Primitive Pottery!

 

The kids and I have loved pottery for years, and we have taken a few classes at the Pottery Studio, but have always dreamed of firing it ourselves, in our own backyard.

Well, after years of dreaming, just yesterday our dream became a reality!

We ordered some chestnut clay online, and when it arrived, we could hardly wait to get our hands in it! Rowan had also harvested some clay from the lake and made a pot out of that too!

Rowan made some pinch pots, I made some slab mugs, and Rosie even made some toys out of clay!

Rowan even made some teacups!

I used flowers from the garden to print a slab!

Here is Rosie making her clay "picture"

I carved fall leaves onto this one!

Finally, our pots were bone dry and we were ready to fire them.

We read a lot of different ways to fire pottery the primitive way, and decided to start by preheating the pots first. We built a small fire in the center so they could come to temperature. We didn't want to take any chances!

We had to tend the fire a lot to make sure they heated evenly.

Finally it was time to cover the pots and let the fire grow bigger. We had previously cut small pieces of firewood so that they wouldn't fall on the pots and break them.

We let the fire burn down to coals and left it to cool.

It was like Christmas morning this morning when we went to find our fired pots in the ashes!

Thankfully, we only experienced a few minor breaks- one of Rowan's pots had a few chips come off of it, and a handle fell off of one of my mugs, but other than that, they turned out great!

Making and firing primitive pottery was super fun and we hope to do it lots LOTS more!

What do you think?

Do you want to try it too?

Happy Learning!

~Beth & Family