Captain's blog: 2005/09

Throwing Pottery

Posted Thursday, September 29, 2005 at 9/29/2005 11:39:00 PM

We had a great department team-builder day. Well, it wasn’t a full day like the Centre Island one, but this was good enough. We started with lunch at The Queen Mother Café on Queen, where I enjoyed some appetizers, delicious Pad Thai and pumpkin cheese cake.

After The Queen Mother we headed over to the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art at their temporary location near OCAD, and began our pottery class for the rest of the afternoon. This was my first time throwing pottery. Throwing pottery actually just means working with clay on a rotating plate. Apparently it is called throwing because in old English, the word for throwing actually also related to turning and twisting, according to this explanatory article I found.

The experienced instructor, Karen, demonstrated how to do everything properly such as securing the clay, squishing it down and up several times to align it, compressing to reinforce the bottom, adding water to keep the clay from drying up, and removing the masterpiece with a wet wire once it was finished. Then we started our individual lumps of clay and wheels. I managed to make a crude bowl, flower vase, and at the last minute, with no time to thin the walls, I mashed together a thick stubby cup without handles.

We helped with the cleanup, and moved our creations to the shelves of the firing kiln room, so that they could be baked in the oven after a bit of drying. Karen also mentioned the option to come in over the weekend to buy the paints and add colour during their Sunday drop-in hours if anyone wanted. We left a contact number so she could contact us in about two weeks when our pottery would be ready to be picked up. Overall, a fun experience.

Well, it wasn’t as fun as the three-day Kingston, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City bus tour with the whole family a few weeks ago, where we wandered off the official tour at night and accidentally came across the historic battlefield, the Plains of Abraham as well as a few Martello towers. But today’s pottery class was good enough.