Handmade Pottery + Ceramic Jewelry

Pots waiting patiently for their turn for decal attention

Happy Monday morning everyone!  After a making/glazing/decal marathon of the past several weeks, I can now breathe a huge contented sigh enjoyed by stress free people all over the world.  Not to worry, I’m sure I’ll repeat my manic potter behavior for the show next fall.  Try as I might, I can’t seem to break the cycle of cramming for a show at the last minute.  The Colorado Potters Guild Spring Show opened Thursday evening and on Wednesday afternoon, I was still applying decals to my work.  Eeeeeeeeeeeeeek is all my brain was yelling all day long.

Applying decals to tiny tiny covered box

After my small decal firings, this was by far the most ambitious one yet.  I didn’t quite fill my Skutt 1027, but almost did.  After taking a deep breath, I buckled down – stopped answering emails, phone calls etc. in preparation for assembly line style decal printing and application.

Decaled work ready to be fired

For some of my work, I had already decided on a design – but for at least half, I sort of made it up as I went along.  I looked at the pot trying to decide how to “dress” it, if you will.  While decals are without a doubt less labor intensive than hand painting – which was one of my hopes for the process – it is not without a time commitment.  It took quite a long time to format the decals on a letter sized sheet of decal paper in order to get the most decals out of one sheet.   I used a variety of sources for decals, including royalty free clip art, tweaked digital photographs (my own and royalty free ones – read the fine print though for release info, digital scans of actual leaves and sketches of my art work (thanks Wacom tablet).

First 2 shelves of decal firing look good

By 8pm, I was ready to fire the kiln and instead of doing a slow fire because quite frankly I didn’t have the luxury of time, I programmed a fast fire to cone 04, gave a nod to the kiln goddess, crossed my fingers and hoped that I’d have some work to bring to the Guild’s sale.  I was up till almost 1am making sure that the kiln would shut off – I had no idea how long a fast cone 04 firing would take (fyi – about 5 hours).

Next shelf looks good too

By 6am Thursday morning, the kiln was still too hot to touch – but being the gambler that I am, I pulled all the peeps, and cracked the lid ever so slightly.  By 8am, the kiln had dropped another 300 degrees – so I propped the lid open wider – and by 10 am I was able to unload.  Mind you, I think the kiln goddess was listening to my pleas and I got lucky.  In my opinion, pots are best when they’re still warm to the touch, much like melt in your mouth chocolate chip cookies fresh out of the oven.

Blue butterfly box

I can’t tell you how darn happy I was as I unloaded the kiln!  Squeals of joy, jumping up and down – woohoos escaping my lips.  My joy was short lived, however when I realized that I only had an hour+ to inventory, price & shower before I had to deliver the work to the show venue at noon on Thursday.  I have a few candid shots of my work sitting on my work table and that’s it.

Work waiting to be priced

Luckily, I volunteered to be on the photograph team for the Spring Show – so I did pull out 6 of my better pieces to be photographed.  I won’t get those back for several weeks though because another member was taking the photographs and needs to upload and edit all of them.  I tried taking some over his shoulder with my camera, but I forgot my tripod at home, so they didn’t turn out so well.  I’ll share later in the week.

So,  how did our show turn out?  I didn’t hear how the group as a whole did, but I personally did very well.  I brought 80 pieces and sold 60 – all of my covered boxes sold, along with some new wall tiles, all my mugs, butter dishes, and almost every single one of my new decal pieces.  I even sold most of my older work that I had priced attractively and wanted to get rid of because I’m tired of looking at it.  I have 6 sets of buttons, some small oblong trays, a couple of misc. pieces, and 3 weed pots left over.

In celebration, I hung out with my family this weekend and didn’t do a whole lot of anything besides going to my daughter’s soccer games, laundry and working in the yard a bit.  Today, I head back to the studio – I’m pretty jazzed about my new wall tile boxes.

Have a good week,

~Cynthia