Shades of Blue

I am not blue. And today, the sky is anything but blue. We have winds tearing at the pines in our yard. Winter's detritus is strewn from pillar to post. Top it all off with a side order of sleet, rain and freezing drizzle. Locally known as Ithacation.... it is definitely Ithacating today. Supposedly these 50mph gusts will let up around noon. Till then, we'll listen to the trees whistle and the house creak and moan.

So what's happening in the studio? A lot, and not a lot. I have been trying to get a lot of the year's grunt work done during the frozen months. We see the bulk of our sales happen during the summer months. I am sure that's true for most potters. Every summer, for the past three years, we have run out of pots during the summer. Not totally out of course, just out of the pots that someone wants. Usually this means being out of soup mugs, ice cream bowls, or mugs/tumblers. It happens seemingly every summer. No matter how hard I try to keep up with orders, we run out.

To try to cut this dilemma off at the knees, we have tried to estimate what we need to have on-hand for the summer onslaught. Looking at the prior year's sales would probably work, most of the time. Now though, with the economy in the toilet, how to we even begin to estimate (GUESS) what will see us through. Hard to know. So with that quandary in mind, I have been putting in double time in the studio lately. We have almost caught up to where I would like to be. Not bad. But still, nowhere near fully stocked. I think we'll get there though.