Enjoy Every Sandwich

Here it is, 4 June, and rain and snowflakes are falling outside my window. I love Montana.

In the past week or so, I had a great time with local and out of town friends who all got together. Although prospects for helping out with house-building for some of our bunch were killed off by the near constant rain, bonfires were not quenched. I think we had at least four bonfires. It was wet, it was cold, but it was also a lot of fun. During non-bonfire time, I spent time with various people sapphire mining, morel mushroom hunting, playing Balderdash, cooking and eating, and trying our hands at pottery.

I’ll start off the story-telling with a post about the pottery workshop I participated in with a couple of other ladies. We worked on throwing on the wheel (hence the title of this post) and building items from slabs.

Here was our lesson plan:

We started off with chunks of clay cut for wedging:

Wedging is working the clay such that all the air bubbles are removed from it.

Once we learned to center the clay on the wheel, we tried our hands at throwing bowls and cylinders. This one resulted in a successful vessel, I think:

Another technique we learned was building from slabs. Slabs of clay were rolled out flat on a table, and we cut squares or rectangles from them to make plates. The slabs were then decorated with stamps:

Then they were formed to give them a nice curved shape:

One plate’s forming time resulted in this pattern inside which was deemed shibui by our instructor:

We set all the pieces out in the sun to dry a bit:

After the plates dried sufficiently, we measured from the center to add three round feet on the bottoms:

At the end of the day, we cleaned up all our tools and supplies:

Our work is now sitting on a shelf until our next visit when we get to glaze the pieces:

Many thanks to BFF for being such a patient and fun teacher, and also generously sharing her knowledge, coaching our techniques to great improvement, and providing supplies and food.