rox54

ha, well, I wouldn't call it patience, I wrote off getting them long ago. If I get them it would be nice though. Frankly, I became more intrigued by all the mythology and internet theories that came about. 

Since sanding is so time consuming, trimming on the surfaces you can reach will eliminate that portion of it. The fewer times you have to touch a piece, the more efficiently you can work. 
How important to you is it to show off the entire surface of the piece? For things like mugs where you’ve said trimming is impractical, would a slightly tinted or opaque liner glaze that hides an unsanded surface be an acceptable design choice for you? It might not work for everything, but could be another time saving solution.
 

Nope...I have my wife to do that for me!

It's possible that the commercial plate has tiny imperceptible stilt marks somewhere on the bottom that are hard to find. Also, some commercial whiteware is "bisque" fired to full vitrification without glaze, fully supported in the kiln so there is no slumping, and then glazed at a lower temperature on stilts of some sort. Because the glaze firing is at a lower temperature, there is still no slumping.

A serious pursuit in ceramics, whether you do it as a business or not, is not something where you choose what type of potter you will be. 
“You don’t choose it. It chooses you.” 
Some people like the idea of being a potter, then find that the reality is not what they were expecting. Be careful about getting your impressions from Instagram or Reddit. 
In my experience of being part of the professional craft world (and not just seeing it on social media) is that the high volume functional pottery folks are the ones making a livable income. The low volume decorative folks are making a side income. That doesn’t mean that NONE of the decorative folks are making good money, some of them are. They have something in common, which is decades of experience and a long term steady growth of reputation and marketing. It takes a long time. 
The high volume functional folks who are making a good living have also been at it for decades. It takes that long to develop that kind of skill and speed. 
I have seen countless beginners try to start out making “expensive” pots thinking they can take a short path to being successful and making an income. It doesn’t work. Period. Anyone who says otherwise is pretending to be someone they’re not. Or trying to sell you something. (Pay me $$$$ for my secrets to craft business success! Or something like that. Again, be wary of social media messages.)
Me personally, I am a high volume functional potter. I didn’t take this route because it was more profitable. It suits my personality and my artistic values.

I would strongly suggest building a more solid set of skills before going into business. Or at least be more than a few months in. However good at pottery you are right now, if you’re under 2 years, you still are growing your skills at an exponential rate. The work you make next month is going to be markedly better than it was last month, and can cause growing pains. 
I know a lot of folks who jump in to selling far too early, and if they’re good marketers, they find themselves stuck in a creative box. If you decide in 6 months that you hate doing production level mugs, you essentially have to start all over building your audience towards whatever it is that you do like making. And that can be hard financially and emotionally. Or they unknowingly make mistakes that aren’t apparent until a few months down the road, and they now have some uncomfortable customer service situations to resolve. 
Finding an audience and growing your artistic voice both take time. And keep in mind that people can make themselves look successful on social media, but the reality may be less glamorous. 
As you build your skills, you’ll learn more about what you do and don’t like doing as a potter. That will help narrow down some of your choices. I think the best thing you can do for you and your eventual client base is to find out what your strengths and loves are in clay first, and then present that to them in the best way you can. Your eventual audience will be the people that like what you make and share at least some of your taste. There can be some give and take between you and your audience, but you have to be the one directing that interaction, and setting the parameters you are willing to work within.

It’s monitored remotely via kiln app. And the owner believes in a lot of security cameras. 

I think with the advent of automatic controllers and as Neil said proper safe practices in kiln setup, very few folks these days fully attend their firings and rely on the over firing detection of the control. In days gone by with kiln sitters and even safety timers this might have been less acceptable and folks at least checked that it finished after a reasonable amount of time. 
Gas kilns, a different matter as most manage the entire firing and turn off by cones. In a commercial studio, fire proof construction, proper setup, likely even fire sprinkler protection,, not firing overnight would put serious strain on their turnaround.
For electric kilns with automatic controls, even home kilns likely fire overnight with only light supervision. Always important to setup correctly to code and check the firing finished as planned though, but I doubt there are many checking periodically or even refusing to fire overnight anymore.

If you have proper safety clearances from the kiln and  inspect your outlet/plug periodically for wear and corrosion, leaving the kiln unattended is not a big deal. That said, you do need to check and make sure it turns off when it's supposed to. 
The larger the kiln, the slower the turnaround time, simply because bigger kilns hold more pots and therefore take longer to cool. Small kilns can cool in as little as 5 hours, large kilns can take 18-24 hours to cool.

Are you asking as a member who’s trying to track work, or are you trying to get an idea of something in order to create a business model for yourself?
At the studio I work at, which is very student focused, a lot depends on how many classes need student work bisqued in time for glaze day.  Because we prioritize student work over member work, I can give firm deadlines to instructors. Member work is a bit more dependent on what else is going on, so it’s a bit more vague. We don’t guarantee finish times for members. Although work on the member shelf is usually fired within the week. 
 
In terms of how fast we fire kilns, a glaze load fires for about 8.5 hours because of heavy kiln pack and a drop and hold cycle. It usually takes about 12+ hours for it to cool enough to unload. If that 12 hours ends some time between 10 pm and 7 am, it doesn’t get unloaded until the next day. 
Our bisque fires for 17 hours including a 3 hour drying cycle at the start, because we have a lot of raw beginners. I pack it pretty heavily, so it’s about the same amount of time to cool. All our kilns are 10 cu ft. 

You’ve asked some very broad and generalized questions that are difficult to answer. The best way to answer these questions is through experience, so my best advice is to move forward with your plans and see where it takes you. 
I would start with Instagram and Facebook accounts, these are very easy to initiate. Start posting photos of your work on the regular basis. Consistency is really important. You don’t need an e-commerce website to start with. You can simply include in your captions “DM me to arrange a purchase” or something along those lines. 
An e-commerce website is a much more complicated project compared to a social media account. You can tackle this when the frequency of your sales makes it necessary to give your customers an easier purchase process. It doesn’t really matter what platform you build your online store (Etsy, WIX, Square, Shopify, etc). They all come with costs, in one form or another. What’s important is how effectively you can drive traffic to your store.
Doing local in-person markets is also extremely important in terms of developing a following, so I encourage you to keep those plans!
As for pricing, that’s a question that many sellers struggle with, including experienced pros. There is no quick formula. Basing your prices on the amount of time spent on your decorating techniques is not a valid method. This doesn’t have any correlation with market value and sellability. Figuring out the correct pricing for your work is a long term process. Start with prices that make sense to you, then adjust them up or down based on actual sales metrics. It will take a couple of years at least before you feel this out. 
Start small, be humble and flexible, and see where it takes you! Good luck, and congratulations for having the courage to start!

Unless the form requires that 90 sharp angle, try a curve that takes a little more space but evens out the stresses.
 
best,
Pres

There have been a few ideas put forth when yarn/knitting bowls have come up on the forum before. A few things that have been mentioned are throw a bit thicker than usual, don't overfire, use a clay rated to a higher cone and fire under it's maturity, don't make the cutout to wide or to deep into the pot, press the area that tends to warp outwards in a bit after cutting the slot, leave a bit of clay in place near the top of the slot until the pot is dry then remove it. 

I had to achieve a decent success rate with yarn bowls when I opted to have a booth at a fiber convention. I found that slots that are too wide make the bowl go out of round. Yarn is really not very thick and doesn't need a large passage. Also, I didn't make my slots past the curve of the bowl, which I think also helped stabilize the shape. I covered the  top half of the bowl for a few days to balance out the drying with the base.  Do the pictures you see online have views from the top down so that you can see if they are wonky?

It appears that the pits go all the way through to the body, so the bubbles are starting there. You say the body is rated for cone 5-10. That means it is immature at cone 5/6, not mature until 10. An alleged  wide firing range is one of the unfortunate fallacies perpetrated by the clay industry. My guess is that there is still stuff outgassing from the body at cone 6. If you are using a kiln with a digital controller, you can try a controlled cooling to allow the glaze to heal over any bubbles that are coming up.
As for the unexpected color, I'm not familiar with that glaze.

Neoprene disc stuck to the wheelhead with a little water for the vast majority of my pots, no clay wads. For bowls and platters wider than the wheelhead I use a  large batt that I glued high density upholstery foam to and put that on a damp Xiem BatMate knockoff. Never felt the need for a Giffin Grip.

your kiln manufacturer has a long history of getting the best out of it's kilns and providing simple controls for users.    why do you think your program is necessary and better than theirs?  and what is special about cone 09?   yours is the first post to mention it in all the years i have read almost every post.   are you glazing some special way that requires your bisque  so soft?  
once you fix the loading as suggested, just try what Neil, who is a kiln specialist and dealer, suggests. 

This is Porths, my first version of this sculpture I started way back about 2007, almost completed in 2009 before illness derailed my studio for a while.  At any rate, I FINALLY finished this boy last year and released him in a resin edition.  I've since gone on to do a 'hairy' Pasture Porthos who's a bit chunkier, and with more feather, thicker legs, long mane and swishy Fabio tail who's casting in a resin edition this year.
Anyway, I've been busting butt to make MOLDS for these two versions of my Porthos sculpture.  Currently I am having the hairy Pasture Porthos molded and cast in England in fine bone china, though I'm also about to start testing slip and settlers for fine bone china pieces here in my studio later this year.  Meanwhile I'm focusing first on using finely ball milled earthenware with talc to cast some pieces.  This first one I've molded right here in studio is what we call Curio scale, a large mini in size.  He's my test cast to see if my mold worked (it did first try!) and to help me figure out how I want to rework and clean up my mold pieces to work even better.  Then I'll be making rubber molds starting next week of each plaster mold piece so I'll have a master from which to cast as many plaster replacement molds as I ever will want, later.
So here's my first ceramic bisque of Porthos with his original docked tail version (mane flights to be added later), an American Percheron with tail bows.

Do other people smell it, or just you? When I had Covid, I smelled smoke like cigarettes, but no one smokes. If other people, smell it, do your neighbors have the same smell?

A thought I’ll share: As soon as I get the powder into the water bucket I put the lid on and go do something else for a while. It lets things get hydrated before mixing, but mostly I do it to reduce dust in the air. 

Hi Paula and welcome to the forum.
Glaze blisters are one of the harder things to figure out the cause of and remedy. Blisters can be from the glaze application, materials, the firing, the claybody, the application or a combination of these. Given when you refired to a cone lower it healed most of the blisters is a good sign. Do you use cones to verify your firing and confirmed you aren't overfiring? Have you tried an unfired piece  at a cone lower or only a previously fired piece? This is where I would start trying to solve this. Since we don't have the recipe(s) for the problem glazes we can't offer suggestions for altering those but the claybody, firing and application method could be areas to look at.
In this months CM there is a really good article on glaze blisters by Jeff Zamek, it is behind a paywall but you can access 3 free articles a month. It's well worth a read. Link to it here.
 

I am not a hold person as to me it simply adds heatwork. In a practical sense there are folks who fire one cone lower but add a hold to get to the next cone heatwork without the peak temperature. In that case firing to cone five with a fifteen to twenty minute hold often gets one to cone six. (Usually verified with cones)
Why do that? Some glazes do not like higher peak temperatures. Some underglazes change color significantly with peak temperature. It is a pretty functional way to fire a cone to two cones max higher without hitting the actual peak temperature. 
Firing higher or for longer has never healed pinholes for me, often made them worse. Drop some temperature and hold however has helped on s some of my pinhole situations.
whatever works for you and your desired glaze results is likely the best answer. Whatever is done, I strongly suggest  always nice to have cones in place so you genuinely know how much heatwork was done. As to suggested time, 15-20 minutes generally gets you to the next cone.

"Climate Change" : Goldfinch,  budding lilac tree, & post-snow/freezing rain iced branches 1/24/24, in NH. I do some photography.  

What a delight to hear more about the lives of people I interact with regularly but don’t really know at all.
I’m an art teacher at a public school (22+ years). It’s unusual in that it’s a k-12 school. I have to explore all sorts of creative endeavors just to be good at my job. A few of them drew me in far beyond what I needed to teach the subject.
Clay is where my heart is, I got a BFA and MFA in ceramics before my teacher life. A significant part of “extracurricular” creative activity still revolves around it. I like to make the tools I use and I want them to be as beautiful as my pots. The wood for handles and ribs comes from what I collect and I will use a branch or plank or block I harvested over lumber from the store at every turn.
The students got me into paper making, poor things didn’t know I was going to make them chop apart plants, boil them in alkali, then spend hours beating them to a literal pulp. I’ve made a lot of paper of my own since then. Coptic stitched a few journals too, @GEP. 
A serious creative anomaly happened when I decided it shouldn’t be so hard to distill essential oils from plants. I was wrong, but the process relies on third world technology and I’m pretty fluent in that. A couple years later I had an efficiently working still and system and obtained essential oils from the most interesting plants growing locally.
When I learn about something I get more interested in it. It’s a blessing, and a curse. I’m always up to something.

I like to say “even potters need a hobby,” and mine is bookbinding! I make hand-bound notebooks, sketchbooks, and journals. I love paper, cloth, adhesives, and sewing. My graphic design training taught me about pages/sheets/signatures, so I get to use my previous career’s knowledge.