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The artist at work

Last weekend, we were racking our brains for something fun to do with Jolie. It was too cold to go to the park (at least for me anyway) and we felt like we had wasted most of the afternoon with Jolie's tortured weekend nap schedule (Sequence: 1. Put down for nap. 2. Wait for the ½ hour to hour to possibly hour and a half for her to fall asleep. This will be the subject of another post. 3. Sleeps for 1 ½ to 2 hours. 4. Wakes up just in time for us to evacuate her and the bedding for a hose down after she soils them with pee. Of note: Step 4 can happen during Step 2 as well).

Somehow, I had the idea of going to a Paint-your-own-pottery place to see how she would like it. Jolie LOVES to paint, but we've never tried the pottery bit. Back in the day when I was single and child-less, I used to go to one close to where I lived and would spend many a therapeutic afternoon trying to channel my more artistic side. I'm not exceptionally artistic, but it was a good creative outlet and we have quite a few of these hard-earned mementos around the house because of it. My one issue with these kinds of places is how expensive the artistic-channeling can cost: the place I used to go to charged BY THE HOUR as well as by the piece, meaning I have some way overpriced amateur mementos in our house.

We got there and there was already a party underway with girls probably aged 6 or 7 taking up the front tables, which I thought was a great idea for a child's birthday party. Jolie looked so excited as she took in all the painting going on around her. We picked out a small, flat plate and some simple Christmas tree ornaments for her to paint, trying to make it as easy as possible for her to tackle.

We let her choose which colors of paint she wanted on her palette and helped guide her on the sequence of which paints to choose since apparently you have to paint light colors first and then dark for them to show up properly after the firing process. It became evident pretty quickly that she was perhaps a hair too young for this when the store worker advised us to paint 3 coats of the same color for a uniform appearance. Um, yeah, not happening. We're lucky to get some form of paint on most of the surface.

The plate, though, was all hers and we let her paint it as she saw fit, including stacking colors on top of one another. My feeling was, this is her plate and it will be darling because it was solely her creation.

By the time she had finished her very abstract masterpiece, we had ditched the idea of painting the ornaments and got ready to pay through our nose for this small plate. It ended up being not as expensive as we thought as they only charged per person and not per person per hour and only charged us the one child fee (plus the price of the unfinished pottery).

We get to pick it this upcoming weekend and while my hopes are not high that it's going to end up surprisingly lovely (some very dubious color experimenting and painting techniques going on), I can't wait to see what comes out of the kiln.

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