Breaking Bad

For as fragile as my product is, I get surprisingly little breakage from customers. (I can think of maybe two pieces in 20 years.) Other vendors are occasionally a risk--my second year at Holiday Market, someone banged my shelves through the curtain from their booth and vibrated a pot off the shelf.

Booth assistants can also be more trouble than help. The Coupeville Arts Festival provides load-in crews, energetic teenaged volunteers the better to get vans unloaded and off of the crowded streets. More than once I've gotten to the bottom of a box to find someone set it down on the pavement a little too enthusiastically and broke the bottom pot.

Even the wind is a hazard. This past June at a show in Roseburg, several spaces to the west of me didn't sell, so I had an unexpected corner booth. Equally unexpected were the wind gusts that blew up Friday, rattling the canopy and actually blowing pots off the shelves. Several plates flipped off their stands on the grid panel, and a soup bowl--stand and all--slid over the edge of the shelf, taking out another bowl on the table below.

But by far the worst culprit, where breakage is concerned, is me. I'll stack boxes precariously in the van or on the ground. Take an overloaded hand truck over uneven footing. Bang pots on other pots while reaching them onto the shelves. Sometimes I'm amazed I have anything to sell at all.

But I'm reminded of what my friend Deb said after we returned to our respective homes after a pottery workshop, and discovered what airline baggage handlers had done to our pots.

They're just things. You'll make more.

Do Touch

From offcenter.biz, May 2014.



She snaps "Don't touch!" and inwardly I cringe. Another Saturday, another mom and kids in my Market booth. Or it could be a father, a grandparent, all enforcing the hands-off policy.

And it really bugs me. By saying "Don't touch," in that tone of voice, what we're teaching kids is that pottery is scary: dangerous, fragile, untouchable.

Children learn by touching. They pat things, they pet things, they put them in their mouths. Saying don't touch is tantamount to saying "You can't know about this stuff."

I don't know about you, but I've been noticing that my audience, the people who appreciate and purchase my pottery, is aging. We're going gray, clearing out the cupboards, downsizing. I'm trying to make a living as a potter. If we frighten our children away from pottery, where is the next generation of customers going to come from?

And the funny thing is, hardly any of my work has ever been broken by kids--I remember one incident in twenty years. Heck, I break more than that in a given month.

So I have a different rule in my booth. No "Don't Touch." Everybody, big or little, gets to pet the pottery. Only grown-ups are allowed to pick it up.

And nobody gets to put it in their mouth.