Monday started on a high note when we sold this vase to a lovely lady who saw it on Facebook.
We will deliver it to her when we head to New Hampshire in August. In the meantime, we will get to enjoy looking at it a little longer. I am glad we don’t have to ship it… it’s 25″ tall. A good sale took the sting off of the disappointing weekend.
Meanwhile, it’s little sister is still available…
22″ tall, ash glaze on the exterior, interior is tenmoku (black/brown glaze). $400 + shipping if needed.
I filled cache pots and vases with flowers and put our special event signs out by the road.
Our three “open” flags were flying outside at 9:45 in the morning. It was after 11:00 am before we saw people. It wasn’t until noon that we had our first sale… $20.00.
Halfway through the day we were worried that we weren’t even going to recover the fee we paid to be part of the tour. By 5:00 pm we had 7 small sales. All we could do was hope for a better Sunday.
But it didn’t happen. We had a small amount of visitors, and three sales.
I can’t even express how disappointed, and worried we are about how the weekend went. We were prepared for extra traffic, since we are now “in town”. In the past this has been a REALLY good event for us. It has provided us with a boost in revenue, after the long slow winter. We are scrambling to find a way to recover.
Some say it’s a new location and it will take time to re-establish. Perhaps, but ours sales were four times better during our first Spring studio tour, when hardly anyone knew who we were. One of the biggest drawbacks for us right now, is that we are in the wrong location on the Seagrove potters map. The new map was printed a few months before we moved. The studio tour map had us in the right location, but the map was extremely small this year and you needed a magnifying glass to read it. Most of our visitors said they weren’t using the tour map, just the list of participants on one side and were cross referencing them on the big map… which has us in the wrong location.
Our best sale of the weekend came at 5:00 on Sunday, when a young couple came hurrying in and said,”We finally found you!”. They drove by the log cabin and we weren’t there. Eventually they landed at Creations, a gallery in town, who then told them where to find us. A big thank you to the fine folks who run the gallery!
| photo credit: Lee Love |
Jeff said next year we should get one of these “pottery head” costumes. One of us can wear it and dance around at the end of the driveway to draw attention to us.
If we are desperate, we just might.
Like many potters, Jeff and I have always supported Empty Bowls. I am sure you all know the premise; potters donate bowls, restaurants donate soup, people come to the event and purchase a bowl that is then filled with soup. All funds raised support agencies that feed the hungry in your community. Since moving to North Carolina, we have been donating to an agency that has a very large Empty Bowls fundraiser each spring. This year they contacted us to make 50 bowls for them. They will pay for a portion of the bowls and we donate the rest.
He wheeled a ware cart out into the driveway to allow for quick drying. I kept a watchful eye on them, thumbing smooth the foot and stamping with Jeff’s chop and his Empty Bowls chop as soon as they were stiff enough. Tonight he is loading them into the kiln for the bisque firing. Our glaze plan should go quickly as well as fun to do. More on that next week!
Sunday morning the door came down on the kiln. Overall, we are happy with the results. The few issues that we had, had nothing to do with kiln design itself, but with a burner that was not firing clean, and a glaze that has been acting up.
The local grocery store is now selling paper products by the pound! I wonder if it’s a better deal that way? 🙂
Our first firing in the new kiln will be a load of bisque. Typically we bisque fire in an electric kiln. Our electric kiln sits in the basement waiting to be wired. Originally, the plan was for our electrician to hook the kiln up to the box that currently is used for the old baseboard electric heat in the house. We quickly learned this winter, that the heat pump is expensive to run when it’s really cold, and it’s foolish for us to heat 2000 square feet of house for two people. After our first ginormous electric bill, we kept the heat pump thermostat down to 58 degrees and turned the baseboard heat on in whatever room we were in, to take the chill off. Doing this cut our electric bill down significantly. We have decided that we need to keep the old baseboard heat, thus costing us a bit more to hook up the electric kiln. Until we can afford to do that, we will bisque in the gas kiln. It’s probably less expensive. One load of bisque equals two or more glaze firings. The electric kiln was two firings to equal one glaze firing in the gas kiln.
So why bother with the electric? It’s less time consuming to fire the electric kiln. No adjusting burners, just turning up switches as needed.
The rebuilt kiln is 4″ bigger in each direction. 4″ doesn’t sound like much but it makes quite a difference. We can now use Jeff’s larger Advancer shelves in the front and the back stack.
We can fit some larger pots in there, and not have to switch to my smaller shelves until we get closer to the top.
Since we are now in a permanent location, we will mud over the fiber to encase it… and perhaps we will color the mortar and paint a cool design. Our wheels are turning, both literally and figuratively!
Last week, Jeff came home carrying an armful of lilies. It was a special treat to have a big bouquet in the house for Easter weekend.