Do you remember the super cool birthday gift I got?
In May we didn’t only eat way too much delicious Belgian pie, more importantly we also attended a workshop ceramics in Västerås (Sweden)- which is about an hour drive from where we live. It was a surprise I didn’t know of until I was facing Annika’s doorbell that said: ‘Keramik’. Since it was something I wished to try for such a long time, I also wanted to go back to finish our creations with glazing.

We started by choosing colors. Not easy I can tell you! First of all you have to consider whether or not you want to use your creation to prepare food in. I don’t plan to so I ad the most choice. Joeri created one bowl for the oven and a cup so these had to be safe for food.
Then we started mixing the glazing. I was surprised about the colors and texture of this since I probably expected something smooth, transparent or glossy but it rather looks and feels like colored sand mixed with water. When adding a layer of raw glazing on the surface it doesn’t look at all like the end result. Being new to this, it’s not easy to know what you can expect. It was extremely helpful that Annika had little samples of every color and their result on the different colors of clay.
Above you can see that the black clay gets a layer of glazing that looks grey and dull but it’s actually a silky transparent green.
After drying you have to scrape of some of the glazing of the bottom for 2 reasons. First of all, to prevent the pottery to stick when the glazing is heated, it gets the support of little kiln spurs (small pottery chairs). Secondly, on the bottom we signed out pottery with our name/initials :-).
So hell yeaah there is a real ‘Fenne’ out there!

And we got the news that all of our pottery is now finished! (We don’t bake them ourselves but Annika does.) The 2 on the top right are mine (small cup and a candle holder), the other 3 are from Joeri. I am extremely curious to see them in real life when we get to pick them up. So exciting!
I have to admit, this feels so addictive. I only tried it once and it’s far from perfect but it’s so calming and creative at the same time. I would love to be able to make more of these or maybe one day have an oven myself and learn all the ins and outs. Who knows,… one day 🙂