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What was the best "trade" you made for your work


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I have a cabin on a lake. Sometimes I go there in the winter to check on it and do some snowshoeing. One year, I came into the cabin and set a plastic basin on top of my electric stove. I then went to turn the main power on.When I got back to the kitchen, the basin had liquified and was dripping into the burners. The stove elements had been on! Power had not been on.Some of the knobs were loose, and were painted with nail polish to tell where the "on" button was. Anyway, the electric stove was wrecked.

I mentioned it to my buddy Albert who lives out there. He said he had a stove that he was not using. He would trade it to me for a large bowl!So we did the deal, and the stove has worked great for at least 10 years.

So, my trade was a stoneware bowl for an electric stove. Have you got a good one?

TJR.

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My son's babysitter did china painting and made Xmas tree angels with long flowing gowns. I told how much I liked her angels but $100 thirty years ago was a lot of money for a ornament. She told me how much she liked my work so we traded, this is the first year I haven't used the angel because I had a small tree. Denice

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When I was a kid in school many years ago studying pottery, I was in the student center complaining to my girlfriend that my tooth was killing me but I didn't have any money for a dentist and was considering drinking a lot of whiskey and getting a friend to pull it with pliers. She remembered this dentist that often visited the pottery studio and swapped dentistry for pots with the professor who ran the ceramics department plus he had the hots for her. She got the professor and the three of us went to the dentist and he agreed that for one of my big bowls he would pull my tooth and treat all three of us to laughing gas. I got a tooth pulled (that he said really needed a root canal but I didn't have enough pots for that) and we all had a great time. I asked him several times after that to pull another tooth or two but he wouldn't because there was nothing wrong with them.

 

Jim

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When I was a kid in school many years ago studying pottery, I was in the student center complaining to my girlfriend that my tooth was killing me but I didn't have any money for a dentist and was considering drinking a lot of whiskey and getting a friend to pull it with pliers. She remembered this dentist that often visited the pottery studio and swapped dentistry for pots with the professor who ran the ceramics department plus he had the hots for her. She got the professor and the three of us went to the dentist and he agreed that for one of my big bowls he would pull my tooth and treat all three of us to laughing gas. I got a tooth pulled (that he said really needed a root canal but I didn't have enough pots for that) and we all had a great time. I asked him several times after that to pull another tooth or two but he wouldn't because there was nothing wrong with them.

 

Jim

 

 

Jim;

That is very funny! I don't know how else you could get laughing gas without pulling teeth.You might have topped my stove story. Let's wait and see.

TJRtongue.gif

Is there an emoticon with a tooth missing?

T.

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I had just finished mapping my schools kiln with about 180 shino tea bowls. To celebrate this, I went for sushi and wanted green tea in one of my cups. Turned out were looking for something unique (place was in a renovated bank and 6 minutes from my college) ... ended up trading them 100 tea bowls for never having to pay for lunch 3 times a week. (still brought a tip for the sushi guy and server) but man ... 3 years worth of sushi lunches ... well worth my time.

 

Another time my mothers bathroom sink broke (I don't ask questions on that) and I ended up trading a newish cabinet, sink, and faucet for 2 vases about 2 feet tall. My mother still has it in her house and that was 8 years ago.

 

This one isn't ceramics, but some equipment .. but I just finished fixing, repainting and restoring a shimpo wheel. I bought it from a nice couple who just lost their mother, and it was in the back of their mothers house rusted to heck, motor shot and all around not working, wheel head and bearings still weren't locked and rusted so I bought it for about $50 and proceeded to get new 2 hp motor, strip the rust, make the peddle work again, repaint it (metallic blue with silver ghost flames) and polish the wheel head of the corrosion building up on it (I miss living near the ocean) ... and it was really nice ... ended up trading that to a buddy for 4 easels, 10 6'x10' canvases and a kiln.

 

I miss that wheel.

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I have been fortunate enough to be able to trade pottery for veterinary services for about 30 years with my friend the vet. Shots/ surgery/illness whatever. My vet now is retiring so its back to money for service but its been a long run.

I've traded a teapot for a use of a diamond wet saw for several months in the 80's.

Pottery for massage a few years worth.

More trades with other artists than I can recall.

Mark

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Dinner set for a Divorce.

 

Marcia

 

 

Marcia;

You are teasing us. We need the full story without the names. Please.

TJR.

 

 

Really. Not the astrophysicist. But true. This is about 20 years ago.oops, 30+ years ago.

Nice lawyer. I also fixed the plumbing on his toilet at his cabin when he let several teachers use it for a fishing weekend. On the Stillwater River in Montana.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I was just a simple fisher and student just 3 years ago. Now I have a personal small business with the lot of help from my sweet DAD. My father doing a work for multinational company since 1975 according to my father. Now I have all the dealing with same scales company in which my father doing work.

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  • 1 month later...

Hey, gang;

I had to resurrect this old post. My neighbour across the back lane ordered top soil for his yard. He made the classic mistake of not remembering that soil is measured by the CUBIC yard. [length times width times height]. I thought he ordered 10 yards. He actually ordered 12 yards of soil, which is enough to cover the floor of a single car garage to a depth of two feet. I said I would buy some from him this spring. I moved about 4 yards in my trusty wheel barrow.My boys said, "Dad, are you going to pay for that?" They are bright boys. My neighbour wasn't around when I moved the dirt.When I saw him, I asked how much a yard? It worked out to $25.00 a yard. I would have owed him $100.00.

He said, make me some planters. So the trade is dirt for planters. A good deal for both of us.

TJR.

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  • 4 months later...

A teapot traded to a friend perusing an MFA in a 2D concentration for her Soldner S100 wheel... I tried to give her more.

 

A set of 4 cereal bowls and an olive oil cruet traded for logo and business card design.

 

For a while I was trading pots for chiropractic care and massage therapy.

 

I like the barter system.

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gorgeous!  when will we hear you play it on youtube?

 

 

This is from a couple days after I got the thing, so I was still figuring it out.

 

(With my luck, and the way things have been going of late, I can only pray that the link doesn't kick you to some naughty site someplace...)

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My best trade :  I thought I was trading with a weaver for a couple of scarves and throws, but ended up trading for a $700 coat -- and that was 20 years ago when a hundred bucks was a heck of a lot of money!  It was all a comedy of errors that resulted in my owning a one-of-a-kind handmade winter coat of woven wool and brocade, made by two talented gentlemen who also spun the wool from their own sheep.  The errors stemmed from the fact that I have slight prosopagnosia (inability to recognize faces), and I'm always trying to bluff my way through craft shows when I fail to recognize artists with whom I've been sharing craft shows for years.  In this case, when a weaver approached me and told me that he always enjoyed seeing my work at the SIX shows a year that we did together, I didn't want to admit that I didn't have a clue who he was, so I pretended to be familiar with his work. When he offered to trade for a $375 dancing pigs sculpture, I said "sure, why not", figuring I'd unload a $375 sculpture that no one but me and him thought was worth owning.  This was 20 years ago, when $375 would buy a lot of weavings, so I figured I'd get lots and lots of Christmas presents out of the deal.  After wrapping up his sculpture and sending him back to his booth, I went to select my Christmas presents -- and found that this weaver offered only two products - a short coat for $450 and a long one for $700!  The short one didn't look good on me, so what else could I do but opt for the $700 coat, which meant that I owed HIM another $325 in trades. 

 

Oh yeah, did I mention that I live in South Carolina where it gets cold enough to wear that coat about -- oh -- about once every five years??

 

But what the heck, it is a beautiful coat, and every Christmas when I fly to Santa Fe for the traditional Christmas Eve walk on Canyon Road, where temperatures range from 15 to 30 degrees, that coat pays for itself ten times over!

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it was a treat to see you and hear the music i like.  thank you, Kohaku.  if you were nearby, you could join the musicians at the general store in Shepherdstown on thursday nights.  all irish and scottish music with each person playing several instruments.  just a jam session with old time music.  

 

it is crazy on st patrick's day if it falls on a thursday!

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