Create Pottery at Home with Pottery Cool

Pottery at home just got fun with Pottery Cool! Get it at Walmart now!

Last year I took the girls on a day adventure to do it yourself art stores. We spent the morning painting beautiful pictures and then headed to a pottery place where you could choose an item, paint it and then pick it up a week later after they baked it. At the pottery place the girls painted animals and clay bowls and laughed and had a blast. They were amazed at the animals and bowls and other great pottery there was to paint and curious as to how they were created. Promising to take them back to a how-to class one day, we left with a new curiosity about pottery. So when I saw that there is a fun and kid friendly product called Pottery Cool that would let my kids learn the how-to and to create at home, I was all about it!

Pottery Cool contains everything you need to set your kids free with creativity. It comes with a battery operated pottery ‘wheel’, tools to help create and design the clay, paint and everything else to make a pottery masterpiece. After I pulled everything out, I turned to YouTube videos on How to Use Pottery Cool so that we had some ideas!

Then I gathered the kids and set them free! After all, mom is not needed when you have a fresh new way to create with clay! The kids could easily sculpt using Pottery Cool’s unique turntable that lets gravity do the work.

I will admit, I did ‘help’ them but only because I was truly fascinated too. It did take a few tries to get the kids to understand that you did not have to push hard or that this was not going to be done in 2 seconds flat. Patience is involved as I showed the girls how to gently hold their hand on the side of the clay as it spun so it would form a bowl.

Here are some tips we learned while working with Pottery Cool:

Don’t spray the clay before you sort of bend and shape it over the spinner. We did and the clay ended up cracking from not being able to form gradually at first. We were fine as we just stuck it back together but if you hand form the clay a little first, then set the wheel to slow, then spray, it seemed to work better.
Be prepared to use a lot of water. The instructions say to spray lavishly with the spray bottle included and you do need to. After you get it started, though, you need to spray as the clay forms in your hands!
Have paper towels or wipes ready. This is wet clay… little hands will get messy! Luckily, this clay washes super easily off of hands, tools and tables so that is a huge plus for me!
Be gentle removing the silicon form from the clay. On one craft I let the kids at it totally on their own. They really pushed hard and thinned the clay out a lot more than needed. When they tried to peel it out of the form quickly, it came apart. No biggie, we just rolled it up, used a rolling pin to form a new disc and started again. But you may want to help smaller kids pull the silicone form out.

Have FUN!!! I did find myself being a little OCD as the kids learned to use Pottery Cool and I didn’t need to be. This is designed for kid use and my stepping in was not as fun. Nothing has to be perfect and the clay can be molded back to try again if there is an issue. So just have fun, get messy and watch them create their masterpieces!

After my kids made one successful bowl with my minimal help and one totally on their own that they are calling a bowl plate, we let the clay sit overnight. Included in the kit are super cool tools to help kids design but mine wanted to paint more than anything so we let them sit.

The next day, it takes about 24 hours until they dry, the girls sat down to paint their creations! This was the most fun part for them! They were oohing and aahing at the shiny paint that colored their creations. After they dried they had beautiful, fun and exciting pottery crafts that they made from scratch themselves! It was a perfect way to tie up the ‘how did they do that?’ question from the pottery store!

My kids had a BLAST with this and we already have plans to use the leftover discs to make more fun pottery when they have their next weekend with me. It really is too much fun! Plus is aids in creativity in a way that I only thought could be done at a pottery store!