved Plaster Slab and Casting Slip How to Make Clay Jewelry–Plaster Slab and Slip Method Joanna Veevers

I have been experimenting lately with how to make clay jewelry. Mostly I have been working with clay slabs, but there are countless methods for making ceramic jewelry. Body adornment is one of the oldest art forms so it is no surprise that clay has been used as a jewelry making material for a very long time. 

Today, I am sharing a nice little project from Joanna Veevers, excerpted from the book Ceramic Jewelry. Joanna shows how to make clay jewelry by scratching into a plaster slab and then pouring and painting on casting slips of different colors. Take it away Joanna! –Jennifer Poellot Harnetty, editor

This ceramic jewelry making technique allows a fine, delicate line to be scored into the surface of a plaster block, which will form a raised decoration on the surface of soft clay pressed into it. This intricate design can be reproduced quickly once the plaster block has been made. A mirror image will be left in the clay surface, so any lettering needs to be scored in reverse.

Joanna Veevers paints colored slips onto a plaster block into which she has scratched an intricate pattern. Then she creates a clay wall around the plaster slab and pours casting slip over it, which gives the thickness to the piece and picks up the detailed decoration.

Veevers shows in this series of images how she makes her intricate, patterned semi-porcelain brooches, sometimes using as many as five different colored casting slips in one piece.

**First published in 2010.