Today was the last day of the "Love of Art" kid's camp that I taught at the Columbia Museum of Art... Monday we made pinch pots, which is the basic form of ceramics. I think the kids really loved it! I'm glad I decided to switch from making paper-clay to just pinch pots. Paper-clay is really fragile and the kids could only dip pieces of tree branches in the paper-clay once... not really sure that would have worked well!!
Some of the counselors in the camp, also participated in making pinch pots! One lady made a piece that looked like a flower, and another counselor made a piece that looked like a strawberry. Pretty cool considering they had never worked in clay before.
Below is a photo of the pieces before they were fired. Since we only had one day to let them dry and then fire them... we dried them out in the electric kiln, slowly, at 100 degrees. Tons of steam came out of the kiln! I'm surprised nothing blew up... some of the kid's pieces were so thick! We had no other options for this, because we had to get the pieces back to the children this morning, so they didn't even have time to glaze or even paint them unfortunately. If only there was another day, then they could have decorated them.