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

DIY Wire Gem/Bead Tree

When I've gone to the Sudbury Gem & Mineral Show in the past, I've always noticed some booths selling pretty wire trees with gems as the leaves. There were all sorts of different colours since different gems were used. They looked so complex that I thought it would take a lot of work but, earlier this year, I decided to see if there were directions online. I bought some beading wire and gemstone beads at a craft store and tried it out. I wanted to make a small tree just to learn how to make them and it was easier to make than I thought! I gave my first tree to my Dad as a late birthday present. I decided to make another wire gem tree for this DIY post and I even made another tree, a weeping willow, with seed beads! The step-by-step directions are below along with photos and tips. Once you know how to make the wire gem/bead tree, it is easy to switch up some of the steps to make different looking trees. At the end, I give a short description of how to do some of the steps differently to make a weeping willow with seed beads.


Supplies:

• 24-gauge beading wire
• Gemstone beads (or regular plastic/glass beads)
• Ruler
• Scissors

Notes before starting:

*These instructions are for a small tree. If you want to make a larger tree, increase the amount and length of the pieces of wire.

*Always twist wires in the same direction so that they look nice.

*Trees are perfectly imperfect so make sure to keep this in mind:

• The twisting does not have to be perfect.
• Give your branches and roots some variety. Do not make them all the same.
• Arrange the branches and roots in a natural way so that they go all over the place.

Instructions:

Step 1:

Cut 24 pieces of the beading wire, each measuring around 12 inches.

Step 2:

String a gemstone bead on a piece of wire, bringing the bead to the center of the wire and folding the wire in half. Twist the two halves of the wire together a few times at the base of the bead. 

Repeat for all of the other pieces of wire.

Step 3:

Take two of the beaded wires and join them together by twisting them together at the base of the previous twisting. Add a third one to a few of them. 

Repeat this with the other beaded wires so that you have several small branches.

Step 4:

Take two of the sets and twist them together, just like we did with the single wires in the last step. Add a third one to some of them.

Repeat this with the other sets so that you have at least four large branches.

Step 5:

Twist all of the large branches together at the base of all of the twisting and twist down to create a trunk. Do not twist all of the way.

Make sure that you leave enough wire to create roots in a similar way as creating the branches.

Step 6:

Separate the wires into three groups.

Separate each group into two groups so that you have a total of six groups.

Twist each of the six groups a bit. A few of these groups can be twisted all the way. Others can be separate again into two groups which can be twisted all the way.

Cut off any excess wire.

Step 7:

Bend and arrange the branches and roots in various directions.

To make a weeping willow with seed beads:

Cut 24 pieces of the beading wire, each measuring around 12 inches. Keep each piece of wire straight. Curl one end of each of the wires in a bit to make a sort of loop that will hold the beads on.

String seed beads onto a third of a piece of wire. Do this for each of the other wires. Be careful not to let the beads slip off of the wires. Follow steps 3-7 of the wire gem tree instructions.

They make such pretty decorations and they especially make pretty gifts!

Cheers,

Kaylie

I Shall Have Some Peace There

My family owns a camp, a little cabin in the bush (woods) with a small wood-stove. It is like a second home. When we started using it again regularly this year, two years had passed since we had last visited it. I checked my journal and found out that the last time that we were there was September 22nd, 2013 and we had arrived on September 21st and stayed there overnight. The day that we finally visited again was September 21st, 2015, the day which, two years ago, had been the last night that we would spend there for a while. Of course, some of our relatives who also partly own the camp may have visited it during that time, but it didn't look like it had been used very much.

We have been trying to use it more now. It feels good to go back there, where it is quiet and relaxing. Where we are surrounded by nature. Where there are less distractions. Where we are away from society, away from civilization. I could go on and on but the point is, it's peaceful there. When I am there, I am surrounded by nature and I am also surrounded by my family since we go there together.

I also find that it is easier for me to concentrate on various activities like reading books and working on various projects. I like writing there and working on crafts like my loom knitting. There are so many distractions at my family's house and there are just so many things to be done there. At our camp, however, life is simple. There aren't a million things to do, only a few. That leaves time for working on other things. The quiet of the bush and the warmth of the wood-stove provide a great atmosphere. We sit quietly and read or work on whatever we like. In the mornings, we meditate, and on Saturday evening, we listen to Randy Bachman's Vinyl Tap on CBC Radio, a radio show where Randy Bachman shares songs that fall under a theme (a different theme is chosen for each show) and shares stories from his experience as a musician and his experiences meeting various other musicians.

Of course, many experiences of mine remind me of songs or literature and my experiences of staying at my camp are no different. In William Butler Yeats' poem, "The Lake Isle Of Innisfree," he talks about going to Innisfree and he describes Innisfree and describes what he will do there. At one point in the poem, he says, "I shall have some peace there." For Yeats, Innisfree is where he finds peace. For me, my family's camp is where I find peace.

Cheers,
Kay