Let’s Get Dirty (In the Pottery Studio)

Pottery is my first love.  It comes before polymer, before metal smithing, before lamp working, before everything. From the time I was a little kid, I knew that as soon as I tried it I would love it.

 

I didn’t have pottery classes of any kind in school.  Well, I did get to go to a paint your own pottery shop with my Girl Scout troop and paint a candle holder for my mother and a fish dish that could be an ash tray or hold change for my father.  Except my mother didn’t burn candles and my father kept his coins in a change purse.  But I had fun.  I still have the candle holder somewhere.

 

In fact, I didn’t get to take a pottery class until I had graduated from college.  I was working for the summer in Atlantic City managing some rooming houses who had a rather exotic clientele.   I found out that there was a class at the local Community College.  I convinced a friend that “he really wanted to take a pottery class.”   I didn’t have wheels and needed a way to get there.  Surprisingly,  he acquiesced. 

The first time I sat down at a wheel, I smacked a ball of clay on the wheel head, turned the wheel on and watched in horror as the ball of clay shot across the room and bounced off a table.  Everyone froze.    After that, I was more careful.  Much more careful.

And you would think that now that I am retired and have all the time in the world to write blog posts, that I would not leave them until the last minute. “But no,” she said.  Because I am spending most of my time in the pottery studio.  I have not made any pottery in 25 years and I have a whole new group of victims  friends upon whom to bestow my clay creations.

I am trying some new things; I have never made glazed beads before or used a bead tree and I am having fun with that.

 

 

I am throwing pots and then altering the forms.  And I am trying different surface treatments including screen printing using underglazes.

 

 

Making a decent print and transferring it to the clay is challenging and there are several methods of doing it.  If I get interesting results, I will post them.

 

And I do tend to get grimy in the studio.   Not as grimy as the guy in the scraps bucket, but pretty close!