And when you make a bunch of flower pots, you also need to make a bunch of water drip trays to go with them!

Making a quick batch of flower pots… while looking forward to my “Plants & Pottery Pop-Up” down near Peoria over the third weekend of May! If I play my cards right, I’ll be headed down with a bunch of pottery, as well as some plants to fill them!!!

One of my favorite surprises during our Glaze Throwdown Challenge?… watching Clara pull out an underglaze pencil and do these wonderful doodles on the side of her cylinder! I can’t wait to see how they look after the glaze firing… hoping they don’t get bugged out!!!

For the second challenge during this week’s LILLSTREET THROWDOWN, we moved to the Glaze Room for the first-ever Glazing Throwdown! I wanted them all to start out with the same canvas”… so I pre-made & bisqued plain, smooth cylinders for them.

The challenge was do do the coolest glaze on these possible… and the real trick is we won’t see what they’ve done until AFTER they’ve been fired!!! We’re hoping for the best… as there were multiple dips, layers, underglazes, dots, sprayed glazes, underglaze pencils, bubbles, squeeze bottles, wax resists and a lot more going on here! We’ll all have to wait to see the results!

This week in my LILLSTREET THROWDOWN class, my students killed it again… twice! Their first challenge was to take one of the “perfectly” trimmed bowls from the previous week and start carving away parts & pieces to turn it into a kind of basket bowl. They had to have a good design, clean cuts & keep enough structure intact to keep it all together.

The “real” challenge though?… they were tasked with carving away more than half of the original weight of the bowl! Tougher than it sounds… that’s a LOT of clay to take away and keep your bowl still in one piece! Huge congratulations to Claire & Will for making the weight… everyone else got SO close… and we only had one collapse! mwah, mwah, mwah…

So great to have a little visitor to my porch as the snow was coming down today! I usually get pigeons, doves & sparrows… but today I saw this little Downy Woodpecker having a bite of lunch at the suet feeder on my front porch!

In my Monday night Intermediate Wheelthrowing class we discussed wall vases (as requested… thank you Darcy)… and then I took it one step further using a similar technique to make ceramic corbel wall sconces… “shelves” just didn’t sound right?! Anyway, I did my demos in class, but then needed to do a little more follow-up in my studio last night! As a work-in-progress… I think they’re coming along pretty nicely!

Looks like Kristy has made a beautiful vermicelli dinner… and put it in a beautiful handmade bowl!!! Food always tastes better in handmade pottery!!!

So we may have had a little “yellow towel situation” again last night!
Allegedly.

Celebrating another TEXTURE TUESDAY… before I head off to class to teach my Beginners how to throw plates & platters on the wheel. They might not get quite this far tonight… but there’s always next session to show them even more!!!