Finishing the Berry Bowls

...to be continued

When I tell people I'm a potter, they usually think of the wheel (more specifically, they usually think of that scene from Ghost!) In fact, throwing on the wheel is only about 10-15% of what I do. Even for each individual piece, the throwing part is less than half of the making. For these berry bowls, throwing takes about 6 minutes each; finishing is more like 20 minutes. You can see the whole process in the video at this link. 

Guess what? I'm on the Internet!

Finally got my website rebuilt! It looks the same as it did before, with a small change: on the home page below all the important links like those to the online shop, this blog, my patreon, and so on, I have a slot for Photo of the Week. It'll just be a snapshot of something interesting I did or saw that week.

I have a reason for this! I've known all along that more frequently updated sites get higher google rankings, and if you go a month without updating your homepage, Google assumes your site is abandoned. This seems a little dramatic to me but who can argue with an algorithm? So I put that in to give me a reason to update frequently. This week's Photo of the Week is a shot of the hummingbird cookies I made for my mom for Mother's Day. 

I can't remember if it was on my list of resolutions for 2025, but it is now: be more diligent about updating the site. 

Pop by the site & give my stat counter a little thrill! Also to make sure the security warning is truly gone, & not just gone for me. 

Underglaze Watercolor Results

A few weeks ago, I bought myself an underglaze watercolor kit. There were several palettes to choose from; I selected the one with colors I thought most likely to survive ^10 reduction. 
I applied the underglaze color on top of two different white glazes. Here's what they looked like when they went in the kiln. 

Click here to see the fired result! 

 

In Case You Haven't Noticed

 ...my website has been down for like a week. Not that it matters, because before it was down, visitors were receiving a security warning before they were allowed to click through. That's the same thing as having no website at all, because nobody is going to click through that. 

Because Network Solutions wanted to charge me seven-hundred-and-something for an SSL certificate to fix the security issue - a benefit all the other hosting platforms offer for free - I finally had enough of them. I was off my feet anyway due to injury, so I had some time to make the switch. 

So I migrated, but that has not been without its own headaches. Hostgator is the most economical choice but it's pretty self-serve, which is a hassle as I am not especially techie. More than that, there have been a number of technical issues. For days I wasn't receiving any email. then I was receiving some but not others, even from the same address. Now I'm getting bounceback notices for emails I didn't send! It's a fucking mess. It's not seven-hundred-and-something dollars worth of mess, but it's a mess all the same. I am in the chat with support right now. I've been in the chat with support every day since Friday. 

That's why I haven't rebuilt my website - between these LOOOONG chat sessions trying to straighten out one problem after another, and my regular duties - class, Mom, studio - I have not had time. 

I keep reminding myself: some people are in real crises. They are in war zones or their children are seriously ill, or their homes got destroyed in floods. This is not a crisis! This is an annoyance, one that will hopefully be resolved soon, after which I can get back to posting about pottery. 
Thanks for your patience! 

Last Day Down

On what will hopefully be my last day of enforced inactivity, I finished the Social Media Webinar offered by UC Davis via Coursera. Want my advice? Skip this course. I can sum it up for you right here, and honestly I doubt it's anything you don't already know:

1. Be professional but not boring. Yeah, thanks so much for that sage advice. Good thing you told me, because I was planning to be a tedious clown. Most of the course was just this advice, worded different ways. 
2. Have a website. Also obvious! Don't have ads on your website! Um, okay, I wasn't going to.  
3. Write your "About Me" page with an eye to why readers would want to do business with you. This actually was a new idea for me & I will be rewriting my About Me page, when I rebuild my website on its new hosting platform. 
4. The rest was all reiterations of #1.

I'm a little irritated that the course was described as "Social Media Content Strategy," because there was absolutely nothing resembling strategy even touched on. You get what you pay for, I guess, and this course was free, so...

Anyway! I'm having my coffee, skipping my morning workout because I'm still feeling a little cautious about the knee, but getting back into the studio today! Less bitching, more making! Thanks for still being here. 

Long, Slow, Tedious

 When we last saw our hero, she had gotten distracted from her Social Media Strategy course by

Here's the eponymous Host Gator! 

thoughts of eliminating or rethinking her website. 

And by her, I mean me, of course. I will continue with that course today, as it seems I need another day (most of a day, lol) off my feet, but enforce stillness gave me an opportunity to tend to the website issue, which has needed attention for some time. 

First, it's pretty spendy! The Network Solutions hosting package is HUGE, and correspondingly expensive. It's way bigger than I need: of 300,000 mb, I was using 640. For the last several months, when people visited my website, they got a security warning about the certificate. Network Solutions told me I needed to pay hundreds more every year to secure the site. It was the boulder that broke the camel's back. I had been meaning to find a better solution for my website but the giant hassle of it always persuaded me to put it off. Enter my bad knee and two & a half days of sitting around, and I finally did so. 

I wasn't wrong; it's a tedious process, and Network Solutions does not make it easy. It's hard to find the function to transfer the domain name to a different registrar, for starters, and it takes THREE DAYS to get an authorization code to do so. I got that ball rolling but still waiting for that code. Every time I tried to unlock the domain name it automatically re-locked it. Took me like six tries! I feel like they were trying to get me to give up in frustration. 

I've downloaded the 3667 files that took up a tiny fraction of the hosting space, and are mostly pics that Doug stored there as a kind of free Dropbox - which he then never accessed. Those pics have been there undisturbed for well over a decade. (He'll have a cow if I delete them, so I am saving them to a thumb drive, which will sit untouched in a desk drawer until the end of time.) 

I will have to rebuild my website, although I can re-use some of the files. All this is reminding me how much I hate fiddly techie stuff! I'd mix glazes & grind kiln shelves all day instead of this, if I could, but it needs to be done. 
Anyway! Off to do the thing. Hoping for more interesting news soon! 

Coursera: Social Media Content Strategy

 

I'm out of commission for a few days with a bum knee - I overdid it, during the pottery tour and the days leading up to it. Rest, ice, compression, elevation. It's harder than it sounds! I keep thinking of things I should be doing or things I want to be doing, starting to get up, then remembering I'm not supposed to and sitting back down. I'm getting really sick of the wintergreen smell of Icy Hot.

To use the time at least a little bit productively, I decided to do that Coursera course I've been thinking about, on Social Media Content Strategy. Notes below! 

"You're never entitled to the attention of your audience. You have to earn it every day." 

"Be curious about everything going on in this organization." Well, I think I've got that part down, anyway. I am this organization! I'm going to translate as "be interested in every aspect of your business," and I can honestly say that I am. I'm interested in every stage: wet clay, surface treatment, glaze chemistry, the art & science of firing. I'm interested in work flow and marketing and tech tools for those things. I'm interested in how the pieces are used in the real world. 

"Content must move the audience in some way." Kk

"If people aren't consuming your content, it might not be good enough." Yeah, no shit, that's literally why I am here. 

"Three things your content needs to do:

1. Move your audience
2. Earn your audience's attention
3. Has to have a 'spark.'"

Um, those are all the same thing. So far this is just annoying. "Be good at marketing by being really good at it!" Let's hope we get into some more concrete information. 

"The first thing that good effective content marketing normally will have is a headline that instantly commands attention." OK BUT HOW? If I knew how to do that I wouldn't need this course. 

Have your own website. yeah cool, got that already - although I am not entirely thrilled with Network Solutions. (I was actually thinking of ditching the website - it's super expensive and I'm not sure anyone visits it, anyway. But that's a thought for another time.)

That's it for today, because ol' ADHD brain over here got distracted with if I should delete my website or wait no maybe move it to another host...? And there I go, wandering away...

Blame it on the Rain

 

I guess we'll just blame it on the rain. 

Day One of the 2025 Maine Pottery Tour was down about half from last year. We had a few good hours in the morning, but spotty rain all afternoon, topped off by a downpour just at 5 pm when we were putting up the tent walls. I had a bit of a crowd for the kiln opening, although most were my students, who had work in that kiln, and people they brought with them. It was a lot of fun! And I was lucky to have the help of Liz Downs manning the sales table, because I could not have done both. The firing was very good, which was a great relief to me after its rocky start. Oh & the unnecessary  $200 baso valve arrived in the mail yesterday...at least I will have one on hand if it should act up again. 

Day Two awaits! Rain is continuing, so I don't have high hopes, but maybe I will make a couple hundred dollars more. If not, well, I still have the ware, and stores awaiting. 

If clay life has taught me anything, it's that you can't control everything, and the weather is at the top of a very long list. You learn to roll with whatever happens. 

Ready, Mostly

 The Friday before is actually the hardest day of the pottery tour. I've been working since 7 am, but I am mostly done. Good thing, too, because my feet are killing me! Somehow it seems harder this year. Or maybe I am just older.

This is the first time in 13 years that I have not organized the tour. I was very much looking forward to putting all the time & effort that I had been spending promoting the tour as a whole into promoting my individual event. I didn't quite reach that level but I came pretty close! I sent out over 300 postcards, about 150 email announcements, sponsored a public radio announcement, and sent press releases to every newspaper in Maine. I've been posting to social media nearly every day. I bought a Facebook ad. 

I still have a few things to take care of in the morning:

• My wheel - I need to carry it down to the yard, so I can do demos. Honestly I would have preferred to do this today but I can't do it without Doug, & he had already gotten cozy for the evening, so asked if we could do it tomorrow. 
  
• Snacks! It's always a challenge to choose appropriate foods. Must be ok to sit out all day, edible with just fingers, not too messy, appealing. I usually get grapes & cookies, and some seltzer water. 
• I have to make sure my Square app is working. Nothing worse than trying to make a sale & you can't get your reader working! 

Now I need to get to sleep. 

I Peeked!

 I have to wait to unload the kiln, because I promised we'd do that Saturday morning during the tour, but I couldn't wait to look! 

Just Playing: Creating a Twisted Ridge Bowl

Sometimes in clay we have to let go of the expectation of making a piece to keep & fire, and just focus on the process. Recently in class I tried to figure out with student how to make a twisted ridge shape if we are making a bowl rather than a cylinder. The result is not amazing! But it's progress on figuring out the technique.
To see the full video become a paid subscriber to my Patreon page. Paid subscriptions start at $1.50/month. 🙂