Getting all muddy & dirty sure is fun!!!

It’s been another great week of Wheelthrowing Summer Camp… with a younger group in the mornings, and an older group in the afternoon. It’s always fun to watch them learn how to throw on the wheel… struggle a bit… and then crank out a bunch of pots in just a couple days!!!

This past week at Summer Camp, my kids did wheelthrowing for the first half of the week, but switched to handbuilding to finish up. Their “challenge” was to make two handbuilt mugs that represented two different animals that somehow tied together. Oddly, we had quite a few platypuses… or is that platypi?… NOPE!… but I think it has something to do with “Phineas & Ferb”???

We’re in the middle of my second week of Summer Camp at Lillstreet… another week of wheelthrowing & handbuilding with my campers! Picture a classroom full of VERY energetic nine 8-year old boys… and one quiet girl in the corner (she’s a trooper)! And, oh but wait there’s more... several of them came in already as best friends from school! And when the Dad dropped off the first one of the boys… his comment was “Good Luck with this one”… and then he left! Yikes!

Let’s just say they’ve been “very entertaining” for me this week. But not too much for them to be following Rule #3… cleaning like the best of them!

After wheelthrowing the first couple days, my Summer Camp kids this week switched to handbuilding for the last two days. We all built slab mugs… lots of scoring & slipping… plus, they needed a “theme” that tied their two mugs together!

Yesterday, one of my Summer Campers was so focused on finishing her wheelthrowing project, that she brought it upstairs to the rooftop to finish it during our lunch break. So while the other kids entertained themselves & played games… a lot of colored slip painting was happening to make her new ramen bowl more “authentic” with a branch of cherry blossoms painted on the side.

Getting dirty can be fun…
another great day of Summer Camp!
It’s a shame they’re not having more fun…

Well, today was my first day of Summer Camp at Lillstreet Art Center. And my wheelthrowing campers are well under way, making pots & having fun… and especially succeeding with Gary’s Camp Rule #3 : “Whatever mess you make, you WILL be cleaning up.”

Now if we could just get the adult students to follow that same rule with such enthusiasm?!

And speaking of handmade birdhouses… I saw this wonderful one downstairs on the Kidstreet shelves. A sad little monster still sitting down there from last Summer. It’s one of the clay pieces we made in my Sculpture Camp last summer… so sad that it’s sitting down there on the shelves unclaimed. Who knows… he “might” just need to come home with me at some point!

Another one of the benefits of Lillstreet postponing the start of our Winter session by a week… the overflowing buckets of reclaim clay from last session should be taken care of! Fresh new reclaimed clay for everyone!!! Hopefully.

And let me just say…
This pile of overflowing clay would NEVER have happened if my Summer Campers were still around! They love pushing it through the grate… breaking it down into smaller pieces as intended! This pile-up would never have happened in my camp!!!