rox54

Short form that stays on topic as much as possible with elaboration if asked for.

Went to a orthopedic surgeon last week. My biggest concern was some cysts that have appeared on the lt wrist, and the rt second finger knuckle. X-rays of both hands have revealed areas of arthritis on second joints of fingers. In the end the Dr. asked about my pain, I  answered that there was discomfort, not pain, and that I would work in the clay when things got sore and it would go away. He said that when it got bad to let him know and he could fix it.  How I asked? "fuse the joints causing the pain. I said Why  would I do that, as I got up to leave!
 
best,
Pres

Tough decisions as we get older @Dottie. Most o f this is personal decision, but I will let you know what I have been doing. Retired 2009, do part time pottery mostly in the non Winter months. I have had cysts, with bone spurs, one operated on, and it killed the joint on the rt thumb. I recycle all my clay with wedging, and throw most of my pieces. I used to pull handles with my rt hand, but now use an extruder to make handles for mugs and other pieces that require handles. I used to take NSAID for pain, mostly just before bowling, as I am an avid bowler at 3 times a week. I have found that the pain of the hands goes away when I am using them. The more I use them the longer the pain seems to stay away. However. as I used to teach most handbuilding techniques in HS, I know how much the pinch pot forms can affect the hands, especially as you get older. Maybe you could resort to a hybrid form with coils, or extruded forms working on the sculptural pieces that way. I think if you love what you do you will find ways to adapt.
 
best,
Pres

It's 2022, and no business should be complaining about credit card fees at this point, or adding to the price IMO. Fees have been steady at roughly 3% for years and years, so I don't know why they're suddenly having a fit about it. It's a given at this point that the vast majority of one's customers are going to pay by credit card, so you set your prices with that in mind. If someone pays cash, great, you make any extra 3% on that sale. Nearly every kiln I sell to anyone other than a school is paid for by credit cards, which means up to $200 in credit card fees with each kiln. Any discounts I give take that into consideration. I sold a large kiln last year that had over $500 in credit card fees, so that greatly affected the discounts I could give. It's a cost of doing business in the modern world, no different than the cost of shipping, packing materials, overhead, etc.
The better option to encourage cash sales is to raise your prices to cover the credit card fees and then offer a 3% discount for cash. People respond better to rewards than punishments.

I think there’s nothing wrong with increasing your prices to reflect increased business costs, which credit card fees definitely are. But from a customer service standpoint, and even a general professionalism one, I think it’s better to just roll it in.
1) I don’t want to put myself or an employee in a position that sets up angry “what the heck is this extra fee? Are you trying to scam me?!” conversations. There is a segment of the population that just wants to fight with retail workers, and I have no patience for being on the receiving end of it anymore. It’s best to prevent as many scenarios like this as possible. 
2) An itemized list of all of my expenses is really none of my customer’s business. They don’t need the gory details.

Great question, Pres. I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot lately.
I do not share my exact glaze recipes, because I feel that keeping them to myself is necessary when running a business. If you have some aspect of your work that makes you stand out as individual and original, that’s a very valuable asset. However I will freely tell people that my main glaze is a modified version of a semi-matte base recipe from MC6G, and that they can figure out their own modification. I also share all of my glazing techniques (though not for free).
I agree with Denise that it would be impossible for anyone to copy another person’s pottery, but that doesn’t stop people from trying. 
In recent years I’ve been leaving most of my shows with very few pots, and one time with no pots, and I can (sometimes) see other artists looking at my near empty booth with some confusion about how I managed to do it. Most of the answer to that is shared freely on my blog, for those who care to read it. But it is scattered around, and some of the most important bits are in videos that are not free. So I am planning to write an in-depth blog post soon, where I consolidate all of it into one place. This is the kind of stuff that I don’t mind sharing. 

Just open your image in Paint, then select Resize , select Pixels & choose just about anything between 500-600 for the biggest number and it'll probably be fine. Do some trial & error on posting it so that after a few tries you'll find the largest number to use for the result that you like. I use 680 mostly and all my pics are posted this way, using Paint.

For more than 20 years, IrfanView has been a very useful tool for me for quick rotation, cropping, changing total size, adding text, and some other tools. Not an Adobe Photoshop tool, and not for non-Microsoft hardware. cost is your time to download. 
https://www.irfanview.com/   
LT
 

Just a friendly reminder, we can have different methods of achieving our goal in reducing photo size. Everyone is entitled, and more than welcome, to  post their thoughts/methods for doing so. Just as with making pots, glazes etc there can be more than one way to get results.
Let's keep it civil, thanks.

i am sorry if this has gotten nasty.   i certainly did not mean to start a war.   i do not WANT to crop a photo, just get it small enough to post here.  i apologize.

I've been asked to write a short tutorial for how to do this under Win10.  No really! 
Seriously I totally understand why this has become an issue under Win10 for people who managed it just fine previously under Win7 (I actually have computers that still run Win7, and even a micro laptop that still runs Vista).  
I immediately had issues with Paint 3d, the dumbest damn piece of crap software I've ever been forced to deal with.  Well one of, anyway.  Turns out - Paint is STILL on Win10, they just hid it.
So - I'm assuming folks used to use Paint to resize their pics, I know I always have (do).  On that assumption here is how to find Paint on your Win10 system.  Yup.  It's still there.  The MicroSoft folks just hid it from us, maybe they were embarrassed!
Click on the magnifying glass icon in the toolbar at the bottom - it is the second icon from the left (right next to the Windows Start icon).
Type in Paint. Paint will appear in the list of found items.
You can pin it to the start menu, or to the taskbar by right clicking and selecting one of those options.  
You can create a shortcut on the desktop by left clicking on the desktop, select New, select Shortcut, enter %windir%\system32\mspaint.exe , click next, name it Paint or whatever you want to, then it will place that shortcut on the desktop.
Now just copy-paste the image you want into Paint (or open the file if you have a local copy), select all, and use the resize option just like we have been doing for 90 bazillion years.  Save.  Eh voila, your photo be SMALLER.
Anybody need more info than that, I will happily provide.
Pye
Fellow hater of Paint3d

Lately I’ve really been into hakeme.
 

I like making textured objects-stamped, incised, carved, run over by a cat----whatever produces nooks & crannies, rips, cracks, scraggly edges, holes etc., and then brushing glaze just across topmost surface  so a little--or a lot---of the bare clay shows. I also single fire electric at cone 5 or 6, with a slow cool. The sample pic is a spoon holder. 

I accidently came upon a technique that buyers seem to love; I love it too. I was a real novice and just playing around on one piece in which I scraped off some glaze on a bisqued and dipped piece resulting in texture and a view of speckled clay. I tried avoiding the dust of dried glaze by using wax as a resist for slip instead, but the look isnt nearly as beautiful. For now, I'm wearing a respirator and performing the task outside, changing my clothes after. I am not a mass producer, so I am ok with this til I find a new aesthetic; not always easy to do!

I accidently came upon a technique that buyers seem to love; I love it too. I was a real novice and just playing around on one piece in which I scraped off some glaze on a bisqued and dipped piece resulting in texture and a view of speckled clay. I tried avoiding the dust of dried glaze by using wax as a resist for slip instead, but the look isnt nearly as beautiful. For now, I'm wearing a respirator and performing the task outside, changing my clothes after. I am not a mass producer, so I am ok with this til I find a new aesthetic; not always easy to do!

what would result from using the oxides mixed with water, but without gertsley borate? 

I feel like any diagram or 2D representation of my career path should involve crayons, lol!
To say it was indirect for a good long time is an understatement.I did start off being pretty focused, and got a whole BFA in ceramics, but when I graduated, I had what I know now to be the crash that every gifted kid with case of undiagnosed ADHD seems to wind up with. So I worked a bunch of wildly unrelated retail or reception jobs for the next 14 years, and made pots on the side while Life Happened and Was Not-pretty (TM).
After having a couple of kids and coming to the conclusions that 1)I make a terrible employee but an awesome boss, 2) since I can predictably earn a couple hundred bucks every time I resupplied the one gallery I was in, maybe I just needed to consistently get my work in front of people to earn some adult money. 
Once I had relaxed and begun to see opportunities and possibilities again, my work did some pretty rapid growth and development. I built a TON of new forms, I went from cone 10 reduction to cone 6 ox, and went from using a white porcelaneous stoneware to a red stoneware with white slip deco. I challenged myself to keep the qualities of the cone 10 work that I really enjoyed while incorporating some of the easy turnover and colourful elements that cone 6 offers.  
I don’t think I know of an artist that has had direct, linear path. We all seem to incorporate bits of our lives and our loves and our experiences into the work we make.

In my former life, I used to be middle management in a health food/grocery store in an area with a pretty diverse cross section of humanity. Specifically, I was a Cashier Supervisor, and I have management training.  In working the customer service desk there, I couldn’t even make up the things that happened! I have witnessed someone drop $1200 in vitamins and bulk items on the same day we had to remove someone tripping balls on crack from the store who was trying to shoplift very, very poorly. I have kept a straight face while witnessing someone checking the “energy signature” on a day-old muffin by holding it to her forehead (she bought it), and while someone was shopping with a pyramid on his head without a trace of irony. The guy returning 7 organic cabbages that had spent a week in his car in August did manage to bust my poker face though. It wasn’t hot by southern US standards, but 30*C was involved.
So my threshold for weird is probably a bit broken!
Serving demanding customers can pay off when they’re in earnest, but it’s helpful to ask a few screening questions to see what they’re after and to establish if you’re able to help them now, in the future, or not at all. To do this, you have to have your boundaries and service offerings defined for yourself.
If someone is in earnest, I would have no issue with them wanting to check teapot pour, and would probably aid and abet this with my own water bottle. If someone is looking for a specific pot, I’ll ask a few clarifying questions and produce the best available options for them to choose from. It helps them pick faster if the choices are limited. If I know I don’t have the options, I’ll say so. I’ll either offer to put them on a list for when the right thing is back in stock, or send them to another potter who might have something that suits better. My philosophy is to help people find what they want as efficiently as possible, and to be of service to customers in my booth. People seeking things like discounts or to not pay tax are met with a professional responses (“I only offer price breaks on wholesale quantities” or “I do some nice things for repeat customers and my email list subscribers,”  or “The price for cash sale is the same.”). Being of service does not mean undervaluing yourself.
I do not tolerate abuse or cruelty though. 
I have only asked 2 people to leave my booth. One person made an exceptionally crude sexual comment that he then tried to say was “just a joke.” I replied “Jokes are supposed to be funny,” and gave him Mom Look Number 32b (Arched Eyebrow Variant). He backed away in embarrassment. The second lady I think didn’t have any idea what a fine craft market entailed, and had a very loud sticker shock response to a $35 mug. Like..REALLY loud. And rude. And angry. And personal. She used the words “Who the $%^& do you think you are!?” I walked up to her and said in a calm quiet voice pitched for her and no one else “This item is possibly not for you, but there is nneed to make a spectacle of yourself over it. You should leave my booth now.” Anyone being rude or mean to me does not mean I have to stoop to their level.
 

This one's not behind a pay wall:  Ehren Tools War Cups

It very much depends on the colourant and the glaze. You’d have to test it. If you don’t have gerstley to hand, use a frit or other flux that’s already an ingredient in the glaze you’re brushing over.

I have a wash recipe from Bill Van Gilder that calls for .25 ball Clay and .25 Nepheline Syenite. This as weight, and then .50 of various coloring oxides. Use mine quite dilute with water and it seems to work well on my two cone 6 clay bodies from SC.
 
best,
Pres 

@rox54 Some things like iron will flux enough by themselves, but other colourants are more refractory and won’t stick without adding a little flux.

Someone more experienced than me should answer this -- but I think the gerstley gives it a nice smooth melt so that the surface texture is not rough.

I spent the weekend glazing the rest of my bisqueware I had saved up, finishing bottoms and taking pictures.  Going to be listing it all on my online store and having a fun sale sometime in the coming weeks.  I have some stuff I know will be popular just from how many people on instagram, facebook and reddit have reached out to try to snipe things early.  
I participated in my local clay art associations pot swap this year and will be sending out this plate to the person whose name I drew!
 

I would not do that-we have burr grinder for fresh beans every day-an expresso maker -a half dozen Italiain expresso pots-drip coffee maker-a few steamers-untold drippers, aeropress for travel-a complete travel coffee making outfit for shows and on the road.A turkish brass bean grinder andbrass pots for turkish coffee (this Turkish coffee is how my brother hooked me with coffee in my 30s)-underrate coffee-never
I have told my Doc you can take everthing away except coffee