Minor Reflections

Y'all know I love the week between Christmas and New Year's. It feel like a time out of time, a chance to catch your breath. I have taken to calling it the Week of Reflection, and I use it to consider the events of the past year, and how I hope the New Year will be different, or the same.

This year, though, I don't have a lot to reflect about. I plan to continue the pots-by-the-pound pricing, because that's working, so why mess with it? My revised time distribution has me spending the majority of my time on my two highest priority tasks: making pots, and seeking accounts which can support higher prices. I am still selling pretty much everything I can make, and while I am doing far better than past years, I'm still struggling by most people's standards. So I need to either A) make more stuff or B) get more money for the stuff I make. I've made a lot of progress, so I think the plan for 2016 is to stay the course.

Looming large in the road ahead, of course, is NCECA, and my process-room demo! Funnily enough, that will be a bunch of time spent that is neither making pots or seeking accounts. Don't care, doing it anyway.

I am also opening an Etsy shop for my soaps & other body products. I don't make quite enough of them to sell wholesale or consignment, but I make more than I can use, or sell within my circle of acquaintances. I haven't loved Etsy in the past (well, I have loved shopping Etsy! Just not being an Etsy seller) but I think soap will be a little different; it's not like each bar needs its own listing. I can create a single listing for each variety and they just keep renewing it when I make a new batch.

I've been meaning, also, to create a quarterly e-newsletter, to reach former customers and students, remind them I exist every once in a while. Maybe 2016 will be the year that happens.

I do want to work on discipline in the coming year. I'm not entirely sure how to address it, though...in the past I haven't stuck well to strict schedules. I'm open to suggestions! Anybody else have a problem getting themselves into the studio as much as they need to be? How did you address it?

I have a firing coming up in the January 8th; once that's done I can repopulate the online Pottery Shop. I sold much of the inventory, and it needed refreshing anyway.

One Hope, One Plan, One Crazy Idea

In the New Year, I hope I can get back to blogging more again.

In the New Year, I plan to make a schedule for my firing cycles, to even out my inventory, so I am not caught with no pots when opportunities arise.

And the crazy idea? Well...

Remember this guy?  Hans Chew, a college student at the School of Arts Singapore, customized a vending machine to dispense handmade ceramics as a kind of performance art pondering the commoditization of art. ("Can we really put a monetary value to art?" the article asks. Answer: Yes. For good or ill, we do it every day, because that's our job.)

Seriously, though, Chew seems like a thoughtful kid, and when I first read about him last spring I admired his cleverness and wit. And then forgot all about him.

Until yesterday, when I was talking with my friend and fellow potter, Mary Kay Spencer of The Potter's House. MK is also my temporary business partner for a few weeks each year, when we, along with the other members of Central Maine Clay Artists, open a pop-up pottery store in whatever vacant store front we can find. The store is doing well this year, and as always we start to imagine keeping it open year round, and as always we run into the pesky problem of staffing. If only we could open a self-serve store! Or, I know, a vending machine! For mugs and other small items. We were joking, but it made me remember Hans Chew. I also thought of the Cupcake ATMs that have been so successful for Sprinkles. Maybe, I thought, out of a joke comes a good idea.

Maybe not, too: it's a little crazy. There's a lot I still don't know. I do know you can get vending machines with big-ish compartments, that rotate to sliding doors instead of dropping the products. I know there are a couple for sale on Ebay right now for $700-800.

I was thinking of it as a summer thing - I can think of an outdoor location where it would be perfect. But it weighs, like, 800 pounds, so moving it would be a world of hassle and expense.

I don't know...I'll bring it up to the group, but maybe there are just too many obstacles. But that's the way of it with ideas; you gotta have bad ones - and sometimes chase them down blind alleys - to have good ones.

If this happens, I promise you will hear it here first.

So Hot Right Now

Extra, extra, read all about it! Handmade ceramics are all the rage, it says so right here in the New York Times! Right up there with artisanal chocolates and, I dunno, handcrafted gin, I guess. Here's my favorite part:

Julie Carlson, editor in chief of the design website Remodelista, has chronicled the rise... “It’s hard to keep track of them,” she added of new ceramists. “In the beginning, it seemed like there were just a few, but now there are more than we can cover, and more than we can invite to our markets.”

When??? When, in the history of the world, were there ever "just a few" potters?  If you are editor-in-chief of a home design magazine, it seems pretty odd that studio potters would seem like a new thing to you. GET OUT OF NEW YORK FOR A FEW MINUTES. There are all sorts of people out here. Actually probably have always been tons of potters in New York, too.

But it's churlish to complain, given the lovely moment of attention we are enjoying. Let's go see if we can turn it into coffee and heating oil and maybe a dishwasher! Ooo, and you know who else is so hot right now? Hansel, from Zoolander! We're in good company.

A Brief Stroll Down the Road Not Taken

I am sometimes asked what I would have been, if I hadn't been an artist. The answer changes: sometimes I think I would have made a fine dog trainer (behaviorist, please) or bartender or engineer - I like to solve problems. Most often, though, I think if I hadn't been a potter, I would have been a window dresser. It was my favorite job at KRA, back in the day. I love making the little tableaus; it engages both creativity and resourcefulness, and is satisfyingly physical work.

I had a chance to utilize those skills again for the Portland Pottery holiday window. A group of us created this display using pedestals, hula hoops, Christmas lights and ornaments. Pottery, also! And a branch or two for good measure. The occasion is, of course, Portland Pottery's 25th annual Holiday Show, opening December 17th. (The party is from 6-9. You should come!) The show is up until the 20th.

In other news, the Holiday Pottery Shop is having its best year ever; I'm making soap like a soap-making machine that makes a lot of soap; and getting ready for a firing, hopefully in a couple of weeks.

Thursday Inspiration: Daniel Oliver

See more of Daniel's charming raku work here.

Straight Up

Looka that stack! That stack is straight as...straight as...well, straight as a thing that's really, really straight. Better than last time, anyway.

Right now the kiln is cooling; first glaze fire with new stack went without incident. Not that I expected an incident: if the dimensions are the same as the old stack, there's no reason why it would fire any differently. But kilns are weird.  And the dimensions are not precisely like the old one: the new stack is one layer shorter, because previously the kiln always drew a little too hard. Not enough to get up on the roof and fix it ( I HATE HEIGHTS) but since I had to rebuild it anyway....

The firing was a little slower than I expected; which might have been a function of the weather - kinda windy - or the changes in the stack. And the damper positions are noticeably different now: I have to push the damper further in to achieve the same reduction. Possibly, in building the stack straighter, I created a slightly larger cross-section? Dunno. Don't care, actually, expect abstractly, as long as I get good results.
...which I shall know soon! I pulled the spy to peek, and not only do things look good - what little I could see - but it seems cool enough to unload. So I'm off to do just that.

This Train's Running Right on Time

Been mostly hunkered down in the studio with my trailing bottles and buckets of glaze, dipping, drawing, waxing, dipping some more. I expect to come in juuuust under the wire, and deliver my order on its actual due date, November 15th.

When he placed the order, the shopkeeper asked me, "Are you a typical potter?" By itself it's an unanswerable question, so I hesitated. "Potters are always late," he clarified.

Did not know that! If that's the case, I used to be a typical potter. I wanted the orders so badly that I would underestimate my turnaround times: Want a full-kiln order four weeks from today? Sure!! I wasn't lying, not on purpose; I was telling myself I would pull all-nighters and neglect all my other responsibilities to keep my promise. I meant well, but as a practical matter, that just ain't happening. Sleep is only briefly optional, and the rest of la-la-la-la life goes on as well.

During my brief stint as a store owner, I discovered how damaging a missed deadline can be. You have an extremely limited retail season, in the winter, and every day you don't have work is a day you can't sell it. You also have a limited buying budget, and you've committed a chunk of it to buying this person's work, and you'll be expected to pay for it whether it arrives on time or not. By the time you know it will be late - often you find out when it just doesn't arrive on the due date - it's too late to purchase someone else's work to fill your store. If you are on a tight margin, late orders can be the difference between breaking even and not. (Never mind making money. That part never happened to me, not as a store owner.)

I can sometimes do four weeks, for a smallish order, if the order comes in at just the right time in the firing cycle. Six weeks is more likely, and eight weeks is optimal. Better to give a realistic timeline, and meet it, than to promise the moon and lose the account. I'll deliver partial orders if necessary, but I'll never deliver late. Not anymore.

Glazing is the step that bumps right up against the deadline. By the time I am glazing I know when I have to fire in order to unload, sort, and price the work and get it to where it is going on time. My glazing days are often long ones, but once I get in the glazing zone, I lose track of time. I put on Pandora - yesterday I was listening to what I think of as sad-sack radio, a station built around Dwight Yoakam and similar musicians - and crooning, " ♫...watch your broken dreams dance in and out of the beeeeeeeeeams...of a neon moon....♪" For hours. Poor Doug, having to listen to that.

Loading today, firing Wednesday, and unloading Saturday for Sunday delivery.

Well, This Explains A Lot

This isn't my old cubicle but it sure looks like it. Minus the windows.

One of the things that I disliked about my old office job was that I felt not just bored with my tasks, but that I literally thought less interesting thoughts* the more time I spent there. Maybe it wasn't a function of the job, but the environment! A study in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives has found that even normal levels of carbon dioxide and other compounds found in indoor air have a negative affect on thinking ability and decision-making. The headline at the link implies that it's office environments specifically, but if you read the article, it's almost any indoor environment.

Most of my claywork is done indoors also, eight months out of the year, but I am rarely inside for more than three straight working hours. I walk to the store, I go check the mail, I stand on the deck and watch the birds at the feeder. (Ha, and I thought I just lacked discipline.) Some jobs - waxing, sometimes glazing, loading, firing, kiln maintenance - are outdoor work. Maybe my more interesting thoughts are a sign of a better-functioning brain!

Wherever you work, take a break and get outside! Your brain will reward you.

*More on this later

Do the Math

Me, in class, explaining all this last night.

A friend of mine has often give me this good advice: Don't guess at anything, if you can help it.

I get the advice often, because I tend to forget it: eyeballing and seat-of-the-pants are much more my natural style. So when I had a request for 20 ounce mugs - and they had to be pretty-damn-close to 20 ounces, not "20-ounces, give-or-take," my first thought was to make a few mugs that looked like they would shrink to about the right size, write on the bottoms what the wet dimensions were, and see which one worked out best, and proceed from there. That approach will get the job done,  but maybe there is a better way?

Enter arithmetic! Or maybe this is algebra? Actually it's geometry, but it is algebraic geometry...? Or arithmetic geometry...?(OOPS SORRY, DERAIL. Back on track now.)  All of the necessary information to tell me how large this mug has to be is available.

Q: Okay, Google: How many cubic inches is 20 ounces of water?

A: 36.1 cubic inches

So far, so good. Now, so I need to make a mug with an interior space that will shrink to 36.1 cubic inches, plus a little so the liquid is not right up to the brim. How might one do that? Well, starting simply, the equation to determine the volume of a cylinder is

π r²(H) = V

where "H" is the height, and V the volume. Now let's put in the numbers that we know. Well, π is 3.141etc, etc. V is 36, plus a little, right? Plus how much? If I want a half-inch of space between the rim and the liquid, that number is 3.5 (which I arrived at by doing the above equation, but skipped that part so I wouldn't be repeating myself.) So, let's put in 39.6 for "V". To get the radius, we need to decide on a diameter, and after measuring a couple of mugs of different sizes, I decided on 3 inches - doesn't sound like much but is actually a pretty wide mug. That makes the radius 1.5. One-point-five squared is 2.25, so now we have all the numbers except one, H; this is the number our equation will give us. Like this:

3.141 x 2.25 x H = 39.6

Now we need to cancel out some of those numbers. We could say the same thing like this:

3.141 x H = 39.6 ÷ 2.25

...which equals 17.6. So now we've got

3.141 x H = 17.6

Cancelling out the π, now it looks like this:

H = 17.6  ÷ 3.141, which equals 5.6 and some change.

So our mug (assuming it was a perfect cylinder, which it's not, but we'll get to that) should, after firing, measure 5.6" tall by 3" in diameter; that's the interior space, 'cause that's where your coffee goes. On the interior. Usually. On a good day. So while I can easily measure the interior diameter with calipers, I'll need to tack on 1/8 inch in height for the bottom, and the clay that stays on the wheel.

My claybody shrinks something like 13%, but that is plus or minus 2%; and these mugs really shouldn't be too large, but they absolutely cannot be too small, so I'm gonna assume 15% shrinkage. (Also makes the math easier to do in my head, when I need to.) So now we have wet dimensions of 6.5 (adding the 1/8 inch and rounding down a hair) by 3.5 - again with a slight round up of .05 inches. 

Well, now we're cooking! If I start with this cylinder, and then add some curves, if I am careful to curve in at one spot about the same amount as I curve out at another, I should still arrive at my 20 ounce capacity. I will be guessing - let's say estimating, sounds nicer - how much clay to use, and then if it doesn't feel right - too clunky, too flimsy - adjusting up or down. I don't mind that, because that only takes a few minutes to work out, as opposed to having to wait a whole firing cycle. 
I am going with 1.75 pounds of clay. These mugs will be in a restaurant setting, so will be frequently washed, and will mostly serve beer, so users may be less than dainty with them. I am thinking a little thicker than usual might do well. On the other hand, I don't want a behemoth, since 20 ounces of beer is a little weighty all by itself (weighs exactly 20 ounces, in fact!) so I am only going a tiny bit thicker than usual. 

I wish I could make these mugs today, but alas, I have to go pile brick on  top of one another: I've promised myself the stack will be finished today so that weight - all 1000+ pounds of it - will be off my mind. And when it's done I will enjoy another kind of pie, as a reward. 

Yay math.  

 

What's Up

Foliage is late this year here in Maine, but incredibly beautiful. I had a good chance to see it as the sun was setting yesterday, while I limped my car home at 15 miles per hour on Rte. 201 through Topsham, Bowdoinham, and Gardiner. Beautiful! My favorites are the peachy maples, especially when they still have some green, or are right besides the flaming red ones.

Oh, what's that? I buried the lede? I guess I did, but I thought that anything - even a gushing foliage review - would be more interesting than another story of my car maladies.

Yeah, my car has issues again, which caused me to miss my evening class - Week 1, at that. Sorry, beginners! But the ever-capable Karen Dyer Dicenso jumped in for me. VIP Auto has the vehicle, will find out later today what's up with that. Whatever it is is bound to be spendy - the best I can hope for is "not over my credit card limit."

But, better things are coming:

• First Friday! Portland Pottery is hosting an opening for Faculty and Staff during Portland's November First Friday event. That's November 6, from 5-8.
• The Central Maine Clay Artists group have chosen our location for the Holiday Pottery Shop! This is the tenth year, and the shop has come full circle: 100 Water Street, Hallowell is where the group held its first meeting in 2005. We hope to open in by mid-November.
  
  

• The stack is half rebuilt. I am taking it easy, doing just a few courses a day, to avoid dinging up my elbow, which didn't like the repetitive motion involved in taking all those brick down.

 Aaand, just had a call from the mechanic, saying they don't know what it is but it's going to be expensive. Well, that's not exactly what he said, but close enough.
Shit.

So Many Unanswered Questions!

Screamy Feet

Ugh, this GETTING OLD thing! Amirite?

I'm on my feet a lot. Throwing days are mostly sit-down, of course, but decorating, glazing, loading, firing, packing, pricing, teaching classes - basically every work activity other than throwing (or blogging!) - is a standing one. For months now I've been literally hobbling when I wake up in the morning, barely able to put weight on either of my feet. It loosens up after a few excruciating minutes, and then I am able to walk normally, but then starts hurting again in the early afternoon. If I still down for any length of time, I go through the morning limping routine all over again. Turns out that what I had been calling "Screamy Feet" has a more official name: Plantar fasciitis. 

But for every curse, there is a blessing,* and right around the same time I started falling apart, I was able to get health insurance. So I told my doc about this foot problem, and she had a great suggestion:

• fill a two-liter bottle with water

• freeze it

• in the evening, when reading or watching netflix or working online, place your feet on it like a little footstool. 

This ices the injured fascia and reduces the swelling. After one treatment, I was amazed at the improvement: no limping at all this morning. We'll see how it holds up over the course of the day.
In other news:

• Still in the throwing/decorating part of the making cycle; I expect to fire a bisque in about two week, and a glaze about a week after that. 

• It's already time to talk about the Holiday Pottery Shop! Fellow potter Mary Kay Spencer, Barb Loken and I checked out a space in Hallowell this week - the big red building on the north end of downtown, for my local readers. Still a couple of details that need to be nailed down but I am optimistic about this space. If it doesn't work, there are possibilities in Gardiner or Augusta, but we seem to do best in Hallowell, so we look there first. 

• Soda firing workshop at Watershed next week! Still a few spaces - give Portland Pottery a call if you're interested: 207-772-4334. We'll glaze and load on Saturday, fire Sunday. Bring two cubic feet of bisqued work, I'll bring slips, glazes, and wax. $125

• Putting the pottery stairs out front of my house one last time for the season. It's a bright sunny weekend, if a little cold; hoping to catch a few late-season bargain hunters.

 *HAHA as if