Downtown Welcome Table plate-decorating opportunity and Empty Bowl clay available

I shared these two announcements from Lori Theriault of the Village Potters at Clay Club last night - they're pretty lengthy so I wanted to share the details again here.

Contact Lori at lori@thevillagepotters.com

PART ONE:

I am working on a project for Downtown Welcome Table (soup kitchen that serves 800+ meals) - they want to upgrade their commercial plates to handmade, and I'm working with East Fork Pottery to make the plates to fit their system of service/storage. Laguna Clay is donating the clay for this - East Fork Pottery is ram-pressing the plates (cone 10, Laguna 850 clay), and bisque-firing them. I'll be looking for potters, individually, by the group, and /or by the school, to volunteer to glaze and fire the plates - anyway they want, as long as it's cone 10/vitrified. There's not really a timeline on this - East Fork has already made and donated 500 plates, our part will make another 500. Anyone interested can contact me for info - the plates aren't pressed/fired yet, but will be in the next month or two I think, and then I'll have them to give out for glazing and firing.

PART TWO:

So Laguna very generously donated 1000 pounds of clay for the above, but it needed to be mixed to a certain moisture content for ram press - this meant they had to mix a minimum 2000 pounds. So I wrote another donation request for Empty Bowls, and while we didn't quite get a full palette, I have 900 pounds of donated clay for Empty Bowls. This clay is VERY firm, as it's mixed for ram press, but I've slabbed some to test, and (with a good, strong slab roller), it rolls to the perfect consistency for slump/drape molds. Overly ambitious potters may want to try to throw it, but it's FIRM. But as I said, I did my test slabbing, and depending on the size of the bowl mold, I expect 18-24 bowls per bag. Any potter who would like to request clay for an EMPTY BOWLS event (could be the Avl event in September, the Dig In event - any event as long as it's Empty Bowls), they can contact me. About 500 pounds is already spoken for, possibly more, but I can designate at least 250 to the first takers - in 25# increments if desired.