Two years Ago or Maybe Less

Two years ago or so I was trying to add comments to our blog on at least a weekly basis and failing badly. Then life happened and the Pot blog disappeared into limbo. Behold, the phoenix arises from the ashes once again and a new pot blog is born.

So let me see...what has happened in the last two years. A year ago we closed the studio and gallery on Jasper Avenue after the writing on the wall became so clear a blind person could read it. Art is a difficult item to sell when the economy is good. When the economy starts to slip it becomes much more difficult. Add to that the fact our location was less than prime, the building remained vacant of other ground floor tenants, we were being ignored by the media and the local Craft Council, and we just decided we didn't want to play anymore.

The past year has been a time of introspection and rebuilding. We have set up our studio in our basement. We have a home business licensed by the city. A MAJOR home business since we have stored some items in our garden shed! That meant that we had to apply for a development permit and the neighbours were contacted to see if they had any objections. If we had "forgotten" we were storing anything in the shed we could have skipped the development permit and bothering the neighbours and walked out with our license that day. As it was, we were honest so paid another $150 bucks and waited two weeks. Then we had to make sure our insurance company and our Landlord's insurance company were on the same page. Got that done too! Now we can legally do business again.

So...we just finished a wedding registry order for a couple in Ontario. A little over a kiln load of pots (in our 16 cu ft kiln). It's kind of a neat story...

When we started shipping pottery to the states years ago from sales on the Internet we learned every piece needed to be clearly marked with the country of origin so Cindy decided to use a rubber stamp which said Alberta, Canada and since we were going to stamp each piece anyway she added another stamp which says Out of the Fire Studio.

One of our retail outlets for a number of years has been The Kitchen Nook in Thunder Bay, Ontario. We have shipped several boxes of pots there over time. A young couple had purchased one of our tea pots a couple of years or more ago, and one day broke the lid. They lived in Kenora, and were not sure how they could fix the teapot. However, on the bottom of the pot, along with Cindy's signature of Clarke, was our stamp. To the computer, one Google search later, and we received a phone call, asking if it was possible to make a replacement lid. Since we have made several styles over the past ten years we asked if she could send the broken lid to us and a few days later it arrived. Cindy made a couple of possible replacements, and when we asked if they wanted to mail them out, we were told just to hang on to them as the couple was going to visit Edmonton in a few days and they would pick them up, and oh, by the way did we do wedding registries. Well, the rest as they say is history. The little $15 rubber stamp paid for itself that day to say the least. The Pots will be delivered this week, and this family will have our pottery collection in their home for years to come.

Sometimes it is hard to imagine just how many people we have touched with our pottery over the past ten years. For at least two of those years we were shipping over ten tons of pots per year to 50 retailers across Canada and online sales so quite probably we have had pots in thousands of homes . By now it could all be landfill but we would hope not!

Anyway, I've rambled a bit today but it is good to get the blog up and running again. With Facebook, and Clay Art, and Twitter, there are lots of outlets if one wants to be verbose. We'll see if I can keep this blog a little more current in the future.