The LASSes took a birthday field trip to Terra Mia, because the Grand Poobah was getting ancient. Terra Mia is a paint your own pottery shop in Noe Valley, and nestled amongst the yuppie falderal. The shop is clean, and there is an interesting variety of pieces to choose from. It's not exactly inexpensive, but they don't rush you, so you can take as much time as you want on your item.
Four of us got up early, fortified ourselves with caffeine and some pastry at La Boulange, while being terrorized by the locals. The good of LB would be nice glasses of lemon water and an arrangement of pickles and olives at 9am, the bad would be the screaming babes that want to have a $3 macarons for breakfast, while mom repeats everything to them in both English and French.
After pretentious bowls of coffee, they LASS did a quick tour through the farmers market, pondered the man blocking the sidewalk with the sign that asked people not block the sidewalk, and wondered if you were ever to old for irony. Eventually we made our way to Terra Mia, and were greeted by lady on duty that day, as well as a pair of Mommies that were rather vocal of the fear that their three year old daughter was going to mess up the Easter eggs they were working on.
Once we had out items, paint and table staked out, we started to have fun. Terra Mia has a nice selection of colors of paints, with a great display showing the baked colors and what they look like with one, two, or three layers. The brushes were all right, lacking anything with too fine of a tip, and the selection of stencils and stamps had a seen better days, but they really weren't useful on most items anyway. After about four hours, one bloody finger from a run in with a paper clip, and one more screaming mom (again fearing their child would mess up the project), we were done.
The following Tuesday, one of our LASSes went and picked up our finished items. It's always interesting to see how things turn out, because you really don't know until they're baked. We had some disappointment with some dimpled glazing and errant splotches of paint from other people's projects, ending up on our own. It's frustrating, because we all put a lot of effort into our work, but as you can see with a certain tea pot, if it weren't for the dimpling, no one would have believed it wasn't professional!
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