Making pots, attracting bees

This year CHO has a theme of ‘bees’ and recently we got a community grant from Council to make planter pots for home and community gardens within which we can grow plants that attract the little honey-producing darlings. I went along, and had a great time. There were about 10 of us there, and it was such fun playing around with clay and learning how to build a pot. Connie, who led the session, has appeared in these pages before. I got off the track and forgot to take any photos, so I am putting up some pics from the internet to give a bit of a flavour of what we got up to.

Rolling out the clay to start the process

More rolling

Roll clay into coils to build a curvy pot

Rub the boundaries between the coil layers to create a smooth finish

Building up the coils

This looks a tiny bit like mine – more uneven than the lovely examples that are in the other photos

For angular pots,there is a slab technique

Building a slab pot

Now, just for a laugh, here are some beautiful finished pots from the internet also – ours will no doubt not be massively like these! (I’ve mostly chosen photos of raku pots. We have been using raku clay today.)