Clay Café Sunday

On Sunday afternoon we went to Clay Café Avalon in Mount Pearl to paint some pottery!

Clay Café Avalon

In case you're wondering what a Clay Café is, it's a place where you buy unfired pottery, paint it, leave it at the cafe so that they can glaze and fire the piece for you, and then you go pick it up once it is in its finished form.

They have a variety of options of pieces to paint including, mugs, plates, fancy bowls, light switches, soap dispensers, banks, boxes, animal figurines etc. We stuck to basics; Luke went for a simple mug and Elizabeth went for a wine glass/goblet.

After purchasing the pieces (which were a tad pricey), we went to the paint station to pick out some paints we liked. In addition to the usual colours, they also have paints with special properties - such as paint that has little rocks in it which explode when the piece is fired.

Also, the paint looks complete differently before and after firing, so most of the paints look more pastel in person than they will in the end.

Then it was time to paint! Luke went for a simple, happy, design for his mug, while Elizabeth decided to take it up a notch. Her "inspiration" was Moroccan tiles, not really thinking about how long it would take to paint the intricate parts. Especially consdering the fact that everything needs to be painted over 3 times to make sure that the paint will be opaque on the final product.

Luke finished his happy mug in an hour and a half, while Elizabeth continued her detailing for quite a while. Luke had time to go pick up a coffee and paint another mug while Elizabeth was finishing her goblet, and he was still done with lots of time to spare. 

However, to be fair, Luke's second mug was pretty basic. But in the end it should look cool because he used the paint with the "exploding rocks".

Unfortunately we couldn't take our pieces home on Sunday as they needed to be glazed and fired. However, we picked them up the weekend after and they looked much brighter and fairly different (especially the second mug)! Here are some pictures of the final products!

Over the weekend we also tried out two new restaurants - Saltwater and Get Stuffed. We were pleasantly surprised by both, but we were expecting a bit more from Saltwater, considering the price. Although the mussels were extremely delicious.

Here are some more pictures from the weekend: