Making Forms

It's not quite round, and it's a bit heavier than it ought to be, but it's a nice size - a small cup with no handle - and the color came out well (I use the glazes supplied by my teacher in her studio; I haven't begun getting involved in the art and science of glazing).
During the first year, after I started to get the hang of centering lumps of clay on the wheel, I tried to make large pots, and they came out heavy and clumsy - but expressive. My teacher didn't discourage me. She let me make my own mistakes.
After a while I told her how frustrated I was feeling, and she advised me to keep working on smaller pieces of clay until I was centering them easily and building them up without making them lurch out of shape in the process.
I decided to take her advice, and since then I've been working on relatively modest projects: cups and small bowls. I've been trying to make them thinner and lighter, more symmetrical. I want to master this craft, and I realize that, doing it only once a week for a couple of hours, it'll take me much longer to do it than I initially expected.
Still, I'm not aiming for technical perfection. That aim would just frustrate me and take the fun out of pottery. Factories turn out thousands and thousands of perfect pieces of pottery. I don't want what I do to look as if it was produced by a factory. Handmade things should look and feel handmade - skillful, but not perfect. I want to produce mainly things that are more than decorative - pieces that people can eat and drink out of - but I do want what I do to be expressive.
It would be easy to regret that I can so late to pottery, since I enjoy it so much. If only I'd begun at the age of 23 instead of the age of 63, I would be a master now (possibly - or I would have burned out and gone on to something else). But I hope that the maturity I've gained doing a lot of other things over the years, and my general aesthetic background, can give a depth to my work. Because I do take it seriously. There's no point doing something that you don't take seriously.