Kids’ Day In the Library

Becky and I went to the Painted Dish yesterday. It’s both a store and a craft studio in Santa Fe. When we walked in we saw hundreds of unfinished ceramics – dishes and cups and tiles and pencil holders and large bowls and teapots and then there are dozens of popular items like ceramics shaped like electric guitars and motorcycles and pop-figures. And there are the colors – all the colors in the rainbow and glitter and more. Then there are stencils in hundreds of different shapes and stamps – rabbits and geckos, bears and butterflies and more.

We were there to try our hand at the craft so that we could do a project with the kids at our library. We though it would be a good idea to try it for ourselves first – and we were very glad we did! Merri, the lady who runs the Painted Dish, gave us a quick lesson in the various stages of ceramics: things like glazing (painting on the colors) and firing (putting the painted ceramic in an oven at 1,000 degrees and baking it until the glaze and the ceramic become one). She talked about which colors shine through, and how to layer colors and different ideas about how to decorate our ceramics.

Then Becky and I each picked a bare ceramic and began to decorate our own. I chose a coffee mug and Becky chose a large cup. She began a design of Fleur de lis and I chose a stencil with a landscape of images including a wolf that looks a little bit like my dog Grreta, and some clouds and a big evergreen tree. We thought this was going to take an hour or two to paint, but two hours passed very quickly and soon it was time for us to go and we weren’t even finished with our project!

So we arranged for a Craft Kit of cups and plates to take home with us (and we included our own unfinished projects) and we brought it all home with us to do at this week’s Kids Day in the Library on Thursday. Each kid – or adult – will get a cup or a plate to paint. And at the end of the day, we’ll pack them all up and deliver them back to the Painted Dish, where they will bake them (they say: “Fire them”) in the 1,000 degree ovens until they are transformed into our beautiful ceramics.

Stay tuned – next week we’ll have pictures of our ceramic projects here!