Birthday Fun at Painted Plate

For Kylie's 7th birthday, we held her birthday party at Painted Plate. It was so much fun seeing the little kids paint and create their own little masterpieces. As much as I enjoyed watching them, though, I must admit that I was a little jealous. Okay, maybe more than a little jealous. I really wanted it to be my turn to paint! Sadly, in the midst of the chaos of a kids birthday party (my own kid's birthday party), it was not possible.

So what did I do? I gave an extremely selfish birthday gift. A little over a month later I told my friend, Leila, that for her birthday I wanted to take her to Painted Plate and we could each paint something sans children. Thankfully, in my selfish gift giving, I knew it was something she also would enjoy.

We arrived at 4:00 and (courtesy of Leila) started our projects along with some amazing Olympia Coffee Roasting coffee. Could their possibly be a better way to get the creative juices flowing than coffee?

We assumed a couple of hours would be sufficient time for each of us to thoroughly enjoy our time without kids creatively paint our mugs and be ready to leave. The problem is that we are both very detail oriented and perfectionists.

One of the keys to good coverage is painting 3 layers of every color. Let me just tell you now that it is not a quick thing to paint the whole piece with three layers!

In the midst of our chatting, laughter and painting, we watched groups come and go... and still we painted.

At one point we realized how long we were taking and worried that we might need to return another day to finish. Relieved, we found out that Painted Plate was open until 10:00.

5 hours later (about 9:00), we were finished.

At that point, all we could do was wait the 5 days until our mugs were fired. I was a little tempted to ask if we could possibly put a rush on ours since I was so excited to see how it turned out!

In the end, the mugs were worth the wait. Here is Leila's very fun finished product:

I was very happy with how mine turned out as well. Here is my finished product:

After this experience, I think we might have a new birthday tradition on our hands. Yes, we definitely need to do this again.