How To | Your Creation Station

February 17, 2021February 20, 2021

Bubble Painting Technique

This easy to do bubble painting technique creates a cool bubble effect on your finished ceramic pottery. Use it to create a background on your piece and then add other foreground elements by painting messages or images on top. You can even add a small add-on piece to give your creation a third dimension. Painting your ceramics with bubbles is also an easy project to work on at home. The kids will have a blast blowing bubbles and your project will look like a million bucks when it comes out of the kiln.

Painting with Bubbles How-To Video

Tools Needed for the Project

In addition to a piece of ceramics bisque and paints to work with you’ll need a few items you’ll most likely already have around the house.

Ceramic Bisque – While you can conceivably put bubbles on anything, pieces with lots of surface area, like plates or bowls, work well. Check out the selection of ceramic bisque on our online studio.
Cup or Small Bowl – You’ll need something to mix the paint, water and soap in to make your bubbles.
A Straw – For blowing bubbles. Any kind of straw will do.
Water – Essential for many things, in this project we’ll need it to thin the paint and soap and to complete the bubble broth.
Brushes – Although you don’t need a brush to produce the bubbles, you’ll need one to paint more stuff on you piece after the bubbles are on.
Clean Up Materials – What you’ll need to keep clean and clean up ultimately depends on you but you should plan on having some paper or cloth towels on hand. You may also want to put down some kind of table covering to catch.

July 24, 2020July 24, 2020

Making Stepping Stones

Our stepping stone kit is fairly easy to put together once you get it home. The basic steps are to mix up your cement, arrange your design and let it dry.

You’ll need to find somewhere to work where you won’t mind mixing cement and water. This isn’t a inherently messy process but messes happen. Putting down some plastic or newspaper makes for easy clean up too. You can do it in the kitchen or you can do it in the yard.

Mixing Your Cement

The first step in completing your stepping stone is to mix up the cement. The process is fairly easy and straight forward. Your kit comes with a bag of cement and a tin pan. We’ll use the tin pan to mix the cement.

Empty the entire contents of the cement bag into the tin pan.
Add 1 cup of water to the cement
Mix the water and cement with your hand until its smooth. All the cement should be wet, no clumps.
Smooth out the cement and gently shake the tin pin from side so its flat. Lift the tin pan slightly off your work surface and gently drop it to get any air bubbles out. No need to drop if far, just enough so the air bubbles come to the top and pop. It may take a few tries to get them all.

Design and Build

Here’s the fun part. Your kit comes with a set of mosaic pieces we made by hand right in our studio. Arrange the pieces in the design you selected and then gently push them into the cement. Sometimes we’ll wiggle the pieces a little as we’re pushing. The top of each piece should be even with the top of the cement. Once they pieces are in just let them be.

Drying Your Stepping Stone

Now that all the work is done, here’s the hard part, you’ll have to keep your new stone in the tine container a good 3 to 5 days it to completely dry and harden. Cement goes through a hydration process where the the calcium and other materials in the cement react with the water to bind everything together. Seems like magic but its really chemistry. In any case, that takes time. As the stepping stone drys its a good idea to pour a little water on it to help it cure. Once the stone is completely dry, take it out of the tin and put it in your garden.

May 23, 2012May 28, 2019

Washing Out Your Tie-Dye

Image-Pinwheel shirt in Black and OrangeHere’s a quick and easy guide to washing out the tie-dye you made at Your Creation Station. We use professional grade, cold-water, fiber reactive dyes in our studio so the colors will remain color fast and bright for many, many washings. The first step to completing your tie-dye is to let your shirt (or dress, bag, scarf, towel, etc.) soak for AT LEAST one hour. The longer the better, I let mine sit overnight and recommend you do the same. By letting it soak, you are giving the dye time to react with and stain the cotton fibers from the inside out. The fabric needs to stay wet for the reaction to happen so the best thing to do is leave the fabric in the bag it came home in until you are ready to wash it out.

Image – Tie Dye In Bag
Keep your tie-dye in the bag you brought it home in until ready to wash it out.

Once your ready to wash the fabric out (or you just can’t wait any longer to see how it looks) open the bag up in a sink, or tub or somewhere that you can easily clean and won’t be ruined if some dye gets on it. I generally use my kitchen sink. Take the fabric out of the bag, remove all the rubber bands and/or thread used to tie the design, unfold your tie-dye and take a look. At this point, I generally rinse the shirt with water, first cold, then warm and then hot. Rinse a couple of times at each temperature until the water runs mostly clear. I’ve found there is no hard and fast rule for how long or how much to rinse before washing and I’ve had equal success running the whole gamut of rinsing a lot to not rinsing at all.

Image Tie-Dyed Shirt Ready for Washing
Put your tie-dye in a washing machine and wash with soap

Weather you choose to rinse out the unreacted dye or not, you will need to wash your tie-dye before using it. Put the tie-dye in a washing machine, WITH NOTHING ELSE YOU WANT TO GET DYE ON, and wash the fabric, with soap, as you normally would. If you have more than one tie-dye to wash its OK to them together. Although I don’t recommend doing it this way, I wash all my cloths, colors, whites, old tie-dyes, new tie-dyes, or whatever, together in cold water and everything comes out fine. Once the fabric has been washed, its ready to wear and can be washed and dried with your regular laundry.