Pottery Wheel Class + Glazing | 4Cats Arts Studio
Back with another pottery adventure!
This was my first time trying pottery wheel and I did it at 4Cats Arts Studio. There are quite a few locations in Toronto, but we booked our classes at the Leaside location at 1386 Bayview Ave #1, East York, ON, M4G 3A5.
POTTERY WHEEL
Our instructor demo-ing one of the bowl making steps
This wheel class is a 1.5 hour long instructor lead class that allows you to throw up to 2 bowls. The class was small with only 4 participants. We each got our own pottery wheel, bucket of water, tools and block of clay to work with. For the first bowl we alternated between watching our instructor showing us each step and then attempting each one ourselves. Some steps were simple to do, but most of them were quite hard to replicate.
Throughout the process you will likely make mistakes. You can adjust the speed of your wheel but pottery is definitely a skill that needs a lot of work to master. Luckily our instructor was really helpful and was available to guide us and fix parts we struggled with.
I ended up making a lopsided bowl the first time around (likely due to my poor centering). You have to accept however your bowls turn out as you do not get more clay or more time for it.
We then got to start all the steps over again to make our second bowl. We got our second block of clay and got straight to wedging (repeatedly throwing our clay on the table to get air out). We then started our steps into making our second bowl. We could work on each step at our own pace but there was a time restraint on how long we had as there was a class after us as well.
You got to practice with sticking the clay to the wheel and prepping it to be moulded. We learned techniques to centre the clay on the wheel (which I found to be very difficult), coning up and down, and getting the clay to be the perfect shape to start forming our bowl shape with our fingers and tools.
Throughout the class the instructor is there to give us tips to ensure our bowls do not rip and we went home with both our bowls.
After taking the bowls off our wheels for us they were put off to the side and labeled so they could be fired. Then was had to clean our wheel for the next class.
We ended up booking a glazing time slot with the studio while we were there. Glazing time slots come at additional cost. When we booked ours there was a 50% off promotion and so we paid $10 to come back the following week to glaze. You can book this online with times starting 7 days after your class.
GLAZING
Our glazed pieces which we will get to see completed next week!
We came back 11 days later to do our glazing!
We got to see our bisque pieces and had to decide on how we wanted our pieces to look. Works from others at the studio are displayed on shelves, so we looked at other pieces for inspiration.
For the glazing process we used underglaze to paint our pieces the desired colour we want. After we were done the studio would do a shiny overglaze on the pieces to make them food safe.
The glazing was a “trust the process” experience as underglaze shows up much more dull than it would be when fired. They also only had the primary colours, black, and white. This meant all our colours involved our own mixing, which we were very unsure about how they would turn out..
We really wanted to try this bubble affect technique of glazing. This involved adding underglaze into soap water and blowing air through a straw into the mixture to make bubbles. These bubbles were transferred on top of our pieces and hopefully it will give us a bubble affect.
I made a huge mess in this process but I am very excited to see how the pieces will turn out in the end!
I spent a little too long glazing my first bowl that we went 30 mins overtime, so we paid a fee of $5 for the 30 minutes we stayed longer.
It seems the studio is temporarily holding these workshops as it is now summer camp season for kids, but they will be back in the fall season.
Keep an eye our for any discounts! While booking I noticed some locations had a 40% off discount on the workshop price of $48.40. Different studios also offer classes at different dates and times.
If you’re looking for an indoor activity when summer is over, pottery wheel at 4Cats is a great intro to the wheel and you get your own bowls to take home in just a few weeks!
Watch our tiktok video!
How to get here
Parking
Small limited parking lot behind unit
TTC - Davisville Station
Bus 28, 11A/11C ~ 8 min
Walk ~30 min
Visited June 3 & 14, 2024
