Sale Weekend

This is our 3rd annual Pottery Sale over Mother's Day and despite all our good intentions, we're still up at midnight tidying and getting ready. Looking around the room now, I think we'll be up pretty early to finish what we started. It's become our tradition to make a nice spread of food for our visiting guests and customers and while we intentionally scaled back this year, we still have a pretty nice offering.

On the menu for the weekend is, homemade orange cake, baklava, iced chocolate almond coffee, regular coffee, hot and black and as the day progresses we'll fire up the grill and offer up two versions of grilled chicken, one in a garlic-ginger Teriyaki marinade, the other a sweet and spicy dry rub BBQ. There will be homemade potato salad to go with it as well as some lemonade :)

Here are a few shots of our pottery offerings as well as some of the food yumminess.

Also included here are the tankards I finished up tonight and the berry bowls with drain plates. I made the bowls a few days ago and the plates yesterday.. they're still not ready to trim.

Tomorrow night after we close down I need to get onto some mugs I need for next week.

Whew. I still need an assistant.

Winding Down

The last two kilns before our Beltane weekend are cooling. We opened it up a little while ago, the top layer looks amazing, but I'm going to wait to get deeper in.

We'll be heading to Virginia for a festival on Thursday night through Sunday. I've already started the packing process. The tent and our sleeping bags and air mattress is already loaded. I've got to pack the displays, pots, clothes and some food and we're pretty much ready to roll. I'm looking forward to the break from daily life and production, as well a chance to see old friends.

When we return there will be some more firing to do to get ready for our home studio sale over Mother's Day weekend and a lot of cleaning and yard work before the guests arrive. Winter was hard on our lawn and we've had no time to pay attention. I've contracted Morgan and some of his friends to get busy on it while we're gone, but who knows what they'll actually do without supervision. *sigh* we need a lawn tractor in the worst way.

closing out the weekend

Another fine and productive Day at Hughes Pottery.I feel like the day started so long ago it was yesterday..oh maybe it was.

First...I need to say that this lovely sandwich pictured here is a vegetarian BLT with a slice of cheese on a biscuit leftover from breakfast. The B in this case is from Morningstar Farms. We call it Fakin' Bacon and the veggie sausage "Snausage" and it often ends up on our pizza. The very cool mug, which contained coffee is by Ian Stainton.

So today... first thing was packing up the Etsy orders from the weekend. I made a new shipping label, which I will try to show you, but I am not sure how to save it as a jpeg instead of a publisher file.

We have a pretty cool system. I cut and past the address from the PayPal invoice directly into the publisher file that I use for Mailing Labels. I then send it to the wireless printer that is beside the packing area we have set aside in the office.

I used to write out labels in sharpie marker, but it wasn't always readable. I wanted to print them out, but when you print labels you end up using the whole sheet for one label. So I made a publisher file that prints on regular paper and has one of my pieces faded into the background of the label. It takes up about half the page. Right now I am just shredding the other half and using it for Raku firings, but I think I'll add another text box to the sheet and make it a Thank You note, which I can sign and pop into the box. I want to say thank you as often as possible, I'm really grateful that so many people love the work we are making.

This afternoon I spent a lot of time wedging clay. 150 lbs in 2 and 3 lb balls. Mostly for tankards and big mugs, but also for pitchers. I got a decent start on both today,

The special bonus of the day came from peeking in the kiln and seeing the top layer was looking good. I'll open it up the rest of the way in the morning and hopefully post some more pictures.