Using a semi-porcelain casting slip (specially adjusted and dehydrated which Barry Guppy has evolved over a period of thirty years), objects are spun using a slip trailer or drawn using a palette knife. The spun pieces are either "woven" in plaster moulds, or are built freestanding using armatures of crushed paper or a 'fibre-slip'* painted paper invented to extend the process. Yet others are of these and other new techniques combined, with actual leaf casts and 'stretch-veneered' clay. The first firing burns out all organic material and then the piece is fired a second time with an earthenware glaze. To avoid distortion the highest firing temperature is kept below 1120 degrees Celsius.
* Paperclay and Fibreslip had precursors many centuries ago in the addition of straw in clay as a building aid and with dandelion fibres in the clays of the pinchpots of the American Hopi Indians. In the early 1970s I had experimented with silk, spider-webs (disused!), in the pursuit of a suitably strengthened clay for my own needs until I met Lady Huxley and her knowledge of Indian potters practice. I then used papier-mâché as the next best organic strengthener to clays and casting slip.