EP Dan's Last Day, Part 1 - The Clay Cafe

I can't believe it's been eight months already, but back on April 29th, EP Dan went back home to make some money during summer vacation. Since it's about half-way through May already, I figured I should finally get around to sharing what we did.

For the better part of 2011 we had both been too busy, and the weather too crummy, to enjoy much of our surroundings. I really wanted to show Dan a good time before he left, so I decided to take the day off from work and spend it with my brother so that he could have at least one good experience before he went back home.

The first place we went was somewhere I've been wanting to visit since I first came to Halifax - The Clay Cafe. On a number of different occasions I had even walked inside, but I seemed to be waiting for the moment to feel right to enjoy one of the best experiences in Halifax. (It seems like it would be a great place to go on a date too, although that's just a bonus, and completely unrelated to this post.)

The first step for us was to choose the object we wished to paint. The price was written on the bottom, and this included the price of the paint and firing the finished product in the kiln.

(EP Dan chose a turtle and I chose a small piggy penny bank.)

Next we chose our paint. Not only were there various colours, but there were also different kinds of paints, with different textures, as well as different stencils and stamps for making shapes.

While there were a variety of different colours, both EP Dan and myself are pretty conservative, so we just went with the standard version for our creations (you can't tell, but that is pink paint I'm using).

In order to get a solid, dark look to the paint, it was necessary to cover our pottery with a minimum of three layers of paint. To speed the whole process up, blow dryers were provided. Looking at this picture again though, I probably got a little too intense while I was "shooting" the paint.

The end results turned out better than I thought they would. My piggy bank says "A penny saved..." on one side, and on the other I wrote "... is a penny earned." My goal is to collect all the pennies I find on bus seats, or on the ground, or in my wallet, and deposit them in my bank before depositing them in the bank, as I run a little experiment to see how much money we waste by just throwing away our pennies.