Pottery class

Today I had my pottery lesson at Rain City Clay, namely their “sip and spin” crash-course to wheel throwing.

A while ago I’d bought a cheap learner’s wheel and while I’d had some fun trying to self-teach on it, I couldn’t quite figure out a few basic things, particularly centering, which is, y'know, pretty important. And it turns out there’s a lot of other basic stuff that I didn’t learn by watching a lot of The Great Pottery Throw Down either! Like how to test the bottom thickness, among other things.

Anyway, the class went pretty well. I went through six lumps of clay and ended up with a decent-looking bowl on the fifth one:

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The class included firings for up to two bowls, and I’m disappointed I didn’t manage to make two of them, but hey, now I’ve made one more bowl than I’d made before.

Well, assuming it doesn’t crack or explode in the firing, anyway.

So, now I have a much better feel for how to use the pottery wheel (and the teacher also taught me how to use a bat on my wheel, which doesn’t have registration pegs). I think that in general this has me much more interested in focusing on hand-building (nerikomi, especially) and slab-building (using 3D printed formers) but it’ll be nice to be able to throw pots as well.

It’s a shame that the ceramic printer ended up not being the entry point into ceramics that I thought it would be, though.

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