Door Refresh in 3 Acts

After scraping and grinding off all the deteriorated surface of the softbrick, I rolled on an 80/20 mix of EPK & silica, at a heavy-cream consistency. This is supposed to prevent (or slow down) further deterioration. I'll let you know how it works! 

 

Kiln Maintenance, the Soda/Salt edition

You might remember my kiln was rebuilt in 2021. Tyler Gulden did the brainwork on this! I highly recommend his services if you are planning a kiln of your own - Tyler has forgotten more about kilns than most people will ever know. 

One of the features of my new kiln is a door on a pivot hinge. I still get a little joy-zing when I place the last conepack & realize I don't have to brick the door - just swing it shut! That door had to be built of IFB, as hardbrick would be too heavy for the hinge. 

As you may know, soda vapor is very destructive to softbrick. We had to brush a coating on the brick to protect it, or else the door would have fallen apart very quickly. It's time to replace that coating, as the softbrick is beginning to spall, which is bad just because I don't want to have to replace it, and also because the resulting debris can ruin ware. 

To clean this up, I use a curry brush - originally intended for grooming horses. I'll remove all the loose crumbles until I get down the solid brick, and then brush on an 80/20 mixture of kaolin & silica. That recipe also came from Tyler - I was surprised to see silica in it, because I assumed we wouldn't want to give the soda vapor anything to react with, but apparently once it glasses over, it protects the brick underneath. 

Like this: 

Like a lot of kiln maintenance, it's not my favorite job, but I can get kind of Zen about it. There's something satisfying about seeing the degraded brick slowly give way to solid material. Even boring jobs can bring the dopamine! 

Anyway, enough yapping about it, time to go do it. Oh and let me toss in, consider subscribing to my Patreon page! There's a free option, & paid options start at $1.50/month. Thanks! XO

One Weird Trick

I'm introducing a new semi-regular feature on my Patreon page: One Weird Trick! I'm going to try out some of those clever techniques you see in instagram reels - most of which are harder than they look! I can't promise I'll do them well, but I'm gonna give it a shot!

Today's video: Bubble Glazing! 

Low Pressure

Some firings are a shitshow, from the moment you light the pilots. Then other times, things just feel right. This is one of the latter! Some of that is due to aspects under my control: making the conepacks ahead of time, checking the sprayer, stuff like that. Some of it is weather - this kiln loves low-pressure days with glowering clouds. But some is just alchemy, some combination of factors that adds up to more than the sum of its parts. 

This firing is proceed perfectly. (I admit I flinched, to type it out before it's over, while something could still go wrong, but that's superstitious nonsense...right?) The back pressure looks exactly right, the cones are falling in near-perfect unison; it even smells right. 

The draw rings again indicated I was done spraying before even half the soda solution was used. This time I trust them, & stopped spraying. Now just waiting the the atmosphere to burn clear and the last cone to fall. 

Unloading either Tuesday or Wednesday. 

How it started/How it's going

I bought some pajama shorts today - 3 pair. With pockets! I didn't really need them but I only had one pair, which I wear often enough that 's annoying when they are in the laundry. The 3 pair cost about $25 altogether. 

Lol wut - right? What do my pajama bottoms have to do with clay? Well, nothing, really, except indirectly. 

When I started writing this blog in 2007, I was making pots, teaching 3 classes a week, & working part time as a receptionist at an insurance agency (I quit that gig in 2011.) Reader, I was poor. Not broke - that implies a status that might soon change - but outright poor. If I wanted a new pair of shorts I went to Goodwill and chose from whatever they had. I actually still shop at Goodwill, because it's fun, & because re-using is environmentally friendly, but the big change is, then I had to. I couldn't just notice that I could use a thing, then hop online & purchase it. Everything had to be budgeted. But yesterday? Needed some pajama shorts, ordered some pajama shorts, end of story.

This is not a rah-rah, follow-your-dreams post. I can think of a hundred things that would have changed this journey from "difficult" to "impossible:" if I'd had any physical condition limiting the amount of hours I could work. If the unusual circumstances that allowed me to purchase a house in 2005 hadn't occurred. Even if I had had children! There were a lot of rice-&-eggs weeks along the way; it's one thing to choose that for myself, along with the skipped dental care, the shaky vehicles that stranded me more than once, the 55-degree house to save on heating oil. It's a whole 'nother thing to choose that for a child, and frankly, had there been a child, I wouldn't have chosen those things. 

But there wasn't, and I did. 

I don't even know why I'm writing this post. I guess because it struck me this morning how much easier my life has become, with even a little bit more money. Anyone who tells you money can't buy happiness has never not had enough. 

This has always, among other things, been a blog about the business of art, a topic of great interest to me for obvious reasons, and also because...idk, it seems like a puzzle to solve. And as with a jigsaw puzzle, you're gonna try some pieces that don't fit. 

I'm still jigsawing an income together. Along the way, I've identified some of those pieces that don't fit:

• Art fairs. I used to love them! In the 90s I was all about the art fairs. But I was younger then, and I lived in St. Paul, which is half a day's drive from at least 25 top-shelf art fairs. Living way up here in Maine, travel & lodging makes those prohibitive. Not to mention, fairs themselves have gotten so saturated that where we might reasonably expect to make 10x the booth fee, we're now thrilled to get half that. The smaller fairs that I could travel to locally are the same amount of hard physical work, for far less money. 
• Co-ops. This one is not absolute. (Actually none of them are!) But, in my experience, the 4-6 days a month you'll be expected to work in the store would be better spent making work or listing/promoting online. Your time is worth money! Don't discount that. 
  Again, not absolute; but at a minimum do the math! They will tell you what their yearly or seasonal intake is; keep in mind that potters tend to be on the low end of average sales, with the jewelers clustered at the top. If they make 36k a season & carry 20 artists, you're going to make lower than 1800 for the whole season. That's <$450 a month for 4-6 8-hour days of work; days that you could be spending making stuff. Doesn't sound so great when you do the math. 
• Some consignment. I'm very choosy about consignment. Any shop on its first year (first 3 years really), or any shop that takes less than 40% commission, or any shop that expects me to pay upfront for the privilege of doing business with them, dismal experience has taught me to stay away. 
• Similarly, those stores where you "rent" a stall. Nope. 

What works has been wholesale; larger, well established consignment stores; studio events; and online sales. I have a few little firewalls: income threads that put a (pretty low!) floor under me in case of dry spell from the other sources: the pottery stairs, sales of the Fine Mess Glaze Notebook & a few tools, my classes, and now Patreon subscribers. I have high hopes for Patreon although it has proven to be a Herculean task to get subscribers there. I don't even know how to do that! But as evidenced by 17 years of posts here, I have a lot of clay related thoughts, I'm probably gonna type em up, and I might as well get paid for them.

Anyway! Time to finish loading the kiln. I didn't get as much done as I hope yesterday, because it was like 90° and 84% humidity. Today's much better! Hoping to fire tomorrow. 

Just looked up this song - seems appropriate! 

Throwing a Coffee Cone

There's a new demo up on my Patreon page: throwing a coffee pour over cone! You can see a bit of it here, or subscribe as a Pottery Patron to see the whole thing! 

 

Mixing Up Trailing Slip: A How-To Video

 

There's a new post for Pottery patrons up at my Patreon page! It shows you how to mix up trailing slip using a smoothie blender, some porcelain, and a deflocculent. This here is a sneak peek; subscribe at the $5/month level to see the whole thing. Thanks in advance! 

Shop Update June 2024

 

New pots in the Fine Mess Pottery online shop! Check out this preview slideshow for a promo code good for 10% off through the month of June. 

Now I'm off to clean the studio before the next making cycle begins. 

The Luck of the Draws

 

I learned something today: I learned that I have been using way more soda than I needed to. Also, draw rings are fun! 

These are the 3 rings I drew from my current firing, which will probably reach temperature while I am typing this post - so if I disappear for a minute, forgive, I've just gone to check the kiln. 

They are in order of draw, left to right. When I drew the first, I was shocked but how shiny it was, since I had only sprayed once into each port - I expected it to be almost dry. With this new information, I drrew the 2nd before the sprayer was half emptied. I was tempted to stop then, because the ring has a satiny, orange-peel surface; but I couldn't believe - despite evidence! - that I could possibly have applied enough soda. Besides, the front of this kiln always gets a heavier spray, so for goos measure I sprayed twice more into each of the rear ports. I left the kiln burn clear, then pulled the third ring - and saw the first faint evidence of pitting, a sure sign it's time to stop. I still had nearly half the canister of soda solution. 

BRB

^10 is soft, not quite half over. I wish I had another ring to draw! I'm definitely doing that every time now. What mainly stopped me in the past - well, besides basic laziness, and anyway, I didn't think I needed to, because I was getting good results - I thought it would be hard to see the top cones. that was no problem at all! 

By the Hum of the Burners

 

I've really dropped the ball with keeping my website updated. I am well aware that search engines will regard a site as abandoned if it doesn't get updated regularly - & they have a much more frequent idea of "regularly" than I do! If a site hasn't been updated in a month, it starts to fall in ranking, making it harder for people to find it. Last week saw 27 visits to my website. This is actually better than I expected considering there's been no new content for like 2 years! And also no meta tags, nothing for a search engine to latch onto. More than half of these came from google.This tells me making time to keep the website current is worth the effort - if 27 people visited when I put in zero effort, how many would I get if I actually tried?

The last update was so long ago that the cover image no longer represented my main body of work. It's been so long that I had to relearn how to do it - & I'm not even writing code, I use a (now pretty old) software called Kompozer to update my site. To avoid this in future, I'm implementing a new approach: when the kiln is firing, I'm updating. Updates don't have to be major to intrigue the web-crawling bots that search engines use! I changed the cover photo & added a link to my Patreon page and my Instagram; I added a link to a signup form for my newsletter, The Messy Minute. (I tried to embed a signup form but nope! that is not happening.) I reminded myself where to put meta tags, and typed in words like pottery, ceramics, handmade, stoneware, sodafired, Maine. I think of these like paint primer: you can't see them so you're tempted to skip them, but they make a huge difference in your results. 

Next - though maybe not today - I want to add an FAQ page. For the obvious reasons, of course, but also because Frequently Asked Questions are frequently googled questions, and people searching for things like "Is handmade pottery food safe?" are the kinds of people I want visiting. This is a suggestion from my friend Milly's Guide to Marketing Art & Crafts Online. Blogger is being stupid about creating this link, but you can find it here:

https://marketingcrafts.online/product/guide-to-marketing-art-crafts-online/

Anyway! Time to go look at the cones! The kiln is in its climbing reduction, so doesn't require a lot of attention, so after I peer through the spyhole, I think I'll lie in the hammock & read the new Longmire novel. I'm interested in your ideas about keywords or other strategies you use to make your website a better business tool. Comment if you have ideas for me! XO L

Firing Update

Kiln is loaded, cones & draw rings in position, door is bolted! We're candling tonight & tomorrow is the big day! (Sorry, I know I should be used to it by now but firing is still a big deal here at Fine Mess Pottery! 😀)

I'll be using less soda & cooler water, and employing draw rings to get a picture in real time of how much glaze is accumulating in the kiln. 

Unloading will be Wednesday AM - which I will be doing live on my Patreon page.  Join us, it will be fun! The photography always takes longer than I think it will, but the shop update should be live but next weekend. 

 

Rings of Fire

My loopy little friends

Since I built my first soda kiln in 2010, I kinda got out of the habit of using draw rings. I had the old kiln so dialed-in, so I didn't need them, then it seemed like too much trouble after we built the new kiln. 

My last firing, though? was not great. Everything was gray, and there was some pitting & blistering of the soda glass. The pitting is its own problem - Jeff Zamek has some thoughts on that - but the gray coloration is simply too much soda. Though I (obviously!) weigh out the material so I use the same amount each time, last firing I used my new, snazzy sprayer, which unlike the old one was able to spray all the liquid into the kiln, instead of leaving a few inches in the bottom. Also, without thinking I used hot water, which can hold more soda in solution, so I may have inadvertently sprayed more soda into the kiln than usual. 

I have some ideas of how to correct my unhappy result, but instead of just guessing & hoping, I'm going to employ a technique used by smarter potters than I am: draw rings! These small, looped-shaped bits of clay are placed near a spyhole so they can be drawn out during the soda process, to assess how heavy a coat of glaze has accumulated. I actually have not used draw ring since graduate school, so this should be interesting.

They are cooling in the bisque right now, along with the pots for the firing. I plan to make a little video of this process for my Patreon page - click here to subscribe!