I was fortunate to have my first experience of creating with clay early in life, whilst still at elementary school. I made a fish. After it was fired in a kiln I painted it. Not sure what happened to it but I haven’t forgotten the feeling of satisfaction from my little creation.
One day, about 15 years ago, when we lived in Sheffield in the UK and my children were about the same age, I took them to a park by the river. They were very excited to go, packed a few things into a backpack and took it with them. When we got there, they ran down to the river bank, took out a gardening trowel, a few bags and started digging into the ground, filling up their bags with soft red clay. When we got back home, they each made a thumb pot out of the clay and I still don’t know where they got the idea from.
A couple of years later, I managed to fire those little pots in a kiln and that’s another story. At the time I was the school PTA (parent teachers association) chairperson and we were looking for a project idea to celebrate the Queens Golden Jubilee year. I came up with a ceramic tile project involving every student in the school and we spent our hard earned PTA funds on getting the school kiln fixed. It hadn’t been used for over 30 years, not since many of the parents, including my husband, were themselves students at the same school.
This kick started my interest in hand building with clay and working with children. I enrolled myself on a community run course in ceramics but it was when I came to live in Calgary 13 years ago that I found my dream job of teaching how to make projects out of clay. When I came to Squamish I decided to start my own business.
