liambesaw

I don't eat in my studio, but I'll bring a coffee or beer in. I put it in a little cupboard in my shed and sip on it while I get everything ready for whatever I'm out there to do. Not when I'm throwing. Usually if I'm filming a video it'll take me about half an hour to set up lights and cameras, get the microphone set up and queued, adjust white balance and exposure, etc etc. I think drinking the dregs of your coffee and then spitting out a bunch of grit is probably enough to cure most people of drinking while claying. Not a pleasant experience!

You can buy one for the dental industry for pretty cheap. Under 50 bucks. Just search Amazon or whatever for "plaster trap". You just replace your sink trap (the U shaped piece) with the plaster trap, it just plugs in. We use them at work and they work great for both plaster and gypsum, so they'll work for clay too. Assuming you'll ever want one, much cheaper than the clay ones

I don't have water in my shed, I need to top off my buckets with a hose. Hasn't been an issue though. Large crock pot for hot water, hooked to a 4 hour timer just in case I forget to turn it off (yes, I bought the timer after I came back in to a crock of dried cement one day). My throwing sessions are generally 4 hours or less, unless on the weekends so I don't go through a lot of water anyway. I try to recycle as much water as possible by letting everything settle and then scooping it out of my cleaning bucket and back into my throwing bucket. Works good.

Your chimney might set your house on fire. Here's a link to a free handout on kiln design, it has some helpful sections on calculating chimney length and combustion area for natural draft kilns. https://ceramicartsnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/gaskilnsfreemium.pdf

Better sooner than later I suppose

Ho boy, did I ever! First off, my family is still in what I call "special request" mode. They know I make pottery so I will get a few "special requests" per year, I save up these special requests for Christmas. My uncle requested back in the summer a stash jar, so I made a big one for him: And my step mom wanted a vase, so I made her one: My mom asked for a water dish for her watercoloring, which for some reason I forgot to take a picture of. My dad got a pipe he had been bugging me to make. Throughout the year I often will throw some mugs or cups and then (especially in the summer) not get handles pulled and onto them before it's too late, so I save them up and make candles out of them. So these are lavender citrus soy candles, 8 ounces each for a 48 hour burn time supposedly, I've never actually kept track of how long one has been burning, but yeah they work great and are a super quick, cheap and easy project to use up some of those random vessels. A word of caution though, if you make these and sell them as part of your business you'll need to buy either a special candlemakers liability policy or a BOP policy that covers candlemaking, and be sure to research what youre doing so you don't end up making fireballs instead of candles.

Not optimistic. You are working on intuition when tweaking a glaze, so a line blend is a good way to test intuition. I bet one of them is the keeper!

Do you live somewhat close? My old business partner lived in Vancouver and would drive to the mailbox store in point Roberts to pick up his commercial shipments, and fill up his car with cheap subsidized distilled petroleum for his cars as well. Either that or he'd drive down to my place and stop by Costco for that cheap government subsidized milk lol. Amazing how it was cheaper for him to drive an hour to cross the border and unload a bunch of shipments at the post office than it was for him to sit at home and mail them. Weird system we've got, but it seems that people have worked it out