Month: June 2018

Many potters will not do commissioned work if it isn’t something within their normal scope for many valid reasons. I will take on a commissioned work if it intrigues me. Recently a friend asked for a large tray, much larger than anything I’ve done before. I said I’d give it a go even though I do not have,

1. A slab roller
2. A mold for it
3. Experience with hand building large.

What I did have was a curiosity about how the heck I was going to do it. I follow approximately 2 million potters, some new, some with decades of experience. I learn from them all. Recently there was a potter who used a cookie sheet for a mold for a large tray…well dang I’d sacrifice a cookie sheet to my pottery studio if this works.

Ok..item number one…no slab roller. A slab roller is like a table sized pasta maker for pottery, it makes lovely huge sheets of even clay and there isn’t one in my studio (it’s my next big purchase). I did it the old fashioned method. I threw it…not like wheel thrown, but literally threw it back and forth on the table, flattening it took it a bit more each time I threw it.

And ended up with this massive piece of clay. Trust me it takes practice.

Number two, no mold…in comes the sacrificial cookie sheet. Clay has memory and moving huge sheets of clay can instill in the clay, a good place to crack, air bubbles, and weak points. I used packing paper to work and move the clay.

Number three…no experience hand-building that large…when did no experience ever stop me? I live for no experience. I love the unknown and to take a chance. I embrace change. I jump in the deep end and figure it out.

Here is where we are with this order today. It’s doing a extremely slow weighted dry so it won’t warp.

And here it is up close. The glaze will do some amazing things with this texture. Yes it still needs clean up, but I think I may be on to something here. Follow me and you can see my progress. Teri🦊

A while back I was listening to a podcast with a wonderful potter Tiffany Thomas, who makes some outrageously beautiful pots. She said that she didn’t use Etsy (a market place on line where crafters and artists sell their work) to sell her wares anymore. She had several solid reasons, but the one that really resounded for me was this, “Why should I send people to a place where they can find other potters to purchase from?” This was a revelation for me. The idea of switching away from Etsy wasn’t too hard to imagine but creating an e-commerce page seemed impossible without spending a ton of money, which my business couldn’t support quite yet. I didn’t think I could ever tackle it on my own.

I looked into it several times over the next few months. I was dancing around it and sticking my toe in here and there. One morning I decided to go for it and sat down and spent the greatest part of a Sunday setting up a page…DISASTER! It was awful, my whole page was completely destroyed. It took two days for the lovely people at Blue Host to right the wrong. For awhile at least my dream of selling from Yellowdoorpottery.com was quashed.

I started analyzing my Etsy page. There was nice traffic, people often “liked” my work and therefore my page, but the overwhelming majority of my sales were driven there by me. On one hand it is good for exposure, but for me the random sales weren’t enough to rely solely on them.

Yesterday I decided to try again. It was a sunny day and the screen porch was open. Katie was in the pool, so I needed to be with her, it was the perfect time to sit down and try to make this work. By the way I am a complete novice when it comes to websites, I figured, I set this page up originally, who’s to say I can’t add the e-commerce element? After several false starts and quite a few curse words, and quite frankly a couple of pints of Guinness, I had my first item for sale on this page! I’ve got a ton of work to do to clean it up and add more products. However I am on my way, please be patient with me while I work out the kinks. I’m not completely giving up Etsy just yet, because there is some exposure, but I will no longer be directing people there, which reminds me, I now need new business cards…it’s always something. Thank you for your support, Teri.