As You Wish -- Painting Pottery!

There is a great little pottery place here in Arizona that I think everyone should try at least once in their life. It's a fun place called, "As You Wish."

It's a place where you can paint your own piece of pottery and in the process, create your own little personalized masterpiece. This was Part II of Monica's Birthday outing (see Ms. Thomas' Lovely Tea House for Part I). She had never painted pottery before and I was excited to show her what it was all about! : ) She was pretty excited about it too!

The first thing they have you do when you arrive is pick out a piece of pottery to paint. Monica loves having a cup of tea in the morning and I am an avid (addicted) coffee drinker, so we both chose mugs to paint.

Of course, I couldn't be fully awake unless I had my caffeine first, so I had my Starbuck's cup keeping me company. (A yummy pumpkin spice frappucinno--half coffee, half cream base). Can we say "yum!"

The guy who worked there was really friendly and joyful and was really good at explaining all the ins and outs of painting our pottery pieces. He told us to paint our lights first, then our darks or the colors would get all funny. He also told us that our pieces would look pastel until they were kilned and then the colors would change to a primary color (well, if we did 3 coats). Um...what was step #4 again? Thankfully, he had this great color wheel that had all the reminders on it of what to do.

Our second mission was to find paint from the paint station...and oh, there were lots of colors to choose from!

Once we chose our colors and got our ideas created in our head, we got to work painting our mugs and conversing in between questions like, "What do you think of this?" and "What color should I use next?" It was relaxing and kind of stressful all in one, because you didn't want to mess up. I DID end up messing up my mug. I added a black trim that I ended up hating, but no fear! Joyful guy helper to the rescue! He sanded my mug and patiently scraped away paint with an exacto knife until all the black was gone. My hero! ; )

There aren't any pictures of us painting because it gets pretty messy and I didn't want to get my camera or lenses dirty. But, once we were finished painting, these are what our mugs looked like.

Monica's is on the left and represents her family. I love the super chic polka dots! ; )

Mine is on the right. It has a Scripture written on it that God has been speaking into my life lately and that's why it's there: "Do your planning and prepare your fields before you build your home." (Proverbs 24:27, NLT).

It's a little difficult using pottery as a canvas to paint on, but is sure is a lot of fun!!!

We definitely want to go back and paint more pottery!

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Oh....and before the night was over, we had to make one more quick run to Starbucks......for another little drink.

: )