Winter in Columbia County

Here's a picture of the studio in this week's snow storm. It is beautiful up here in winter. One of my goals this year is to clean out and upgrade my production capacity so I can fulfill orders more promptly. So I am in the process of hauling 5 years worth of broken pottery into a dumpster parked in my driveway. I checked out several outsourcing possibilites in New York Sate and Massachusettes this fall and have decided to keep on producing the work myself. Making fine porcelain is not an easy task, which may be why the best of it tends to come from places like France, Germany, Belgium, Japan and China, places where ceramics have a much longer history than the USA. So, I will continue to plug away, refining my process and hope to be able to fill orders with a 2 week time frame. Since the vast majority of my work is made to order, 2 weeks would be a real break through for me. I basically work alone, which is also out of the box.

I have started working on a spring and summer collection. The new pallette is softer than the brights I have used in the past. I hope to have new work ready to publish in a month or so.

While I love working directly with people creating work and knowing who owns my things, I have new favorite store in Brooklyn called Greenjeans. Amy and Jae are remarkable people with a vision of consciencious living. They inspired me to create this blog with their blog
http://www.greenjeansbrooklyn.blogspot.com/

Winter is a great time to clean out, reassess and make resolutions. There is so much great stuff going on and sometimes I feel like there is too much bad news in the media. Communicating the good news has become the task of citizens. I hope to contribute to the good news here at my blog. It is thrilling to have access to technology that facilitates the telling of more of the story. The story of a potter living and working in upstate New York.

Warm regards-

Mary Anne