A Ceramic Studio & Hobby Shop

A Ceramic Studio & Hobby Shop has been the creative heart of Valparaiso’s Chicago Avenue since 2011, when owner Laura Destin opened a paint-your-own-pottery studio in a 2,400-square-foot space built for exactly this kind of hands-on fun. More than a decade later, the shop still runs on the same idea: walk in, pick a piece, and leave with something you made yourself, whether that is a coffee mug for the kitchen counter or a full mosaic mirror for the wall.

The studio’s shelves hold more than 190 pieces of ready-to-paint bisqueware, from simple figurines to full dinnerware sets, backed by a palette deep enough to keep repeat visitors experimenting: 84 Mayco Stroke & Coat glaze colors, more than 60 assorted gems, and 27 speckle finishes for anyone chasing a specific look. Pricing is refreshingly transparent for the craft-studio world; the cost of each bisque piece includes glazing and firing in the studio’s kilns, with no hidden add-on charges sprung on you at checkout. That transparency, paired with a genuine walk-in, no-appointment-necessary policy, makes the studio an easy stop for vacationers who decide on the spur of the moment that today is a paint day rather than a beach day.

Because the shop sits in a small military and school-district town rather than a big city, it has built its calendar around the community it actually serves. Families come back season after season for the same worktables their kids used the year before, and the studio’s willingness to work with local organizations, from scout troops to school groups, has made it a fixture of Valparaiso’s small-business scene rather than a seasonal, tourist-only stop that disappears in the off-season.

Painting bisqueware is only part of the story. The studio’s pottery wheels and hand-building tables support a full slate of clay classes, including wheel-throwing and hand-building instruction for anyone who wants to shape their own greenware from a lump of clay rather than start from a pre-fired piece. Glass artists have their own lane too, with glass fusing and glass mosaic classes that use the studio’s kilns to turn cut and layered glass into finished coasters, panels, and wall art. Classes are organized for a wide range of ages, and the studio runs youth camps that introduce kids to the basics of paint-your-own pottery during school breaks and summer.

Beyond regular studio hours, A Ceramic Studio & Hobby Shop doubles as a party venue, hosting birthday parties, scout troop projects, ladies’ nights, and church group outings around its worktables, an easy way to turn a family visit to Valparaiso into a genuine souvenir rather than a store-bought one. The studio relocated within Valparaiso in 2017 and, after scaling back during the pandemic years, has been rebuilding steadily with an eye toward expanding its class offerings again, all while keeping the walk-in, no-appointment-necessary spirit that has defined it since day one.

For visitors staying along the Emerald Coast, the studio makes an easy rainy-day pivot from the beach, or a low-key afternoon activity to pair with a stroll through Valparaiso’s small, historic John Sims Parkway commercial strip, part of a town platted in the early 1900s and named, fittingly, for the “Vale of Paradise.” Bring the kids, bring a group, or come solo and let the glazes do the talking. Either way, the finished piece goes home with you, fired and ready, days after you paint it, a lasting keepsake from a Panhandle vacation that beats another t-shirt from the boardwalk.