Last night in my Intermediate Wheel class, we celebrated the final class of our Fall session with a fun potluck & trading/stealing game. The category was handmade pie plates… with your potluck food baked inside! Needless to say… we had PLENTY of pie… and I was one happy camper with the palate of a four year old. No such thing as too many pies!!! Chocolate Cream, Spiced Pumpkin, Salted Caramel, Strawberry Cream & more. I made a Tollhouse Chocolate Chip Pie in my red stamped pie plate… which Claire won & took home along with the yummy leftovers!

Hard to believe that it has already been three months since my Alaskan adventure!

Traveling to Fairbanks to teach a two-day workshop with the Fairbanks Potters Guild. We had such a great weekend playing in the clay together. It was such a great group of potters all ready to share ideas, tips & tricks! We had a great time… and I’m looking forward to “taking my show on the road” more often in the future.

If anyone else is looking for a Chicago potter to come to your studio, art center or pottery guild… keep me in mind! We made so many pots in just two days. We made stamps… made mugs… made platters… made bowls… and made memories for a lifetime!

Last night in class, we broke out the new 10” decorating disk from MKM POTTERY TOOLS. Darcy was trying to draw a mandala pattern & wanted to space things out perfectly. The decorating disk made it so easy… and the new 10” size was perfect for decorating her pie plate!

Sharing my DiamondCore Carving Tools helped make the carving fun too!!!

Just a quick flashback… to last week’s demo fr my Beginning Wheelthrowing class. Where we worked on making “bowls on purpose and not cylinders gone bad”. Towards the end of class, we spent some time altering some of the bowls & adding some surface decoration. So this is where we left them last week… ready for just a bit MORE!!!

Part Two of my class demo last night was to turn all of my simple round bowls into some “not-so-basic” bowls with simple alterations & surface decorations. Just encouraging my students to start decorating… to push their clay a little further… and to more HAVE FUN!!!

And then THIS happened!!! While my students went to practice making their bowls… I made “a few” more too!!! Just one bag of clay quickly turned into bowls. All waiting to be altered & decorated as Part Two of the demo!!!

Last night in my Beginning Wheel class, we tackled throwing “bowls on purpose”… instead of cylinders gone bad!!! This was my demo bowl…with a nice smooth curve & a sweet little spiral inside!

Pretty pleased with my wheelthrowing beginners tonight in class. It’s only Week Two of the new session… and they’ve already trimmed buttons, added handles & made their first mugs!

Tonight in class, one of my students returned after two weeks traveling in Australia & Los Angeles. It was great to have Michael back… and luckily his pots were still leatherhard for trimming… and, oh but wait there’s more… he also brought some OREOs back from Australia for us!!! Thanks Michael!

My Monday night class has been focused on “enclosed forms” lately. So we combined that with a little Christmas in July!!!… and Halloween too, but that doesn’t have the same ring to it?!!!