Trying a Pottery Class

In February and March, my mom and I decided to try out a pottery class. It was a private pottery class that took place once a week for seven weeks at the instructor's little studio located in her house. The only pottery that I had ever tried was in art class in high school but that involved building with the clay by hand rather than with a pottery wheel. In this class, we used a pottery wheel to make mostly bowls and mugs, although I also made a small vase, a flower pot, and a plate. My favourite pieces that I made are the mug and plate in the photo above, which I matched by using the same turquoise glaze on both of them. I absolutely love the colour and it reminds me a bit of the famous Tiffany's blue of Tiffany's jewellery boxes.

The instructor was so nice and patient, especially with all of my questions of "Am I doing this right?" or "This is the next step, right?" Making pottery on a pottery wheel was so much more complex than I thought it would be. In tv shows and movies, you always just see the people holding the sides of the clay with their hands and forming it while it spins. When you are actually making pottery though, there is so much more to it than that. There are a lot of skills and techniques so I will not go into too much detail about them but I will describe the basic steps along with some commentary. First you need to measure out your clay and knead it in a certain way (apparently there are different techniques for kneading it but we used a technique called "ram's head"). After that, you kind of smack it down in the middle of the wheel with the flat side down, wet your hands (it is very important that you keep things wet but not too wet), and then you start pushing the clay up to heighten it and then you press it down for centering the clay. Centering is probably the hardest part, especially for beginners, since you really have to focus on how it feels between your hands and if it looks centered. Next, you make a hole in the center by pushing your finger down in the middle, making sure you leave enough of a base at the bottom and measuring it with a tool to make sure. After that, you start extending the hole and making the walls of the vessel taller if you are making a mug or bowl (since I mostly made vessels these are the instructions I remember the most). Before taking it off the wheel with some tools, you clean it up and smooth things out a bit.

The pottery has to harden a bit before you can do anything else but once it has been left for several days or longer, you clean it up even more and trim off a bunch of the extra clay using tools and you can also make and add a handle if you are making a mug. After leaving it to harden even more for several or more days, you fire it in the kiln before you glaze it and then fire it in the kiln again after glazing. Sometimes pottery will break or "explode" in the kiln which happened to some of my mom's pieces. The instructor for our class actually mixes her own glazes and it sounds so fascinating. It is also really weird when you first glaze the pottery since the colour of the wet glaze is not going to be the same colour that it will be after firing it. Also, even though you pick a specific colour of glaze, you still don't know how it is going to turn out after firing it. Several of my pottery pieces as well as my mom's pieces turned out to be quite different than the colours we thought they would be. But that's what makes it so exciting!

One big thing about making your own pottery is that every piece is different and the instructor is very artsy in that way that she loves how each piece is unique. She told us that sometimes people will buy two mugs from her and they will search all of the mugs in order to find one that matches the other as close as possible and, hearing her talk about those situations, it seemed like she thought it was silly since each piece is unique and that is what is so fun about having pieces of pottery. You get a huge variety instead of duplicates. Even when I thought that my pieces looked a bit messed up, the instructor assured me that they were not. Of course there are some major mistakes that you can make in pottery like having weak locations in the pottery, cracks, etc. that you want to avoid but you can't really go wrong with the aesthetics of pottery. I absolutely love that about pottery and I loved trying out a new art form. I am definitely thinking about trying out more pottery classes in the future.

Cheers,
Kaylie