Wes's is the grey one with a flat bottom and curved walls, and mine is the white speckled one with a wide rim and a smaller bottom. We've since lovingly embraced the addition of these lopsided new vessels by plating colorful side dishes inside of them (as they're both too small for main dishes). In a way, these bowls have piqued our creativity in the kitchen more, and it makes us giddy to see the food that we cooked in the bowls that we made.
All happiness aside, here's Wes's takeaway from his experience: Pottery is scary. You can do everything perfectly and then in the end it can literally all go to shit when you are making your final adjustments, after which you will need to start over from square one again. Almost sounds like a metaphor for real life. So about half an hour into the obsessive-compulsive task of shaping the bowl, Wes's was starting to look good. Then, the walls were getting too high and the bottom was getting a bit thin. With a pointy needle-like tool, he gently attempted to cut down the wall while pressing down on the foot pedal to turn the wheel. The wall wrinkled instantly and suddenly the bowl looked like a deformed pitcher that threatened to fly off the wheel. I was laughing then, but not anymore when something similar happened to mine. I think I was trying to thin out my walls by squeezing them with my fingers and somehow this pressure had thrown the bowl off kilter, resulting in disaster. Your heart literally sinks. Our teacher calmly and matter-of-factly told us to simply scrape it off and grab a new hunk of clay. At least the second time around, it's a lot faster and easier to get back to where you were.
