What do a bicycle inner tube with the case of a biro pen, and a milk bottle with a quill attached have in common?

Doug Fitch and I make slipware pottery. My ‘thing’ is decoration. Of all the various ways of decorating that slip offers, it is the trailing of it that fascinates me.

Doug trails less often, and his methods and tools are somewhat different from mine. He often describes our contrasting styles by saying that the type of slip trailing that he and I do is akin to our handwriting. My writing is tidy and accurate and his, in his own words, is illegible and consequently abstract in nature!

In the early days of my pottery making, before starting my. Jason had worked at the iconic Aldermaston Pottery, under , and also with the larger-than-life personality that was . Thus he employed much decoration in his practice. With Mary, he had learned slip decoration, and in particular slip trailing. As soon as I joined Jason and dipped my toes, metaphorically speaking, into slip trailing, I was hooked.