About 3 months into our pottery lessons, we picked up our latest stash of fired, glazed pieces. What a difference compared to the first few weeks! We've got cups with handles, pots with separate lids, and bowls big enough to eat out of - plus some really cool multi-hued glaze effects. The house is beginning to overflow with little bowls and cups. Looking forward to see what our next stash will look like.

After 4 weeks of pottery lessons, we picked up our first stash of completed, fired pieces after last week's glazing session. It's amazing how different pieces look after you glaze them - they look like real pottery now! Most of the cups and bowls we made were a little small to be functional mugs and dishware, but they did look great when arranged on a display shelf in the dining room.

A few were just the right size and made it into the cupboard.

We're going to continue with another month's lessons, and hopefully learn how to make some handles for our mugs, as well as some larger forms. I'm really enjoying the hands on, 3-d aspect of throwing, and I love that you end up with dozens of little pieces to use or display around the house.

Kiersten and I began our pottery lessons at Green Dog Pottery. After driving by the little shop with the iconic deranged green dog icon, I bought Kiersten some lessons for her birthday last year. Our first lesson involved getting our feet wet with a small, pinch form cup, before diving right into throwing on the wheel. Unlike the movie Ghost (which was my only reference up to this point), throwing was much harder than it looked. In particular, centering the clay on the wheel initially was remarkably hard - somehow my efforts just unbalanced it all the more. With a little coaxing from the instructor, though, I was able to make a somewhat cylindrical cup, which will dry this week. It actually was remarkably fun to mold the clay with my hands - a very different artistic experience than the usual 2D work I'm used to. Next Saturday is our second lesson - more to come.