Page 63 - royal-times-15-16

Pottery Trip

On the 3rd of December, the 1st year, 2nd year and 5th year art
classes headed off to Monaghan bright and early to attend a
pottery workshop.

We arrived to meet Brenda, the owner of ‘Busy Bees’. She
showed us how to throw a pot on a pottery wheel. We were
all excited, but a little nervous because we thought it would
be difficult. Ms. Burns split us into two groups, and my group
headed over to another room, where we had tea, coffee,
biscuits and sweets kindly provided by Brenda. We drew
sketches of our pots, looking around the pot-filled room for
some inspiration, and coloured them in.
Next, once the other group were finished throwing there pots
and decorating them, we headed back over to the workshop,
and took turns throwing our pots. At first, we were very
cautious and nervous---half of us didn’t know what type of
pot to do!
After a while of shaping and moulding our pots, we all had
an idea of what we were doing. If the clay got dry, we had to
splash some water on it, if it was too small, we had to pull the
inside and outside up at the same time, and if the inside was
filled with water, we had to stick a sponge in the pot. To take
the pot off the wheel, we sliced it with a piece of string and
placed it on a tile and left it to dry for a couple of minutes.
To decorate, Brenda had a lot of shapes we could cut out of
the clay. We all created unique pots with different decorations,
such a butterflies, stars, and horse shoes.

Overall, it was such a good day, we had great fun throwing a
pot and decorating it--- I’m sure it’s safe to say we’d all love to
go again!

The Royal Times 2015-2016 63