First class: eight balls of clay, one cylinder
I arrived at the first evening class with no idea how a wheel worked and left three hours later with one wobbling cylinder, 9 cm tall, and clay in my hair. In between I destroyed seven balls of clay, each 500 g, each in a slightly different way. I am writing this the morning after so the embarrassment is still fresh enough to be useful.
Ball one never centered. I did not understand that the clay has to be stuck to the bat first, so it wandered off the center and spun across the splash pan. Ball two centered, badly, and when I pushed my thumbs in to open it, I went straight through the bottom. Ball three I opened carefully and then could not find the floor; I kept pulling and the wall came up and over like a flower and folded onto my wrist. Balls four and five collapsed during the pull because I was squeezing from the outside and not supporting from inside. Ball six I pulled too fast with the wheel too fast and it twisted off at the rim. Ball seven I simply pressed too hard while thinking about something else, and it went flat.
Ball eight. The instructor had been watching and said the thing everyone says, which is that the clay knows when you are afraid. I thought it was a slogan. Then she put her hands over mine and I felt the difference: she was barely pressing at all, and the clay was moving anyway, because the pressure was steady and the wheel was doing the work. Her hands came away and I kept the same light pressure, pulled slowly, three pulls, and a cylinder stood there. Nine centimeters tall, walls about 1 cm thick, leaning slightly to the left. I stopped before I ruined it, which may have been the most important decision of the evening.
Things I did not know before Tuesday: how much water you use (a lot, constantly), how wet your jeans get (completely), how sore your lower back is afterward (very), and how long three hours is when you are concentrating (no time at all). The cylinder is drying on a shelf with my initials scratched in the base, and next week I am told we trim it, which I assume means find out how badly the base is made.