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In the days of smart phones, easy to access filters, and many influencers curating a “picture perfect” life on their social media feeds, it’s easy to get wrapped up into feelings of imperfection and thoughts of “how do they make it look so perfect” while my life looks nothing like that.
We’re here on this blog, not to make a highlight reel of a “picture perfect pottery life”, but trying to be open, to share honestly and illuminate what our lives as potters, people, and small business owners is really like.
We love making pots and working our asses off to make it work. Sometimes though, it’s hard. Sometimes we try and try and still things don’t always work the way we want.
When we used to live and work out of the old general store in Edmund in the 80s, our studio conditions were.. well,.. just different. The humidity, the temperature, various other things. Nothing too major or particularly that noteworthy, but just different than they are here at the brewery.
Clay is a little fickle. It wants to be wet, but not too wet. It wants to be dry, but not too dry. Like, “hey, I’m dry. Please add more water now but not too much or I’ll slop over”. In a nutshell, it has strong opinions about its conditions. Which brings me to the point:
Clay is a little fickle. It wants to be wet they way it wants to be wet. IT wants to be wet, but not too wet. It wants to be dry, but not too dry. Like, “hey, I’m dry. Please add more water now but not too much or I’ll slop over”. and it wants to be dried the way, and at the rate, it wants to be dried. In a nutshell, it has strong opinions about its conditions. Which brings me to the point:
As some of our long time customers will recall, way back in the day we used to (emphasis on the used to) make a line of slab built porcelain mugs. Some were inlaid with colors and others had texture. They had smooth flat handles.
We commonly get asked when we will make those mugs again and every once in awhile we get a bee in our bonnet and think- hey let’s try those again! Maybe the clay will desire our conditions now? But, as we recently found out again, the conditions in our building still don’t really favor the way we make our porcelain slab mugs.
We made 6 as a test trail the other day and, much to our chagrin, out of those 6, 5 of them cracked. Whomp whomp. Not a very high success rate to really constitute continuing to make a large batch only to have 80% or so of them crack.
See ya next time!
