Poco Mountain Girl

I’ve been taking a cool local pottery class for the last several weeks.  We’ve been working on hand building up until last class.  These are some of my creations, all built from hand rolled clay slabs.

I had never done pottery before.  Everything was so new and I didn’t know what to expect, which of course was a lot of fun.

We made mugs and closed forms, dried them first to leather-hard and then to bone dry, fired them to the fragile bisque stage, and glazed them.  The glaze is pretty much colorless, but it turns vivid when fired.

We put the glazed pots back in the kiln and they were finished eight hours later.  It was wild to see my pieces finally come out of the kiln–strong, colored, and shiny!

I made each of the kids a cup, and one each for David and me.  That hilarious round thing in the middle is something I’m not sure exactly what, but it was fun to make.  It started out as a closed cylinder and I beat it with a stick till it was round.  I guess it could be a candy jar–it’s a nice deterrent to eating too much candy, since you can barely fit your hand inside.

We had hot tea when I came home and gave the kids their mugs.  Cash was especially thrilled.

Cash and Zia’s little cups.  Below is my horse mug, great for drinking purple smoothies. 😉

This week we finally threw on the wheel!  I made a couple of bowls–I was shooting for a nice big shallow salad bowl, but both turned out to be sizes that fit in the palm of my hand, lol.

My new pottery friend Erica is super cool. Neither of us had no idea what we were doing, but we had such a blast anyway.

Next week we finish up our last class.  I’m kind of sad it’s almost over–I really liked this art form and can’t wait to get my hands back in the clay.  I might get a pass to the clay studio or take another class soon–I just wish it was a little more conducive to bringing a two year old along. It won’t be long before he’s big enough to work his own ball of clay, though.

Until then, I’ll be sippin’ purple smoothies out of my hand built horsie mug.  🙂

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 15th, 2014 at 9:16 am and is filed under Arty, Making Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.