Mixed Results

Look closely and you can see the horrible deformities of the bloated clay body

The Good Big Bowl, surrounded by bad little ones.

A few weeks ago I was writing about how we were suffering from bloating in the clay body we were using. I had a lot of clay pre-wedged for use and some of it was fine and some of it was bloating. I feel like we've worked through most of the problems, but some bowls I had suspected of being from the bad batch came through today and truly they were the worst of the pieces we've seen so far. Alongside them were some perfectly beautiful mugs from a different batch of clay.

Now we're faced with a dilemma, how to proceed. My wife and I are in disagreement on how to handle it. She wants to return the whole  rest of the batch and get a new batch from a new mix. Where I see how this would solve our problem it will also take a couple weeks for that to happen  as well as a lot of labor and time on our part. Then what do I do in the meantime? Fall behind in production schedule with no hope of getting anything done. If I continue to work through the current batch I will get mostly good pots and some that aren't, but it won't  put me behind while the new batches are mixed and sent and we drive down and pick it up.

I kind of feel like we've worked through the worst of it and will probably have no more problems. At least now I know to track the inventory numbers along with what I'm making so I will know what to report back to the clay company.