There is a one very nice and creative family here in Etyek that lives in a beatuful cozy house with a lovely humming garden full of flowers and bees. Kriszta and David are raising three kids, take care of numerous pets, bake bread, provide volunteers with psychological support. David is a ceramicist, and sometimes we go to his studio and work with clay.
There is everything that you need for creative process - kiln, pottery wheel, rolling machine, all types of clay (different colours and properties), tools for carving and modelling, texture stamps, glazes etc.
Once we made a set of items - a cup, a plate and a soap dish. We chose a clay with inclusions of volcanic nature - they are not visible in raw clay, but will appear after firing in a kiln and create nice texture.
For a cup we took a piece of clay and formed a ball with our hands. Then we made a recess in the middle of it and slowly started to deepen it with a thumb, turning the ball around in one palm. This process should be very slow and we had to concentrate all our senses on it in order to not break the wall of a future cup and to gain uniform thickness of it. The process of making thin-walled tableware is almost always the same - you have to turn a piece of clay either on a pottery wheel or in your hands and press and pull and stretch carefully in right directions.
When the bodies of our cups were ready we prepared 'hands' - long rolls of clay - and made some notches on its ends with a sharp tool and put some liquid clay - this helps the parts of the product to adhere securely.
Then we moved to plates - for them we needed some rolled thin pieces of clay that we made with the help of a rolling machine and embellished with patterns that can be made with texture stamps. The same was for the walls of a plate - we cut thin long pieces or rolled clay and attached them to the main piece with a help of notches and liquid clay.
Soap dishes were something that combines both approaches that we used for the plate and the cup, but in the end we added some 'legs' and holes for soapy water withdrawal.
So now we are waiting for our pieces to get dry nicely and fired in a kiln so we can use our self-made items in our daily life.
Pottery is very grounding and enjoyable procces that gives you a lot of space for creative experiments and self-exploration and is very good for community building process when performed in small groups of people united by the same values and ideas.