We finally, after a reschedule or two, had our much-anticipated wheel throwing class tonight– the final part of my Christmas present, four months later. My pot, such as it is, is the one on the left, and the second of my wife’s two is in the back right. My first attempt was too terrible to even make it to the drying room; I essentially just let it die and go back to the recycling pile, and while our instructor really thought MLW should save her first one too, she thought the second was better.

Throwing pottery is really hard, as it turns out. That doesn’t actually surprise me– I was fully expecting to suck at this– but it was still a bit startling just how difficult things like “keep your fingers the same distance apart” can be. That doesn’t sound hard! But it is. You can see on my pot that there are a few places in the middle where it thins out abruptly, and that’s the same on the other side too, but one way or another it’s still a vast improvement over my first effort and I’m glad I ended up with something at least a little passable.

We want to take a whole bunch of other classes at this place, and I can easily see myself wanting to take the throwing class again just to have an expert on hand for when I inevitably screw up again. It’s super cheap just to go in there, buy some clay, and rent the wheel for a while, and we can do it any time they’re open, but I feel like it’d be wasted money until I can at least internalize the various hand positions for the different steps in the process. I need somebody around to tell me what I’m doing wrong and how to fix it if that’s possible.

(One random fun thing: the way you remove a piece of pottery, whether it’s good or complete failure, from the “bat”– that’s the disc it spins on– is by sliding a thin wire underneath it to slice it away from the bat. That has, for some reason, always looked like an intensely satisfying experience, and the best thing about my first attempt being a terrible piece of crap is I got to slice it off the bat. I am proud to report that that’s the thing I was best at, and it was exactly as pleasing as I thought it would be.)

We also have our mugs now, from our last attempt at this. We will glaze both items at once when the pots are done drying.