It is no secret that I love activities, so when the "living social" deal flashed up on my i-phone for ceramic painting at Colour Me Mine I just couldn't resist . My friend Tegan was visiting from Brisbane and she is very artsy, so I thought it would be a perfect winter Sydney activity to do with her! There are two Colour Me Mine studios, one at Summer Hill, and the other at Crows Nest, which is just around the corner from me. We arrive at Colour Me Mine Crows Nest with our vouchers in hand not knowing what to expect, but we soon realised after walking in that it is the favourite weekend outing for Mums and their kids, (It didn't even occur to me that it would be a kids thing whoops), and thank god there was a table of girls around our age already there otherwise Tegan and I would have felt very out of place!
The walls of the little shop are lined with bookshelves carrying ceramic pieces of every shape and size, from platters to money boxes, picture frames and flower pots! After spending the first half an hour trying to decide what to paint, I sat down with a cute little square jewellery box and Tegan a fruit bowl. The next thing we had to decide was what we were going to do with them??!? Thankfully the place is completely set up for the beginners and the young girls on duty came to our aid and went through everything we needed to know about the colour options, painting utensils, and "Inspiration" folders.
There were all sorts of things to play with, sponges, stencils, lace, sticker things, contact, masking tape, each which would create their own individual "effect" on the ceramic. I decided to use a little birdie from one of the inspiration folders as the "feature" of my jewellery box and Tegan took inspiration from a lovely yellow and black pattern found in one of the other inspiration books. ,They booth seemed really easy and we thought we would have them knocked over in no time, pfttt, were we wrong.
Note to self, next time I got to Colour Me Mine get there early! We arrived there at 11am, which we thought would give us plenty of time to spend a leisurely few hours creating our masterpieces, then leave in time for lunch at one of the great restaurants in Crows Nest. In reality, after 2 hours at Colour Me Mine, we hadn't even started to paint but were still "prepping" our pieces with various tapes! By the time 4 hours came around we were still going and I started to go delirious from sitting in the one place for so long and my growing need for food, but we managed to finish our pieces in the next half hour. The good thing was once we finished painting we didn't have to worry about anything else and could just drop our pieces off at the counter where they will be glazed and fired for us, ready for pick up by the following Thursday.
By the time that Thursday came around I had completely forgotten about how much "hard work" the whole experience was, instead I was super excited about seeing the finished products! I tell you what, they looked much better when we picked them up compared to when we dropped them off! I was impressed, they actually looked O-K, would have thought...
Even though the first thing that Tegan and I said to each other when we got into our car after 4 1/2 hours of painting at colour me mine was "what a waste of a day!", I actually cant wait to go back! They have a whole up stairs level which you can hire out for parties.. (a little girl was holding her birthday when we were there)... maybe something to keep in mind for the big 3-0 next year ....heheh
