This post is an offshoot of The Hourly Earnings Project, which I wrote about all of last year. One of my observations about working as a potter was that I was unable to make pots for 8 hours per day, like a normal job, because it was too physically taxing. Going forward, I need to stretch my ability to make more pots per day, or work for longer hours, in order to grow my business.

Yesterday, I started working on a new wholesale order, worth $540. Which means the market value of these pots is $1080. I challenged myself to make the entire order in one cycle of throwing and trimming. I managed to throw everything in one day, and get most of the handbuilding done. Today, I trimmed all the thrown pots, added handles, and finished the handbuilding. I worked 5.25 hours the first day, and 5.5 hours the second day. I took a 30 minute snack break each day. For me, those are pretty long hours. Last year, I would typically throw for 2 to 4 hours per day. My back is a little tired, but thankfully, no butt pain :-). 

So now this is my new benchmark for what I consider a "very productive" work pace: in a 2-day cycle of throwing, trimming, and handbuilding, I need to produce about $1000 worth of inventory.

This might be too personal to talk about on a blog. When I sit at my wheel for a few hours, the ends of my pelvic bones get sore. The soreness turns into numbness, then the numbness travels down my legs. It's really painful. My throwing chair is small and contoured and I didn't think I could find a cushion to fit. Someone suggested that I try wearing bicycle shorts. All this did was remind me why I don't even like wearing bike shorts while biking. 

I dug through my closet and found some small shoe insoles, the kind that are designed to go under the balls of your feet when wearing high heels. They are made of a grippy gel-like material, so they stay put in your shoes. Turns out they stay put on my throwing chair too. I've been sitting on them for five days now, and no pain! Relief from numb butt!

My Intermediate Wheel class asked for a challenging project. So we made Oval Baking Dishes with Lids. This was a three week project. Week 1: we threw the pot's wall with a lid gallery, then shaped it into an oval. Week 2: we attached the wall to a slab floor, then draped another slab over the pot's rim, to form a nice curve for our lids. Week 3: we carefully trimmed the lids to fit into the galleries, then added handles. This photo depicts an awful lot of hard work, precision, and patience. Pottery credits from back to front: Carolyn Neuendorffer, Quianna Douglas, Andrea Waters, Melanie Choe, Pam Emery, Andrea Schewe, Jeri Holloway, Lorraine DeSalvo, yours truly, and Judy Goldberg-Strassler. Special thanks to Karen Arrington, one of my advanced students who was working in the studio on "lid night." She is a veteran of oval lids, and she helped us out a lot. 

We made Side-Handle Teapots in my advanced class. Although we noted with some regret that these pots are not ambidextrous, we all decided to make right-handed teapots anyways. The community center asked us instructors to take photos of our classes, for use in upcoming course catalogs. So the class let me pose them into this fun group photo, along with our right-handed teapots. (l-r) Karen Morgenstern, Diana Guillermo, Kori Rice, Amy Castner, Carol Wisdom, Karen Riedlinger, and Karen Arrington.

I was named to a list of Top 50 Ceramics Blogs by GuidetoArtSchools.com. I would be more enthusiastic about it if they had spelled my name correctly.