My first big custom order is almost complete. A restaurant here in San Francisco, Contigo, asked me to make about 30 of my wee bowls for use as salt dishes. Making the wee bowls has always been fun but sometimes it can be challenging to have that much fun… if you understand my meaning. It was quite an odyssey to make that many bowls, all within identical specifications. Let’s just say I was glad to get the order and glad now that they’re done. Tomorrow they will set out into the world, to be set out on tables in my own town. I’m fairly sure the owners will like my work.

However, complications do happen. After their second glaze firing I discovered that I’d somehow forgotten to inscribe anything on them. Blast! Inscribing is important: it makes each item personal, it let’s people know that someone actually hand made them, but more importantly who hand made them. I experimented with an overglaze but, sadly, there doesn’t seem to be any good way to fire them (I simply don’t keep that many tiny kiln stilts around). Now I’ve settled on the unlikely choice of marking them with an ordinary everyday Sharpie. Yes—as simple as that. Provided my handwriting is careful enough, things should finally be complete. 

If you’re ever in town, if you’re ever hungry, and if you ever visit the soon-to-open Contigo, carefully check under the little ceramic salt bowl on your table. Know that it came from someone who enjoyed making it, from someplace quite like this:

Bon appétit!

Contigo, improvising, Sharpie, wee bowls, works in progress This entry was posted on Thursday, January 8th, 2009 at 12:02 am and is filed under Pano-pol-blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.