Clay Pottery Organizing Tips

Video Transcript

"So now I just want to talk a little bit about organization and keeping track of the things that you've done. If you keep track of everything it can help you with your consistency in your pieces, in your glazes, it can help you know your kiln costs, etcetera. I'll show you a little bit. I have a sketch book here. In this book I keep any forms, any new forms, new ideas, things that I might want to try in the future. It's just a good way to keep track all in one place of your ideas. This book here, is actually my list of sizes and weights. And it's got all the forms that I do that I've done on a regular basis. It's got my glazes and how I layer the glazes in order to get the effects that I'm looking for. So that if I haven't made a piece in a while, I can come back to this as reference and be able to make it the same way that I did six months ago. Now, another really important thing to do is keep track of your glazes. Here, I've got my glaze recipes, they're just on note cards like you would with normal recipes, but in addition to keeping the recipes, I also keep a log of when I make the glazes. This is really important because you can - if your glaze isn't coming out right you can go back to your log and see if you did something wrong, if you wrote the wrong number for a particular material. You've got that documentation there and you can fix your problem. Now one last thing that I like to keep track of is my kiln. And what I do is every time I load a kiln, I mark whether it was a bisque firing or a glaze firing. And how much inventory was in that kiln. This helps me keep track of what my retail value I'm getting out of each firing, so that I can know what my costs are per piece and per glaze load. And just keeping these kind of items around the studio is a really great way to keep yourself in check."