My first Pottery Launch!

I am just bloody over the moon! It took me about a year to get a mug to a standard that id be proud enough to sell. This batch of mugs took around 2 months of making 6-8 mugs every week which quickly mounted up to around 55 mugs. I obviously couldn't bisque fire all of those mugs so I had to pick and choose. I ended up with 40 mugs. I planned to give away a fair few of these to friends and family plus I ran a give away on my socials to try and market my Series 1 mugs. Now, its my first time doing all these sort of things--selling my products and pushing myself to do uncomfortable stuff. I don't mind posting stuff on Instagram, but when I have to video myself--then I have to try work up the courage.

I aproached Fancy Lucky Seaside Shoppe which is located at The MacDonald House in Lawrencetown, Nova Scotia about possibly selling my pottery in there.It was a very successful day. Me and Liv decided to go for a litter pick around Lawrencetown and then she found a 20 dolla bill on the side of the road! So we decided to treat ourselves to lunch at The Heron’s Nest Tearoom because we cant get enough of their delicious soup! While we were in there we got talking about how cool it would be to have my pottery being sold locally in a location such as this one, so I worked up the courage, and showed them my Instagram page. It just so happened that they were looking for another potter to support, it was just the perfect day! This really put the pressure on for the glaze firing to go right.

I ordered a couple of new glazes just for this range of firings as I wanted to keep the colour scheme similar from piece to piece. The colours I ordered were pumpernickle, pink, purple and transparent. Because I had mixed the stoneware together on most of these pieces, I wanted to showcase the clays through the glaze, so my idea was to have a colour on the inside of the mug then run another colour down the top quarter into a transparent glaze down the bottom 3/4. The day I started to glaze I knew I had a task on my hands but not until I started to sand them down did I realise how big of task this was. I started at 9am and went on until 10pm that night. I started glazing a lot of them the same but halfway through things got distorted. I wasnt keeping track anymore of what glaze was going where and to be honest it was a learning curve. Sanding, applying the wax to the base and then glazing all the pieces in one day is not realistic. I need to be able to spread these jobs out to give myself more time to apply the glazes. With lots of help from my girlfriend Liv and her mum Candace we managed to get all the glazes applied and ready for the kiln the next morning. Everything got loaded and the kiln was set to hit cone 6.

The next day we where going snowboarding which was perfect to take my mind off the kiln. By the time we left, the kiln had already come down to 300f from 2200f. So I knew by the time we got back from snowboarding the kiln was going to be very ready to open. So just to be clear we have only had one bisque and one glaze firing previously to doing this glaze firing so we are still very new to this stage of the process so I was very nervous to lift the kiln lid. But it was such a glorious moment. Just to see all those shiney pieces glistening back at me, oh it was bloody exciting! Those next moments of unloading the kiln is such an exciting process, examining every peice as it comes out and trying to remember what the hell you did for it to come out looking like it does. Very rewarding!

Now that I have inventory I started to list my mugs on my website and advertise through Instagram, its been nothing but positive vibes, im soo grateful to have such a supportive network of people around me, friends and family buying my mugs from Canada and England! Its got me soo motivated to get back in the shed (not a shed right now, its just a spare room in our apartment) and shape away! Thank you for reading this blog post stay tuned for more!