pottery 5 & 6

It seems that throwing a pot is a lot more like riding a bike than going fishing.

If you catch a fish in a particular spot on a good morning in June, there is not a guarantee that you will catch another one in that spot on any given morning.  HOWEVER, if you learn how to ride a bike on a good morning in June, chances are good that you will also be able to ride that bike on any given day after that.  No guarantees, of course, but chances are really quite good.  

Finding center seems a reasonable and hopeful task for a Thursday afternoon.

Four pots are now irrevocably destined for my garden (or yours), holes gleefully drilled into the bottoms of wet clay.  It is a quiet glee, in this basement room with one high window where 7-10 people stuff their coats, boots and bags into a corner closet, the better to make room for the steadily growing stacks of clay that fill the shelves.  We leave them for a week, covered in plastic, then trim them and put them onto another shelf to dry.

And then someone takes them away while we are gone, fires them, and returns them as hardened, brittle and bleached looking things.
I met one of those people one week as I was leaving class.
"How was class this week?" she asked.
"Great.  How was yours?" I responded, making a false assumption.
"Oh, I'm not taking classes.  I'm part of the guild.  I came to mix some glazes for you."
Huh.  So many things happen behind the scenes while I merrily sit at my spinning wheel with my hands in the clay.  She threw a smile back as she ran up the stairs to the parking lot.

These are the people who can centre without a thought, and make pots only to slice them in half so that we can see what consistency looks like in a "throw".
So a "throw" is the thing you do to clay on a spinning wheel... not to be confused with a "chuck", which is the thing you make to hold a piece that needs to be held when being trimmed.

A chuck has an hourglass shape with neither lid nor floor.  It's purpose is to hold the clay that matters (maybe a teapot lid, or cream pitcher with an uneven top surface) so that it can spin consistently as you trim and fine-tune the pot's contours.  As far as I can tell, it doesn't get thrown into the fire, because it works best when it is a little wet and will gently hold the piece you are working to perfect.

If you google "pottery chucks", you'll find a site labelled "throwing a chuck".  Apparently it's a thing.

This week I made a plate that looked like it wanted to be a butter dish.  So I complied.
And then decided to try to take charge of the next piece of clay to force it into being the domed lid for the butter dish.   I may have been successful.  I'll post pictures next week.

My last throw collapsed on itself.  It was a mug, then a mug with a more pronounced bulge on the bottom half.  The bulge began to fold and so I widened the top out into a bowl ... with strange and convoluted ropes of clay that were too weak to hold the weight.  So it went back into the bag for next week.

I emerge from 2 1/2 hours of quiet and occasional conversation with others who are sitting at spinning wheels, with mud on my face and clothes, and feel like it's closer to June than January.

My prayers that God would mold and shape me are taking on entirely new meaning.

Outside, the snow is melting.