sgraffito

scraping away what doesn't serve

A couple of weeks before I left for the UK, I learned a new pottery term: sgraffito. It comes from the Italian word graffiare, meaning “to scratch,” and it refers to a technique where you scratch through the surface of an underglazed pot to reveal the original colour of the clay. It’s done when the pot is “leather hard” — the part of the process when th…