Saturday School

Since we have had so much snow/ice stuff this winter, kids in our county have been out of school 5 days.  In order to make up those days and still manage to keep most of Spring Break intact, the school board decided to schedule school on some Saturdays.  Today was the first Saturday school.  While I was at the pottery studio today, there were a couple of different groups of students and teachers from North Shelby School who dropped in for a visit. For those of you unfamiliar with North Shelby, here is a quote from their website:

North Shelby is a special purpose public school located in Shelby, North Carolina.  North Shelby provides services to students in Cleveland County Schools between the ages of three and twenty-one who have significant intellectual disabilities and who have been placed at North Shelby by the Individualized Education Program (IEP) Team at their home school.

It was a pleasant surprise to have those visitors and I enjoyed showing them around a little bit.  I wish I had been throwing when they came by.  I bet they would have enjoyed watching that.  

On to the pots!  

This week was our Spring Break at Cleveland Community College, so there was no pottery class Wednesday night.  Boo.  There was a day off for me on Friday though.  Other people (people with more sense than me) took some real time off this week, but it was Thursday afternoon before I got enough of my To-Do list done that I felt like I could take a day.  So I spent some extra time in the studio Friday afternoon.  I'm still playing with facets.  Here are some bowls that I made.  

As you can see, I'm still working on facets.  Notice the varying amounts of twist in these bowls.  I still don't have the twist I'd like to have, but I'm working on figuring out what makes the twist happen.  Does the pot need to spin faster or do I need to push out more aggressively?  I think that it has more to do with being really forceful in stretching the clay.  I have decided that I am more successful if I use a stick to push out rather than trying to do it with my fingers or sponge.  Is that cheating?  

Here's a close up of my favorite of these bowls.  It's not large--only about 1.75 pounds of clay, but I like the shape.  

I also threw three good sized mugs on Friday afternoon.  Here they are with the handles that I put on them this morning.  

Vicki stopped in to say hi today too.  She took a couple of pictures of me working.  Here I'm working cutting facets in a piece.  This piece didn't make it.  I should have started with a much taller, more narrow cylinder to do what I wanted to do.  I had to start over...

One of the nice things about working with clay is that if something doesn't work, you smash it up and try again.  Maybe I'll remember to take a picture of what I ended up with.