The Season of Abundance

It's fall. Okay, technically it's summer for another ten days, but, ya know...it's fall. Like every September, I am about buried in a mound of tomatoes right about now. I also have cilantro, garlic, and jalapeños. Now all I need are some limes, chili powder, and cumin, and I have the makings of fresh salsa. I will make approximately a boatload, and freeze most for later. 

Basil and oregano are in abundance, too, and I am pureeing up a storm with my tomatoes to freeze for future spaghetti sauce. I'm also clipping and drying those herbs, along with thyme and rosemary. I love this admittedly illusory sense of self-sufficiency, and every year I am tempted to go further: Keep bees! Maybe chickens! Does Augusta have an ordinance about goats? 

Fall does this to me; it puts me a mode of producing, and hoarding: what is instinct, except millennia of collective memory? Mine is telling me, make and save. Make and save. Winter is coming.

In the studio, too, I am a busy bee. Making and saving, also for winter, in a different way: for the shopping season. I am incredibly bad at guessing what people will want to buy, so I just make what I want to make. Here's what I want to make:

• Mugs! So many mugs. 
• I got a little burned out on butterdishes in the spring, but I am ready once again to embrace one of my favorite forms. (Speaking of: I've been asked a few times about the video of my Process Room demo at NCECA. The answer is, I don't know. There have been many videos from the conference posted to NCECA's YouTube page, but none from the Process Room yet. Believe me, when it appears I'll share it here like five minutes later.)

Altered oval vases! These are a new fave: fun shapes, lots of surface to decorate. Also, they demand handles. 

Wine Chillers: These seem like such joyful pots to me; it makes me happy to imagine them in use. Holiday dinner. Date night. First night in a new apartment. 

Serving bowls! Obvs.

This will probably be the last kiln load I'll throw in the summer studio before the whole operation moves upstairs. That's a bummer in some ways, because making stuff in the summer studio feels like camp. Everything is fun upta camp! (Throwing a little Maine dialect atcha.)But I have more room in the winter studio, more shelf and table space. I can make more stuff, more quickly! It's fall. That urge for making is upon me.

It's fall. 

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.

Work in Progress!

The Bullpen

New Year's Day seemed like a good day to do a major studio reorganzation. Some day had to be a good day to do it; though my space is reasonably large, it was getting claustrophobic. Every time I wanted to put something down, I had to move something else. Inefficient! Also inefficient: I found myself walking around my big table all the time, and another table, originally built for packing and shipping (back when I mistakenly thought Etsy wouldn't suck; moron that later) was essentially just being used to pile stuff on. In the mental way-back machine, I remembered my station at Kinko's back before Kinko's became FedEx Office: the copiers arranged in kind of a bullpen, so I could work multiple machines with just a step or two.

Another opportunity the reorg offers is to see what uses I need, that I haven't accounted for, and to what I have accorded too much space. I usually work in an orderly make/fire rhythm: make enough to fill the kiln, bisque, glaze, fire. My greenware shelves can therefore double for bisqueware waiting to be glazed. But it's January, and I am in no hurry to fire in the miserable snow and cold - although I will eventually have to - so I keep making, though my greenware shelves are full. I can add about 30% more space to these with 2 half-cinderblocks and a plank: make it so, right?

I also notice that though I have two six-foot-tall, three-foot-wide shelving units beside the wheel to hold wetware, I never, never, never, ever fill up even one of these units. Even during 100 mugs in 100 hours project, I didn't come close to needing all of my wetware space. Some of my alterations - stamping, ovalling, stretching, darting - need to be done while the ware is still quite wet, so I tend to break up the work into shorter bursts: throw for a few hours, then stop to alter and decorate. I never throw more than I can finish in the next couple of days. Some of the space alloted to wetware can go to some other purpose; like maybe housing the bisqueware that doesn't fit into each glaze firing,that piles up until there is enoughto fill its own firing.

All this efficiency feels grand, but at about halfway through, I am staring at a huge pile of stuff that has been unhomed, and will need to find its place in the new order. It isn't junk - most of it isn't, anyway - but some of it could go somewhere other than the studio, like the books, for example. They just get dusty, as I am not inclined to touch them with dirty hands. Good news: I found The Potter's Encyclopedia, of Color, Form, and Decoration, a delightful book that I used to just lay around and page through the way other people read travel books. Like meeting an old friend by chance!

Anyway. There's still lots to do, so I'd best finish my coffee before it gets cold, and get to it.

Glaze Kitchen ReOrg

While cleaning out her basement in anticipation of an energy audit, my friend Barb Loken, of Loken Pottery came upon two sets of shelves with a particularly Maine history: they were used to store product in a shoe factory. Barb had no use for these shelves but couldn't bear to just have them hauled off, so she offered them to me, and even delivered them.

My new old shelves. Thanks, Barb!

I knew just where I would put them: in the shed that houses my glaze kitchen, which has been steadily filling up with stuff since its inauguration seven years ago. I've done a few drag-n-toss days since then - otherwise it would be a completely unusable space, given my husband's packrat tendencies - but the arrival of these two marvelous storage shelves has inspired me to do a full clean out and reorganization. No more climbing over stuff when I need to mix glazes! No more lifting two or three bins to get to the one that I need! (Or, you know, a lot less of that.) I'm sort of embarrassed that the photo above is the "after" photo: "What must it have looked like before?" you might ask. Trust me, this is a lot better. The shoe shelves themselves proved better suited to get the various bins, boxes, and bottles off the floor than to hold glaze materials, but they made it possible to render the lab at least somewhat orderly.

Now that the clean up is done, it's time to mix glazes. Not my favorite job, but I am almost looking forward to it, in order to fine-tune to arrangement.