Barbara Long on mon 5 oct 98
This is the first year that I have gone into the craft fair market in
what I consider a "big way". That being 12 shows for the year.
Unfortunately, I didn't really prepare for the amount of stock that I
would need during the off season and...I have become a demon woman
trying to fire as many loads as possible between shows.
Yesterday when I went down to unload my newly fired glaze load, I was
crushed to find every single piece on the top shelf had fused on to the
shelf.When I pulled each piece off, the foot rim remained adhered to the
shelf.I had to wait for further cooling to see the rest of the load, but
had a sick feeling that I had lost a whole load and with a show next
weekend this could really hurt.Trying to figure out "what happened?"had
me going for awhile.
Good news and bad news..the rest of the load was fine. Trying to clean
off the ruined shelf I noticed that the shelf felt glassy, but none of
the ruined pieces had glaze drips.Then the light went on in the
brain...I had done some touch up with kiln wash on this shelf before
this firing.The container wasn't labelled, but was sitting on the shelf
with a bunch of glaze tests that I had been working on.I had glazed my
kiln shelf!!! This will now become an expensive lesson in the need for
labelling.
Before I had figured out what the problem was...I had kiln washed(?) the
remaining shelves. Lucky for me,I realized the error of my ways before
firing the next load, and had time to wash all the glaze off the shelves
and dump all unlabelled and dicarded containers and freshly wash all my
shelves,before ruinning an entire load and all my kiln shelves. Talk
about boneheaded!
Hope that this little saga sends someone else to check all unlabelled
materials in their studio.
Barbara in Lyme,Ct
Elca Branman on tue 6 oct 98
Some of us keep relearning the same damn lesson; label and take notes.
You are NOT going to remember which two glazes you impulsively put on
that georgeous bowl!!
At least,I am not.
Elca ..at home in Sarasota,Florida
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Judith Enright on wed 7 oct 98
The 'keeping records' part of Elca's post prompts me to tell this story.
I've always kept records of work I've done, right down to what color underglaze
goes where in the design, etc. ( I developed this habit when I was doing coil
and slab work and making few enough pieces that I could take the time to record
everything. Once I got into wheel work and started doing series, I just kept
the habit going.) ANYway, several years ago I made some sculpted tiles that
were framed in maple and sold as wall hangings. A customer purchased one that
was decorated with a sculpted model of a brick path winding through a garden and
past a fish pond. The customer came back a year later and wanted two more of
these style tiles, repeating the brick path motif. My memory didn't serve me in
remembering all the details like what kind of clay, what ^ firing, any of that.
I pulled out the binder for 1995 and found the original tile design along with
all the relevant notes (including the formula for the ebony stain that went on
the maple frame!), and I was able to produce another set of five tiles from
which the customer chose three. Call me a stickler for detail -- in retrospect,
it was well-worth the extra 10 or so minutes to keep the record -- it netted me
another sale and an extremely content customer.
That said, be well....
Judith Enright @ Black Leopard Clayware
____________________Reply Separator____________________
Subject: Re: Lesson in labelling
Author: "Elca Branman"
Date: 10/6/98 8:59 AM
----------------------------Original message----------------------------
Some of us keep relearning the same damn lesson; label and take notes.
You are NOT going to remember which two glazes you impulsively put on
that georgeous bowl!!
At least,I am not.
Elca ..at home in Sarasota,Florida
___________________________________________________________________
You don't need to buy Internet access to use free Internet e-mail.
Get completely free e-mail from Juno at http://www.juno.com
or call Juno at (800) 654-JUNO [654-5866]
This email may contain confidential and privileged material for the sole use of
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