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Spring Pottery Class 2025: Final All-Classes Potluck & Barrel Firing

It wouldn’t be Seattle without a little Spring drizzle, but it didn’t dampen any enthusiasm for seeing freshly fired pottery from the kiln (final glaze firing). Nor anticipation for how pre-prepped pieces from the barrel firing would come out, which always carries a bit of mystery. No two barrel firings are the same!

Once things were hot enough, in goes a little iron oxide powder for added effect. Once pottery is carefully moved to a cooling station, it can be altered and decorated with feathers or horse hair. There’s a temperature range ‘sweet-spot’ that allows hair to imprint thin, random lines without instantly burning off. Students grab a glove and mash hair against the surface of their piece. The results are nearly always surprising and satisfying.

The pot luck spread was marvelous! A few students are known for contributing delicious dishes. A cherry on top of an already satisfying Spring Session!

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Pottery Class Spring Session 2024: Final Party & Mini Wheel Throwdown!

It was a beautiful day for all classes to converge! Superb potluck dishes on hand, and the barrel firing got going straight away and loaded with various pots and masks already prepared by many of the students. All sorts of different elements were added to the firing to achieve an array of effects (cow dung collected from Eastern WA, iron oxide, salt, and more). It’s always an interesting gamble that never seems to disappoint once everything comes out.

We topped it off with a (very informal, goofy) mini-wheel throwdown competition! A mini egg holder theme, but with M&M like candies standing in for actual eggs. You know, like everyone does! The mini wheels are USB powered and a torch is used to quickly dry and firm up the piece to remove it.

Thanks to all the students who came to enjoy the day! We’ll see many of you in the fall. Have a great summer!

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Pottery Class Fall Session 2022: Head to Head Vase Throwdown!

The chill in the air didn’t slow up students from bringing some great food and spirit to this Fall Session party.

Students enjoyed seeing newly fired pieces and meeting students from other classes. We even had quite a few pups in the studio!

Towards the end, a rousing round of head to head vase throwing, the tallest piece that could be made in 4 minutes! Heckling is always encouraged!

It’s always a pleasure seeing students photograph their work in the ‘photobooth’ just outside the studio. See you next session!

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Pottery Class Spring Session 2022: Final Class Party

The weather cooperated for an action packed final part for this Spring session! There’s always a little more excitement knowing we can spread out in the fresh air and do cool stuff, like getting a barrel firing in (but the action didn’t stop there).

The Raku firing in the barrel requires a variety of material including firewood, sawdust, leaves, needles, cow manure, and further in, additives like iron oxide.

While the barrel got heated up, it was obviously time for a head to head round on the mini wheels! But as a twist, contestants threw tiny pieces an active tic tack toe board. A near turducken of competition!

Eventually it was time to pull pieces from the barrel and experiment with applying horsehair and feathers, which have to be applied within a particular temperature range to leave its effects. The pieces were cool and interesting straight out of the barrel.

It was a marvelous day of fun and experimentation!

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Final Class Party – Fall 2019: One-Handed Throwing Competition!

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After the resounding success of our blindfolded throwing competition, we thought: ‘how else can we screw up a thrower’s capability?’.

Each pair of competitors had only one hand to use each to throw the tallest vessel in 6 minutes! Some pieces were remarkably well formed. Others, not so much! But in the end it was all for the prestige of the title, not the art.

A late addition to the rules was to demand competitors fill their free hand with their drink! Why did it take so long to figure that one out? Better late than never.

All of this restricted pottery training should produce some Kung Fu level throwing skills!

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Blindfolded Throwing Competition Throwback (Winter Final Party 2019)

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This idea emerged from other final party contests, like head-to-head speed throwing and throwing the tallest pottery inside of several minutes. It was time to make things really interesting!

This time a student at a pottery wheel was blindfolded (even before their clay was centered) but had the benefit of a coach. The first potential side benefit might’ve been to allow students to better focus on what they were feeling through their hands. However it quickly became clear how important the coach/thrower relationship was, and it was fascinating to watch the teamwork play out.

It was immediately apparent how the quality of the coaching became key to adjusting to the nuances of getting a cylinder thrown and gaining some height to ‘win’. In addition to providing a squirt of water here and there, the coach had to learn how to communicate to the thrower in a whole new way, since nobody was familiar with strictly verbalizing specific throwing movements or corrections. So both coach and thrower had to work together to overcome their respective handicap!

It was suspenseful throughout! By the end of each session it was genuinely impressive how well the students could throw blindfolded, and just about everyone was surprised and fascinated by the ‘social experiment’ aspects too!

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Spring Session Final Party + Throw Down!

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The final class party is when students converge from different classes, pick up their newly fired delightful work, and enjoy some eclectic pot luck grub.

The weather was perfect, so instead of a barrel fire we knew we had to have our 2nd inaugural mudslinger’s invitational, where random teams compete to cooperatively throw the biggest, crudest bowl against the clock, head to head. Is it easier to spin a delicate yet sturdy form with another set of hands and after a cocktail? Nope!

Students admired each others’ creations and took pictures of their work at the photo station. Between the kids joining the festivities, the great food and banter, there was scarcely a dull moment! Thanks everyone!

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Final Class Party For Winter Session

It was a beautiful day in Seattle to get a barrel fire going, enjoy some marvelous food and drink, and watch students carefully pull out their pre-configured pieces to see what sort of effects they achieved. I’ll be writing more soon on what we put into a barrel firing to create such cool possibilities. Once pieces come out, additional effects and decoration can be done with horse hair or feathers, which burn random, semi-permanent patterns into the surface.

To see more pottery fired this way, check out some of the #dunsheestudent images on the Photos page!