Steamboat Pilot & Today

It's a sight to see -- 250 soup bowls piled all over Deb Babcock's pottery studio. For one more day, every flat surface in her studio will be turned into a shelf. Even the potter's wheel and the floor are stacked high with piles of hand-thrown clay bowls waiting until Saturday for the third annual Soup Bowl Supper.

It took 300 pounds of clay and an uncountable number of volunteer hours to create all those bowls.

Twenty-four potters met in May to make the bowls. Ten people brought potter's wheels. For the entire weekend, the room was filled with the sound of whirring wheels, wet clay sliding through fingers and the conversation of artists.

The next week, a few potters returned to trim the bowls and load them into a kiln for the first firing at Blue Sky Pottery on Copper Ridge Drive.

In July, more potters showed up to glaze all the bowls.

"Some were dipped and some were painted," Babcock said. "The person who glazed the bowl wasn't necessarily the same artist who made it."

Each attendee of the Soup Bowl Supper gets a hand-made bowl filled with soup. At the end of the dinner, the soup bowl goes home with the ticket holder.

For the past two years, the fund-raiser has been a benefit for LIFT-UP of Routt County, but the Steamboat Clay Artisans, organizers of the event, decided this year to open the benefit to all area nonprofits. This year, proceeds will benefit Yampa Valley Recycles.

Fourteen nonprofits applied.

"We wanted the members to stay excited about making the bowls, and we also wanted to widen the audience for pottery," Babcock said. "Some people wonder why they can go to Crate and Barrel and buy a mug for $2, and then we ask $18 for a handmade mug.

"We want people to understand the meaning of handmade."

Yampa Valley Recycles plans to make this year a "waste free" event by using cloth napkins, washable silverware and regular cups instead of disposable ones.

YVR will use the money raised to buy another recycling container for downtown Steamboat like the ones near the Third Street Post Office and on the corner of Seventh Street and Lincoln Avenue.

Last year, the Soup Bowl Supper raised $7,540.

Because of the space taken up by the Steamboat Springs Arts Council Members Show, the event has been moved this year across the street from the Depot Art Center to the Community Center.