Pottery Fun

Back before I had Jack, I used to love to make pottery. A friend and I took a class at a nearby studio, which then allowed us to use the studio whenever we wanted for our projects. Well, it’s been probably 15+ years since I sat down at a pottery wheel, so when my sister invited me to join in for some studio time… I was all for it!

We decided to book a Mud & Merlot class at The ClayGround Studio in Ellicott City. It typically costs $45 per student and it includes an instructor to teach you how to throw a vase, cup or bowl. It’s also BYOB, so we brought some hard cider and wine to enjoy while we played with clay!

For our first session, we each made our own item. You can see my bowl and Jack’s cup here:

Then, they put our items in the kiln and we were told to come back in a few weeks to glaze them. Well, a few weeks turned into a couple months so that we could pick a date that worked for everyone… but we finally got back there at the end of August.

Here are how our items looked after they were baked for the first time, before the glaze:

I decided to paint mine with a pretty smoky blue on the inside and then do a white base and dotted blue design on the outside of the bowl:

Jack decided to work with my dad (his Dippy) to paint his with a solid color and then had Dippy paint little designs all over it (I didn’t get a  good picture of his, but you can see it in the background of the last photo).

Here are all out bowls before they went back into the kiln for the last time:

Two weeks later and they were done! Here is how my bowl turned out:

And here is Jack’s cup:

That’s a LEGO head on there, in case you were wondering! Each dish is dishwasher and food safe, so we have already started using them at home. My bowl is perfect for serving fruit at dinner and Jack’s cup has been used for little snacks and water too.

It was really fun to get back into throwing some clay around and everyone else had a really fun time too. I love that Jack was hanging with the ‘big kids’ and even worked on his own little project too.

So now I feel like I want to do some more classes. They have a mosaic class… so maybe we will try that one next!