A day at Kleistone Studio: what it means to run a community ceramic studio
What does it mean to run a community ceramic studio?
This little reel shows you what we get done in a day’s work, as the first preview of our series “A day at Kleistone”. We will go into more details of each activity in future videos.
In this video you will see how we typically spend the day, although to be fair this was a really full day.
We usually start the day by unloading the kiln. We put the pieces from our members on their shelves and the rest, which is usually firing service or classes, we put away on class shelves or boxes. If we have finished firing a whole class or firing service, we group the pieces together and send the emails to the owners.
We then prep the studio for opening and make sure everything looks nice.
We take care of the reclaim, which is a stinky but necessary job. The more people we have in the studio, the more often we need to do this. We have a whole blog post on reclaiming clay, by the way!
In this video you also see us mixing glazes, which thankfully we don’t have to do too often. In this case, we were mixing our studio white glaze, which we mix from scratch. It’s our most solid reliable glaze and we use it to glaze all taster class pieces, which you also see us do here.
Our studio is also a shop open to the public and we sell clay kits and other ceramic tools. This means we need to make sure our inventory is stocked up and we have enough clay kits in the display.
During the day we also usually load a new kiln. Our kiln, Nora, rarely takes breaks. We have a packed schedule and lots of work to fire. Here you see us load a glaze fire, but don’t worry, we have a more in-depth video coming up on that soon.
At the end of day we clean up and mop and turn on the kiln. Turning on the kiln is the last thing we do before leaving as we don’t want to be in the studio while it’s firing up to temperature.
We hope you will enjoy this series! More soon. After Easter we will probably do a live kiln unload. Stay tuned.
