This Blog Has Moved!

I have merged my blog and my website into one address: goodelephant.com

All posts written after May 2010 can now be found at the new location. Update your reading lists and thanks for reading!

-Mea

Delicious and Surreal Dinner Party

Marlene Skopec has been collecting my pots for years, she now owns 6 entire place settings plus several nice serving pieces. Last weekend she invited me to a dinner party at her house, where the entire meal was served on my pots! This is the first time I have reconnected with my pots, after they had been out in the real world living in a different house. It was a tremendous honor to see how much they are being appreciated. The other dinner guests, Dan and Sarah, confirmed that they have used the pots many times at Marlene's house.

Marlene is an outstanding vegetarian cook, even for an omnivore like myself, the food was a gobble-worthy. The meal ended with tiramisu served from one of my casseroles, and tea brewed in one of my teapots! Surreal!!

What's for Dinner? Casseroles!

This photo was taken at a workshop that I taught this past weekend. It's a new idea for the Greenbelt Community Center called "Weekend Project," where students learn a new pot design, throw it on Saturday and trim it on Sunday. It's basically a fast-paced "mini-class" for self-directed potters who want a little bit of instruction one project at a time. I'm happy to report this first one went really well! The enrollment filled out fast, and each student turned out a really lovely casserole (or two). Just looking at this photo makes me hungry! Big thanks to the five students, Cass Cooney, Judy Goldberg-Strassler, Sharon Piper, Kori Rice, and Vejune Svotelis, for diving into a new idea with me. The next "Weekend Project" will be planned for the fall session. The next pot design has not been chosen, but I have several suggestions that I am considering. (these workshops will be open to anyone in the DC metro region. Visit www.greenbeltmd.gov/arts to find out how to sign up for programs at the Greenbelt Community Center)

Hourly Earnings, Part 1: Wholesale

This post is the beginning of a research project. It is the first of several posts on the same topic that I will write throughout this year, and possibly beyond. My pottery business has grown considerably in the past two years, but my ambivalence to let go of my graphic design practice continues. I realized this past winter that I know how much I earn per hour as a designer, because my contracts are based on an hourly rate. It's not an exact number, because it doesn't account for expenses, or for the time I spend doing non-billable work. But it's a pretty good idea. So what I want is the same sense of "knowing" about my pottery business. How much am I really earning per hour by making pots? I don't need an exact answer, just a pretty good idea.

I have heard and read lots of discussions on this subject, but they all come from a backwards and presumptuous point of view, i.e. how much of an hourly wage should I anoint upon myself before I sell my pots? This is a pointless and unresolvable question, because the intangible factors that differentiate every potter are so vast and varied. An exceptionally talented and skillful master should be rewarded as such for his/her time, while an aspiring amateur's time can literally be worth less than zero.

So instead of pondering what I should earn I am going to calculate what I did earn.

Here's my methodology ... whenever possible I will separate pottery sales into quantifiable portions. I will keep track of the time I spend to complete the work. I will subtract any applicable expenses from the sales amount, then divide what remains by the number of hours spent.

The "quantifiable portions" will include wholesale orders, retail art shows and festivals, open houses, registries, etc. (Maybe I'll even settle the debate between the predictable volumes/lower prices of wholesale, vs. the unpredictable sales/longer hours/higher prices of retail?)

How I price my pots ... it's a long-term process. New pot designs start as low-priced prototypes. The prices and designs of fast sellers evolve over time. Slow sellers get eliminated. I compare new designs with the price points of my established good sellers. I also compare my prices with the other potters who are working at the same level as me. I don't want to overprice, because I think a handmade pot is an everyday, down-to-earth object, and should be affordable to average pottery fans. However, I am more careful not to underprice my pots. Underpricing is amateurish, indulgent, and harmful to other professional potters.

Now on to the calculation ... this first calculation is for a large wholesale order. It is the largest order that I wrote at the Buyers Market in February. It contains a good mix of low, medium, and high priced items, therefore I think this will be a good measure of wholesaling in general.

I kept track of the time spent working on it, including the following tasks:

• preparing clay (recycling, pugging, wedging)
• building pots (throwing, trimming, altering, handbuilding)
• loading and unloading the kiln
• glazing
• studio cleanup
• applying hang tags to finished pots
• packing for delivery
• accounting

I did not track the time spent on tasks that didn't specifically apply to the order, including glaze mixing, or the afternoon I spent carrying a year's supply of clay down the stairs into my basement studio.

From the total dollar value of the order, I subtracted the following expenses which I could quantify:

• clay
• shipping boxes
• a percentage of my Buyers Market expenses, equal to the percentage of Buyers Market sales that this order represented (by far the biggest expense related to this order)

I did not subtract the following expenses which I could not quantify:

• glazes
• tools/equipment use and maintenance
• utilities
• bubble wrap and packing peanuts (some purchased, some recycled)

The dollar amount that remained was divided by the total hours spent. And in the end I made $24.74 per hour. My official response to this is "not too shabby!" I feared that I was making less than minimum wage, but the real answer is nowhere close to that. The answer fits my self-evaluation as an up-and-coming, but bona fide professional potter. My time has a good value, but the value still has room to grow, as do my work efficiencies, craft skill, and business development.

One final note about punching an hourly timeclock ... this is not a job that I can do for 8 hours a day like a normal job. The longest I was able to work in one day is 5.5 hours, and at that point my elbows and hamstrings were aching! My usual workday is more like 3 or 4 hours. So that's another issue that I need to address, how to reduce the physical strain of making pots so that I can be more productive per day. (Then again, having worked in the corporate world, I know that many people with 8 hour-per-day jobs don't spend 5.5 of them being productive, so maybe I shouldn't worry about that.)

Coming soon ... I will repeat this calculation for other wholesale orders over the next few months. Maybe different types of orders will have a different result, or maybe I'll get better as the year goes on.

Road Trip to Fallingwater

I'm not even sure my good ol' Subaru is supposed to hold five adults, but that didn't stop me and four adventurous friends from piling into it and driving 3.5 hours to Fallingwater. (from left to right in the photo: Karen Arrington, Neil Morgenstern, Karen Morgenstern, me, Vejune Svotelis) There was a pottery-related reason for the trip ... I had to deliver a large order of pottery to the Fallingwater Museum Store. So in addition to five people, there were three large boxes packed full of pottery in the back, as we climbed over the mountain ridges between DC and Pittsburgh. Fallingwater is a stunning and glorious place to visit. If you have any interest in art, design, or architecture, go as soon as you can. Here's their website fallingwater.org

Thursday Night Teapots

My Thursday night Intermediate Wheel class has been asking to make teapots for months, so this session we took the plunge! We did several projects to lead up to this form, like throwing spheres, throwing enclosed forms, and pulling lots of handles. The pots shown above were made by throwing an enclosed form, trimming it on a chuck then cutting off its lid. Then we added thrown spouts and pulled handles. Also in the photo are some of the jars that preceded the teapots. I think they turned out great! The pots in the photo were made by (vaguely from left to right) Lorraine DeSalvo, Carolyn Neuendorffer, Melanie Choe, Andrea Waters, Jeri Holloway, Kuniko Wallis, Quianna Douglas, Margaret Lukomska, and Jamie Consuegra.

Hip to Be Square

This is a project from my Friday night Advanced Wheel class. This project started last November when several of us went to see the Winterfest show at Baltimore Clayworks (my pots were in that show, along with about 20 other potters). We were all impressed by the pots of Sequoia Miller that we saw there, and soon after I came across a blog post on Sequoia's blog describing how to make Square Lidded Boxes, and we decided to try it! This project was very challenging, we all learned a great deal about altering and assembling, not to mention patience and precision. Furthermore, right after we threw our walls, it started snowing and didn't stop for 3 weeks. ok I'm exaggerating, but due to cancelled classes and the Buyers Market, we didn't get to assemble the pots until 3 weeks after we threw them. I'm happy to report that most of them survived. In this photo, many of the pots are still works in progress, but trust me, the finished pots were outstanding! From left to right in the photo, the pots were made by Karen Morgenstern, Chris Coyle, me, Kori Rice, Christina Guidorizzi, Karen Arrington, and Amy Castner.

After the BMAC: I'm going to be very pale this year ....

.... because I will spend the next 6 months in my basement making pots! I had a really successful show. I took 19 orders, including 9 from existing accounts and 10 new galleries. Thanks to everyone who wished me safe travels to Philly, the roads were pretty clear and the driving was ok, plus the Rosen Group made our arrival times flexible. The hard part was walking through ankle-deep slush puddles between the convention center and the hotel.

I don't want to sound overly celebratory, because it seemed the show overall had a down atmosphere. And what feels successful to a growing, part-time business might not relate to anyone else's pottery business (my advice to aspiring professional potters, always measure your success by your own self-defined goals, comparing yourself to others is bad for your sanity). My business will grow considerably this year, in spite of a continuing recession, and for that I feel grateful and optimistic. Still no plans to quit my design practice, but like last year I am giving myself permission to make pots full-time for the next few months!

Getting Ready for BMAC: The Big Chill

So one week before the BMAC (Buyers Market of American Craft) I was feeling pretty good about my planning ... all my pots were fired, my pricelist was printed, I actually had some free time to work on an early order. And then ... we got buried in two feet of snow! My power went out on Saturday morning, and didn't come back until Monday evening. That was 2.5 very cold days, wearing layers of fleece and trying not to stand still.

My Friday night pottery class was cancelled, we rescheduled it for Monday night and it got cancelled again ... because the area roads were still being cleared. We had thrown some pretty ambitious pots the week before, we were planning to alter and assemble them ... now we have to hope they don't dry out before we meet again, which won't be until after the BMAC.

I spent the day Monday packing up my booth for the show, and moving everything into my car. This was partly to stay warm, and partly because there's more snow coming tonight! Another foot or so is forecasted for the DC area and for Philadelphia ... ugh. Now I plan to spend Wednesday night shoveling snow again, and hoping the roads are safe to drive to Philly on Thursday morning. I'm trying not to feel down, I bet every artist in the show is stressing out about traveling this week. I'm telling myself that Thursday will be a long and challenging day, but after that the forecast looks clear, so buyers should be able to attend.

At least I'm glad that all of my planning and packing is done. All I can do now is hope the power doesn't go out again, and brace myself for the next few days.

Holiday Open House 2009

I held my Holiday Open House on December 12-13. This year I was very pleased to be joined by my friend Nan Rothwell, who brought her salt-glazed functional pots from Faber, Va. (near Charlottesville). I'm a big fan of her work, and of the workshops she conducts at her studio. I got to trade with her (an elephant for a mug), and her pots were fascinating and highly educational for my students who came to see the show. The attendance was great, especially on Saturday! This is my third time holding an open house, so I've figured out a pretty good system now ... transforming my living room into a showroom ... picking the right dates and hours ... what works in terms of marketing, and what doesn't ... this year it felt really easy, like I didn't waste any effort. Can't say the same for Olive, my cat, who was a bit wigged out by the commotion (she forgave me soon).