Pottery painting can be an awesome date idea, especially if you’re an art or craft lover like myself and my husband. At most places you can BYOB and your own snacks and food and the pricing can be very reasonable (depending on what you paint). Not to mention, Groupon has loads of local deals for activities like this. I found over 30 different places offering discounts in my area. Simply search for “pottery painting” and you’re sure to find something interesting in your area as well.
My husband and I decided to do this on a random day this week. My husband’s work schedule is, shall we say, less than ideal. For the better part of the last four years or so we rarely had mutual days off. Now that I’m working from home, we have the amazing advantage of taking days off together for the first time in years! All summer he’s been rearranging his schedule to get one day off during the week and we’ve been going out together as a family visiting museums, parks and other fun stuff with our three year old in tow. He had off again this week, but our daughter just started the new school year, so we opted to go out on a date, just the two of us while she was in school. After spending the previous week doing “mommy camp” and running around with my little girl, I was not up for anything really active, so we decided to do pottery painting and planned to hit my favorite local spot, Create Me Pottery. Luckily we both love art and painting so it was the perfect choice for us and something we hadn’t done together in quite some time.
There’s just something so nice and therapeutic about painting, picking colors, projects and letting your creativity lead the way. It’s such a great activity whether you’re on your first date with someone new or spending time with your partner. It allows you to sit, talk with each other, do something fun and you get something really pretty to take home. The pricing is very reasonable where you pay for what you paint plus a small sitting fee. Most places have pieces that are only a few dollars. In addition, you can usually bring your own snacks and drinks along.
In typical fashion, my husband did not disappoint in the food department. Being married to a chef has its perks and he packed along a lovely picnic lunch and a bottle of good wine.
After much deliberation on what to paint, we landed on a couple of lego block banks. We decided to do two of them and use them as bookends. We’d been discussing what to do with our daughter’s changing table now that we really don’t need it anymore. The table has drawers and a hamper that we still use, but we wanted to do something else with the top. (I highly recommend this changing table if you’re in the market: Badger Basket Modern Changing Table & Hamper). We thought about getting bookends to help create more useful storage for her ever growing library. These lego block banks would do really nicely and we grabbed two of them to paint.
We decided on spelling out her first and last name on the “pegs”. We used a base color and then stuck on some letter stickers to spell the names then painted over each peg with in a different color and pealed off the letters after the paint dried a bit. By doing this, the pegs were all different colors but the letters would be in the base color. We also picked out a couple of stencils to accent the sides with some flowers.
When painting pottery, it’s always good to do about three coats of paint. Most places I go to will typically tell you that, but I had family visit another place near them and apparently were not given instructions so all the pieces came out with very pale paint and very visible brush strokes. When doing layers like we did for the letters, try to pick a lighter color for the base, otherwise you run the risk of the base color showing through (unless that’s what you want). Also, you may want to do four coats of the top color. A couple of the top colors we picked were also on the lighter side so we did a fifth coat on a couple of them.
We had loads of fun painting together and figuring it all out as well as spending some nice quiet time and just enjoying each other’s company. Since it was a random weekday we had the whole place to ourselves and enjoyed it immensely.
Here is what the pieces looked like when we finished painting. This is not how the final pieces will look as they need to be glazed and fired to bring out the deep vibrant colors as they should be. The base was also a speckled paint which you can’t tell at all when painting with it.
Of course, being a perfectionist at heart, I’m kicking myself for the mistakes I made and the sloppy edges (one of the flowers I did is upside down), as well as the “S” sticker that went completely awry while painting. My husband, however is much more laid back and thinks they look great. They’ll still look super cute in her bedroom and I’ll be making sure to face them with their best side forward. I am anxiously awaiting when they’ll be ready to pick up. Stay tuned for an updated photo of them when I have them ready.
Overall, it was an absolutely lovely day and we both had such a great time with each other on this well deserved break.
If you’re of a mind to do this, I highly recommend it and also suggest checking Groupon to help save you a bit and look for some awesome local places to check out. Each local area is different, but in my area there are deals upwards of 40%-50% off, so definitely worth checking out! Click HERE to check out your local Groupon.
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