A Crafty Treat

If you are following us on Instagram, you may have already noticed that we’ve recently been working on a few crafty projects.

We still have a few to finish, so watch this space, but one project that is already completed is our new clay box. It seemed a perfect workshop to go on, as it was Jan and my anniversary recently and pottery just happens to be the traditional gift for a 9^th anniversary.

My lovely friend Kerryn (who has her own amazing blog which you can check out here) and I recently took part in a clay box making workshop. It was a lot of fun and a great change from our house renovation work.

The workshop was held by the extremely talented ceramist Linzi Ramsden – you can check out some of here fantastic work here.

As I can’t remember any of the proper terms for the techniques we used when working with clay, I’ll just let the images do most of the talking.

We started by rolling out our clay slabs into squares and choosing the design for our box. There were loads of different samples of materials, fabrics and textures to choose from. You can see that I chose this amazing firefly for one of the sides of the box. After placing the chosen design into position you just roll over it and squash the detail into the clay.

This is what it looks like after removing the fabric.

I love the amount of detail and clear lines that it leaves. After preparing all of the sides of the box it was time to assemble it.

Linzi gave us a demonstration and needless to say she made it look a lot easier than it was. Luckily she was on hand throughout the whole day with lots of help and advice. Then came the hardest bit of the whole workshop… waiting – the box had to be fired before we could start painting it.

So one – very long – week later, this is what it turned out like!

I can’t tell you how relieved I was to find it stayed in one piece!

Before we could start painting the box we applied a coat of a black liquid (can’t remember the name) which fills in all of the lines and accentuates them. You can see that it already looks completely different.

Then we could finally start to paint the box.

And here’s the finished result.

I’m really happy how it turned out, especially considering I’d never made anything out of clay before.

We’re not sure what we’re going to use the box for yet, but I think it’s pretty enough to justify not having a use at the moment!

Have you ever taken part in a craft workshop? Have you ever made anything out of clay?