Creating with clay

Happy Mother's Day!
I'm so excited to show you what we've been up to!  I could hardly wait until the children passed these beauties along to their mothers so that I could share it without ruining the surprise.



With inspiration from the garden (and from some vases I spotted at West Elm), we've been busy creating gifts to honor the mothers in our lives.  We even moved our make-shift ceramics studio outside to take advantage of some beautiful spring weather. 





The children began by rolling out slabs.  They used a ceramics needle tool to cut out a rectangle.














The needle tool was then used to score the edges of the rectangle where they would be joined together.  Scoring roughs the surface of the clay and allows the two textured edges to grab each other like Velcro.




The two edges were joined and blended to create a cylinder. 

Next, a base was traced in the clay and attached with more scoring.















The clay was smoothed,

and plants from our gardens were pressed into the clay.  Mostly, we used fennel flowers from our own prolific plant.

After drying and firing in the kiln (that we are so lucky to have on campus), it was time to glaze.  First, each child selected a color and used a paintbrush to wiggle glaze into all of the wonderful depressions and crevices created by the plant imprints. 
















Next, they sponged off the glaze from the background to reveal the plant imprint.

Finally the entire vase was coated in layers of clear gloss glaze, which looks pink before it is fired.














Glaze is not entirely intuitive for children (or adults!) because the color and texture changes with the heat of the kiln, but that's also part of the fun!  Opening a kiln with a glaze load is like Christmas morning.  I love having the honor of being the first to see how each child's much-loved project looks when completed.

Take a look!

Aren't they just lovely?!  West Elm has nothing on our little artists!