After we chose to focus on pottery for our project, I was really excited. I hadn’t been on a wheel in a long time and this was an excuse to have fun and create something. I was looking forward to this for a while until Jaymie told us that the Anglo- Saxons didn’t make wheel-thrown pots. Now, I have done pottery off and on since I was a child. What has never changed during this time is my absolute disdain for hand building pots. Be it pinch pot or coil, they never turn out well for me. 
When the time came for us to create/recreate pots this past weekend, it actually started out surprisingly well. The material we were using, Sculpey (see above), was definitely not clay (it was all that had been available at the art store). Shane found out, to our dismay, that the material tended to repel water rather than mix with it. This was problem number one. I was planning on using something similar to a slip to smooth out the coils on my pot. By this time, I hadgone too far to turn back. I just kept on coiling. And, just to make matters worse, my coils began to get thinner and thinner. Sculpey was too heavy and hard to, one, keep its structure when taken too high and, two, be smoothed out from such thin coils.
I should add that, regardless of my many issues with this process, Shane and Jaymie made absolutely fantastic pots that not only look great, but managed to not collapse upon themselves. One benefit of every time I become annoyed at my failed coil pots is that it really makes me think about how skilled some people are. The pots they are able to create blow my mind considering how much difficulty I have with the simplest coils.
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