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More than a week has passed since the element in my kiln broke. I immediately ordered a new set of elements from an online ceramic shop and a single wall element directly from Tucker's Cone Art Kilns. I have to say, Tucker's customer service is nothing short of phenomenal and they have made a lifetime customer out of me. The new wall element should be in my hands tomorrow afternoon. In the meantime, the support from other potters has been great. We are a protective bunch when it comes to our kilns. After all, it's a very expensive and necessary...

Life throws challenges all the time and it's up to us to sort them out. And part of the process is separating the problem from our reaction to it. A couple days ago, I went to check the temp on my kiln. The display read "E - 1" which is an error saying the kiln was taking too long to reach its top temp, so it turned itself off. One of the reasons could be a faulty element. My kiln has 4, and I just replaced them back in January, so it seemed strange to me an element wasn't working...

Now that the warmer weather has moved in and the grass and trees have grown and leafed out, it's time to get myself back out in the garden. And while my ceramics are clearly inspired by nature, this post is not about my pottery at all. When I was a teen, my first job was on a flower farm. We had 5 greenhouses, and every spring, we loaded them up with more geraniums than I could count and endless types of annuals, both flowers and vegetables. It was my first introduction to plants, and I can still remember the awe...

I'm no expert at running a small business, but what I can tell you is I run my ceramics as a business and not as a hobby. I take into account my time, the cost of supplies, electricity to run the kiln and heat the studio, shipping, taxes, and more. It's certainly not always fun or straightforward, but it is obviously important to running a business and making it successful. While I do weekly bookkeeping, at the end of the year I sit down and look at how everything went. I ask myself what sold the most; where did I...

"Wow, that's a lot of birch. Do you every get tired making it?" This was once asked of me a while ago and the question has stuck around in the back of my mind. The short answer is yes. Yes, I do get tired and bored of it. But I don't let that get in my way. While I get bored of the repetition and familiarity of what the majority of my work has consisted of these past few years, I try to find ways to change things up enough so it is interesting to me, yet probably undetectable to...