After nearly two weeks of completely gray skies, it was wonderful this morning to finally see the sun… even if it was just a start as the clouds seemed to be moving in… and winning!

So far the LILLSTREET THROWDOWN has been mostly focused on wheelthrowing projects… but this week it took a turn into handbuilding!!! To ease our way in, we started with a few smaller challenges!

CHALLENGE #1 –
The were challenged to cut-off two “perfect” one-pound balls of clay. They could not use a scale, just their gut for weighing them blindly. Tougher than it sounds. After they each “thought” they had the one-pound balls… we went to actually weight hem with a digital scale! For most of them, they over-estimated the amount of clay. But we had two people who were shockingly spot-on!!! Tracy & Jacob were a tiny but under on one ball, and an equally tiny bit over on the other ball of clay… evening out to two “perfect” balls when averaged out.

CHALLENGE #2 –
The next challenge was to take those one-pound balls of clay and do a bit of coil-rolling. Some of my students had surprisingly never really rolled coils, so I did a quick demo for them. They then rolled coils trying to get them as long as they could in three minutes. The catch was, that if their coil broke at any point they could not put it back together… and their challenge was over as we would measure their longest segment. We had four “winners” in this challenge… one from each table… with Jacob, Taylor, Stacey & Dana. But they weren’t done yet…

CHALLENGE #3 –
The four “semi-finalists” carried on for another coil challenge! This time we doubled the amount of clay, and doubled the amount of time… and cut the number of hands in half!!! Yes, they could only use ONE HAND to roll the longest single coil that they could in six minutes!

But it was Dana who literally “rolled over” her competition…
and practically took over the entire table with her one-handed coil.

CHALLENGE #4 –
After coiling, we moved on to slab throwing. Again, we started with a quick demo… and then they started pulling their slabs. No slab rollers. No rolling pins. Just throwing them by hand!!! The goal was to get the largest continuous rectangle of clay… no folding over edges, no patching of holes, no fixing of tears… just one big solid rectangle.

After they pulled the clay as far as they thought they could,
I trimmed off the raggedy edges to reveal their inner-rectangle for measuring!

THE HOMEWORK CHALLENGE –
So now that they’ve warmed-up their handbuilding skills… it was time to give heir their next THROWDOWN CHALLENGE… and their first handbuilding challenge!!! For next week’s class, they need to construct a handbuilt flower brick. Keeping in mind their structure, stability, functionality and creativity! I showed them some examples of various flower bricks to inspire & get their creative juices flowing… and I also offered up my STODOLA textured rolling pins in case they wanted to use them?!

I can’ t wait to see what they come up with for our next class!