Callie Beller Diesel

Please, double check to see if your kiln is set to Celsius or Fahrenheit. You may not need to re-bisque at all. But if this message hits you too late, re-bisquing shouldn’t hurt anything. Depending on your clay, the extra heat work may or may not affect the porosity you’re used to, which can affect glaze application if you’re dipping, but I can’t see it being anything drastic. Pick one piece to test out and adjust your dipping times accordingly before you dunk the whole load.

How old is old? Some Cress kilns have a weird system where it’s an infinite switch that Dick describes, plus a thumbwheel that will turn the kiln up for you at varying rates.

If your supplier is willing to share when they took delivery of the stuff you bought, you might be able to figure out which one it is with this timeline.

You didn’t even get to cone 022. Yes, I would rebisque after you sort out your ventilation issues. Although, just because I deal with Celsius numbers a lot more, that 1045 number is suspicious to me. 1045 C is close to a cone 04 bisque. Double check which scale your kiln is set to before you do anything.

+1million for all clay not being created the same. I think the best thing anyone can do when they’re working in clay is to make their own observations about the materials they’re using. Supplier practices, material availability, recipes and user expectations do vary heavily from one location to another. The more specifics we get, the better help we can be. Links to product specs can be really helpful too.

If they’re not going to be in a freeze/thaw, then sealing them might not be necessary. The clay itself shouldn’t discolour, and most glazes won’t either. The exception being something like raku.

So, it sounds like you’re trying to figure out how to manage customer expectations, and figure out where your policies are in relation to your booth neighbours. If other vendors are setting the expectation that customers get a discount on venmo transactions, that seems odd, because it’s all electronically recorded even with the personal account option. Most farmers I work with deal with million dollar operations, so they’re subject to RevCan scrutiny and I can’t see it being that different in the US. So it’s probably worth talking some shop with your booth neighbours. Are they in fact giving discounts, or is the sales tax buried in their sticker price? As long as it’s documented and recorded on the receipt properly, that could be a viable possibility, or a workaround for yourself. As long as your area doesn’t have a rule against it, that is. If the other vendors aren’t setting an example of cash or Venmo discounts and someone gives you side eye about taxes, this usually means that you’ve got some customer audacity on your hands, and there’s a lot of ways this can be dealt with. If anyone ever needs help with scripting, I’m pretty good at it, and I can walk folks through the principles of how to do it yourself. You can set boundaries and hold them firmly without being rude or harsh. Personally, I don’t discount the sales tax percent for cash sales. I don’t offer my customers explanations, because that leaves wiggle room for arguments I’m not interested in having. “It’s not my policy to do that,” or “RevCan takes a dim view of that,” is the most they usually get. Your customers aren’t entitled to your financial practices.

So much this! While I do advocate for social media as a valid business tool, it’s not one that I think everyone needs to pick up. If ANYTHING doesn’t suit one’s constitution or life or business model, it makes no sense to use it. It’s like a Giffen grip: some people love it, some people hate it. Both are valid. Social is one way of building an audience, but not the only way. Circumstances and nuance need to be considered.

Probably because zinc can kill certain underglaze or mason stain colours, so it tends to be a go-to recommendation. To my knowledge, black isn’t one of the affected colours though.

+1 for Highbridge’s thoughts on eutectics. My personal favourite thing about Rose and Matt Katz’s research is that they’re incorporating colourants into UMF calculations through sheer empirical testing. While it was standard to assume that colourants had no effect on the base glaze when I was learning, it seems illogical that adding almost 10% of an ingredient would leave the melt unchanged. Not all of them are added in yet, but they’re working on it. When you’re looking at your recipes in glazy with and without the iron, are you looking at just the Stull map, or are you checking out the extended UMF calculations? How is the iron changing your flux balance?

So one of the terms of use of the forum is that especially as a moderator I can’t encourage anyone to do illegal things, and neither can you. So I’m working from the default assumption that people are using the business Venmo version for their businesses, and that you’re reporting your cash income properly. Setting up Square, or any other payment system, like a till to record all your item sales and taxes makes that math really easy. Combine it with a simple cash flow management system like Mike Michalowicz’s (sp?) Profit First and a bunch of stuff is already done come tax time. If you’re using the personal version to accept business payments, not keeping business transactions separate from your personal finances or not remitting taxes properly, that’s not good. No one wants a surprise IRS visit, and I think PayPal is going to take a VERY dim view of not getting their fees. I don’t know if they’ve got systems for flagging suspicious numbers of money transfers or not, but it’s not a risk I’d want to take.

Clay tools for sculpting are dead cheap to get started, which is great! The beginners tool sets found wherever you’re buying your clay are great to get started with. A lot of people’s favourites wind up being found or repurposed items. Ware boards to put your pieces on and drywall/tiling sponges cut in half are a couple that haven’t been mentioned yet. Rather than dipping your hands in water constantly to avoid clay drying on them, keep a damp sponge to wipe off on. You’ll save your skin and your piece. A couple of towels are also nice. If you stay with it a little longer than an adhd hyperfocus hobby (I feel that pain!)a banding wheel can be an upgrade.

If it’s just an odour and not layers of nicotine buildup, immersing it in bentonite based cat litter can possibly help. The other option might be to seal it in with something like varnish, if it’s really stinky, or if there is nicotine buidup. If you try scrubbing it off, you might also remove some of the carbon on the unglazed parts, or possibly damage certain glazes.

Because banking in Canada is different enough, I had to look up what exactly the differences between Venmo and any other card service is in the US. (We don’t have Venmo because we do that through our banks instantly, for free, without the middle man, and the encryption legally has to favour the account holder.) Anyways. It looks like the appeal for Venmo is that customers can use their own cash without having to pay an extra fee, or potentially incur credit card interest. There does not appear to be much of a benefit as a business, because you still have to pay fees to accept payments, and it takes a couple of days to transfer the money to you, just like a credit card. So the question then is, will you loose sales at this venue if you don’t offer that payment option? If everyone’s carrying cash anyways and it doesn’t make a difference, it looks like more of a hinderance than a help from my angle. But, if it makes a difference to your sales, you might want to have a look at it. If taxes and recording transactions are at issue, you can still use your Square as a till system and enter the venmo transactions as cash. That way you can do things like send receipts, and have the app do your calculations and have a record of the sales tax you have to set aside for remittance. It just helps to have everything in one place.

Is there a possibility that it could have been exposed to excessive heat that would cause the plaster to re-calcine?

My question is, how advanced is advanced? Making a mould can be pretty technical and precise, and the common beginner errors can be pretty costly and difficult to clean up. If you want a more entry level project that involves using plaster to make moulds, why not start with a decorative sprig mold, or press mould that can be used to make handles? That would also introduce design considerations like undercuts and making your own tools. A similar project could involve casting some simple roulette blanks using a found container and have the students carve them into decorating tools. It’ll help them learn about how the material behaves wet, while curing and in use as a tool before throwing in things like multiple displacement based volume calculations. If you want to show them the actual slipcasting process, partnering somehow with a paint your own shop that casts their own pieces might be a better option.

If you’re making functional ware, the technical considerations are a bit different, and there’s a smaller window where a glaze will melt at earthenware temperatures and be durable. But there’s a lot of really good functional earthenware pots that come out of the Canadian Maritime provinces, especially Nova Scotia. It’s worth checking out.

Meta has already started rolling out a subscription based verification service in New Zealand and Australia, and will expand out this year. It may or may not fly well on a long term basis. Twitter is NOT doing well right now by any metric. But it depends on how they change it. The first iteration won’t be the last. The broader content creator community is agitating for more stable ways of generating income for themselves, so another thing to watch in coming years will be if they choose to organize somehow. They say that if you’re using a service for free, you are the product being sold. When you’re consuming the content, they’re feeding you ads based on your behaviour. When you’re the one creating content, you’re being one of the reasons people go to social media in the first place. Platforms are currently making billions from free labour.

It doesn’t hurt, but there are lots of both “internet famous” and monetarily successful accounts that don’t show anything more than hands. For every account featuring a young, well built male potter who got famous for throwing shirtless, there’s a dozen more who make process videos where you only see hands and clay, or photo carousels of moodily photographed pots. In fact, up until the middle of last year when IG decided to prioritize Reels over photo posts, it was completely possible to never show your face on that platform and not suffer in any way. (IG has recently walked that decision back after a lot of pressure, but that is also another post.) Both Old Forge Creations (Joe Thompson) and NotWorkRelated_ (Sarah Hussaini) are very transparent about their income and business models, if anyone wants to have a look at a couple of examples of people making an online model work. They’ve both spoken in a number of places about both numbers and what their work days look like. For those without IG accounts, you should be able to view enough of their feeds to get an idea from your browser.

I would also like to point out that the OP was originally concerned with folks who are transitioning from a hobby to a business. In terms of starting a business today and not anytime more than 5 years ago, many hobbyists may already have a social media presence. Some communication skills will already be in place, as opposed to those of us who grew up with no wifi and had to learn them.

I’m going to discourage any disrespect on any sides of this argument. We are a community and we work to figure out solutions and offer support. Spirited opinions are fine, but we’re not going to start name calling. We do not invalidate lived experiences just because they don’t reflect our own. I think that the truth about the importance of social media lies somewhere in the middle of these opposing opinions, and definitely beyond overly broad statements and categorizations. If something works, but only does so under certain circumstances, that needs to be stated. There are people who make a reasonable living selling exclusively in person, selling exclusively online or using a hybrid model. I know in person and have been given numbers by people in all 3 categories. For professionals, it’s about how you choose to structure your business. Succeeding or failing due to someone being a better marketer than they are a craftsperson is NOT a new phenomenon. 20 years ago, people were complaining about someone only getting famous because they were friends with gallery owners. Now they’re mad because folks are good at taking photos and manipulating an algorithm correctly. For those people, the socialization is EASY. The internet, especially social media, platforms people who wouldn’t be heard otherwise. That is both the best and the worst thing about it. We can see amazing artists we wouldn’t have before get the opportunities they deserve, and we also get to see all the beginners do all their dubious beginner things and be loudly wrong on a very public forum. And heaven help the comments section of any 20-something woman making pots on the internet, whatever her skill level. Placing no value on the internet as a marketing tool and discouraging anyone in the first half of their careers from using it is doing folks a huge disservice, IMO. It disregards the fact that most people under 45 expect a certain amount of internet presence, as do enough people over that age. It’s a big way we all communicate now, and telling less established artists to not bother is denying them a tool that could work for them IF used correctly. Doing everything that appeases the algorithm gods and neglecting the other parts of your business will definitely earn you a mental breakdown, and little else. As a potter, using service based marketing methods is going to be less than effective, and those are the types of courses that tend to be most prominent when you go looking for them. But if you go in acknowledging you’re not likely to be the next Florian Gadsby and just use some good photos to help build your visibility and email list, I’d call that a sound professional practice. There’s a lot of room between trying to be internet famous and building a community that supports you financially. You do need to budget your time carefully, but you can build systems that help you do that effectively. Schedule online sales and dedicate a day to batch build content leading up to that. If you need styled still photos, take them on the same day you take them for your newsletter. Build a prop box and have a simple photo setup if you can’t just leave a booth set up somewhere. If you need short form video, take about 3-4 10 minute videos of yourself as you work that can be edited together in different ways. You don’t need to take fresh video every time, adn you might need to build some skills in IMovie or equivalent. I have a packing station set up next to my inventory storage so that I can knock out a shipment in about 5-10 minutes. Faster if I’m doing more than one at once. I personally don’t live in a country that has a population base that supports 10-12 shows a year within driving distance that are large enough for me to net 5-7K each. That means I need to get my wares out online if I want to top up my income to that equivalent. If I don’t post regularly, my sales do suffer from the lack. I had to take a long social media break for my mental health last year, and my revenue shrank, the same way they would have if I didn’t sign up for some shows. My photography skills are also hard won, and I find building posts regularly difficult, especially if they aren’t received the way I want them to be. I know about sanity saving systems, because I have to use them myself. So online-only doesn’t work for me personally. But I do it, because it’s a steady trickle of income that adds up over the year. Mark once posted about making sponge holders being the difference between eating well and eating a lot of top ramen. For me, my equivalent is selling mugs online. And I think it’s important to acknowledge that the folks I know in real life who are making a good living now with an online-only model started building their audiences at markets. Email marketing is very important to their businesses.

+1 for MDO. Mine are going pretty strong 20 years later. I recommend the single sided 1/2” or thicker. I do have some double sided bats, but I like them less because they can slip off a bat patty, and the single sided is usually a little less expensive. If you’re using bat pins, the slippage isn’t an issue.

It’s worth noting that throwing with 10 lbs is a bit of a different animal than throwing 3 lbs. If you’re in practice for throwing with larger quantities and that’s mostly what you’ve been doing at your studio, sizing down means remembering to ease off on your pressure. Smaller amounts of clay don’t need to be whacked down hard, you might be used to leaning harder into your centring than necessary, you might be trying to start your pull with too much clay and torquing it, etc. Especially if your clay at home is softer than you’ve been using at the studio. If any of the above is at play, the good news is that once you readjust, you’ll find you're now a better thrower with the smaller quantities.

The thing I’ve learned most from my customers (that I didn’t learn in other customer service jobs) is that you should never underestimate how you can affect people with your work. I love doing the romantic gifts for folks. Birthday or anniversary gifts, moving in with his first boyfriend gift, stuff like that. The sweet, building your life kind of things. But I never dreamed pots could help others with things like grief. Warning: You will want tissues for this one. Also, cancer content. Background: I make mugs with swear words on them. The “f bomb” is the most popular. I know, not everyone loves them, and if you don’t, that’s perfectly okay. But the people that do love them REALLY love them. I started making them as a bit of a money maker, frankly. I thought they were gimmicky, but whatever. I still made them nicely. Most people find them funny or cheeky, have a bit of a laugh, buy one for themselves or a friend and get on with their day. But one Saturday a couple of years ago, I was surfing social media and I came across this post that had tagged me, and it brought me to tears. Someone had bought one of my “f___” mugs at a consignment store. She was speaking about being a palliative care nurse, and dealing with her dad’s late stage cancer diagnosis that he had received the month before. I can’t write it better than she did, and this is posted with permission. "As a nurse I can manage the crap out of this...mostly. As a daughter my vision and skills are clouded. As a daughter there are not strong enough words to say how hard this is. And I see palliation and family care in a whole new light. But I really wish I didn't have to see it in this light. So, I will cope with cuss words and inappropriate humour. I will cope with coffee and Jesus. I will cope with love and support from friends. I will cope with hugs and shoulders to lean on when I have to go to work. I will cope with alcohol when needed. And I will continue to find support in unexpected places... like a mug that sums all of this up in one word." So that was a big one for me. I viewed these mugs as the least of what I made. Like a lot of us I’m sure, I question the value of what I do sometimes. When I do, I try and remember that post, and remind myself it’s important to keep showing up to make the things.

Ok, but Hank Green did a video on this recently, and he used Melissa May’s quest for a good teapot spout as a jumping off point! Link here in case I’m not the only crazy head on tiktok. For anyone who doesn’t want to loose their life to oddly compelling short form video (RUN! Save yourselves!!), the explainer is that fat is hydrophobic. If you put a little smear of butter just under the teapot spout, the tea doesn’t stick to the rim of the teapot spout to create a drip.