Whilst I greatly admire many glazed ceramic items, I personally prefer the matt finish of unglazed ware. Ceramics that are unglazed are most often lacking colour which is why I started to produce agate ware*.

To produce my agate ware, oxides and minerals are added to the clay as a stain.  Sometimes I do this by adding the powder stains to crushed dry clay then adding water, sometimes I wedge (knead) in a thin slip made up with the stain.  The coloured clays are then left to settle for a while to ensure each different coloured batch is the same consistency.

 There are several methods I use to achieve the effects in my jewellery, here are just a few -
 














 		 Marble Method 1:
Two or three colours are rolled as separate slabs, then layered and rolled as one slab.  The slab is cut into strips which are placed on top of each other so that I end up with perhaps twenty stripes through the stack, but I usually make a few humps and bumps in the layering so that I get stripes which curve.  Placing the stack on its side I then comb through the stripes which draws one colour onto another giving a feathering effect.  This is rolled and probably combed and rolled again.  The comb is actually a butter curler. 

Marble Method 2:
For this method it is really important that the coloured clays all have the same consistency or the softer one will always come to the surface.  Roll a long sausage of each colour, with some thick rolls and some thin ones.  Put a stack of the sausages together and roll again, one hand working forwards and the other backwards, so that the colours wrap around each other.  Cut the resultant long sausage into something like four equal lengths and place them next to each other to get a sort of square, then roll out as a slab. 

Splodges:
Follow Marble Method 2, but once you've rolled the colours together cut disks from the sausage, place them tightly next to each other and roll them out as a slab.  

Speckles:
I use a slab of a single colour, most commonly white, and onto it I grate (using a rotary cheese grater) almost dry clay of at least two colours, usually more.  When rolled the clays come together as speckles.  I will often keep the slab with speckles on one side and plain on the other and cut shapes out to reverse the colours, but if I want the speckled effect both sides I cut the slab in two and put the halves together with the plain sides facing.

Stripes and zigzags:
It's simple to cut slices of two colours (or a slab that has different colours on each side) and put the slices together to form stripes.  For the bolder zigzag stripes I use a cutter that I think is meant for vegetables.

Chequered:
I use a clay gun (a bit like a small but strong icing piper) and squeeze out long square sections.  I build them up together in alternating colours and form what is known as a loaf.  Once this has been left to settle for a while slices can be cut from the loaf.  To get crisp neat squares the clay can be frozen but I generally let it distort as it's cut and rolled.
Once I've created each piece or shard I use a fine drill bit to make a hole in it if required then leave it to dry completely.  Each shard is carefully sanded whilst still 'green', which has to be done very carefully because the thin unfired porcelain is extremely fragile.  It is more usual to sand ceramics at the point when it has been biscuit fired (fired to a comparatively low temperature at which point it becomes 'pot' and won't return to clay when wet) and this is generally when ceramics are glazed.  As I don't glaze my work there is no need for the usual two firings.

My work is fired in a single firing to 1250oC, in an electric kiln.
 


* Agate is a gemstone formed of chalcedony quartz that forms in layers, giving a wide variety of colours and textures. Traditionally agate ware pottery recreates the veins of the stone and has been popular at different periods over the past few centuries.