look what i made!!!!

you may be aware that i took a ceramics class this spring. and if not...i did!!! it was so much fun to have a weekly outlet for my creativity!! it brought back lots of memories from the ceramics class i took at BYU, but there were plenty of things i forgot too. one of the best things i learned in the class though was from the first day. we were going around introducing ourselves and telling what made us want to take the class. i mentioned that i took a class in college, but hadn't mastered the wheel so i was back to try again at conquering it. the last lady was introducing herself and she said "i'm here to do hand-building because i already know that my skills do not lie in using the pottery wheel!" i thought that was funny, but i also thought it was kind of profound! it's great to try new things and develop talents, but it's also good to recognize that you don't have to be great at everything! and when you realize that it leaves you to focus on where your strengths do lie and increase those skills :) so i did take a go or two at the wheel, but i did mostly do slab (hand) building for most of my projects. here are some pictures of my works of art!

here are a couple of bowl things i made!! they both have three little legs on the bottom to help them stand :) the bottom one here is so cool because it has pine bough texture because i pressed that into it when the clay was soft! it's amazing what the texture does to the color and everything once you put a glaze on it! 

next up is a leaf platter that i made! it's more green than the picture shows and has a cool upward swoop on the darker side :) lots of people in my class said they wanted to borrow my idea to make one of these for themselves for cheese and cracker serving :)

ha - well this was meant to be a cylinder that i was making on the wheel, but i accidentally gouged it with my thumb creating that inversion you see. but it actually looks pretty cool! not sure what to use it for, but hey. maybe it just needs to be used for display art!

this is the biggest thing i successfully created on the wheel haha. now mike has a new little ice cream dish! he says he likes the manly colors ;)

here are a couple shots of the vase i made!! i like the way the weaving turned out! and this vase was glazed to match...

this big plate!!! i love this one! and we dipped most of our pieces to glaze them, so this one ended up with such a cool pattern because it was too big to dip it like normal ha! my teacher told me that this piece could sell for a couple hundred dollars. any takers??? ;) i'm so glad i made this plate! it's definitely one of the best pieces!!! and it really only started out being created as an afterthought :) look how great an afterthought can turn out to be!

and last but not least, my leaf piece!!! i used the leaves that mike and i bought for decoration for our wedding reception! i pressed them into the clay and cut them out and pieced this together. i was pretty nervous that it wouldn't make it through all the firing and glazing because of how many corners and things it has and how fragile clay is at different stages, but it made it!!!! look how cool it looks with the veins of the leaves and everything!!!

so that's it folks! well...okay there was one more thing that didn't deserve to be put on here because it looks so weird haha - you guessed it. it was a piece i threw on the wheel...or tried to anyway! i think maybe we will plant a flower in it! 

ceramics is such a fun hobby - i love how you can keep changing the clay until you get it just how you want it, but then you never know what's going to happen to it after that as it goes through the initial fire (distortions can happen, explosions...all kinds of stuff), then you glaze it and hope that the elements in the glazes react well together when you fire it, then it goes through the last fire (where distortions can again happen - and did for me ha - again even if they didn't the first time around!) and then it's done! a long process, but so exciting to see the end product...and at times a little nerve-wracking but worth it!! i'm so glad i got to take this class!! and i have left-over clay so hopefully i can take the class again next year :)