I promise I'll stop banging on about the market in a minute, but I really wanted to talk about my price tags.
So I saw a thing from a potter on Instagram where they had made price tags for their products out of clay and then glazed them. This meant they had a really clear way of sharing their prices with customers, in a reusable way - the pen just wipes off the glaze.
I love this idea and though it would probably work in glass too.
To start with, I wanted to create little 'tents' - take a square of card and fold it in half - it stands up by itself and should be easy to read. But I wanted to do this in glass.
So I bought some white glass. I cut it into the appropriate size squares and gave it a gentle fuse in the kiln to take off the sharp corners. So far so good.
But to make the tent I would need to slump the glass over something. This was much harder than I thought it would be. I had to find something that was the right shape and would be ok going in my kiln. We tried old bean cans, but couldn't get the right shape - once we took the bottom off they lost their structure.
So I ended up making a cardboard mock-up and building it in clay. This worked surprisingly well. I even added a little tab for the glass to sit on in the hope it would stay in place.
So now I had a lump of shaped cooked clay and a square of glass. I remembered to paint the clay with shelf primer so the glass wouldn't stick. I set it all up in the kiln then walked away. Not much I can do once it's going.
I really thought it would work, so I was pretty disappointed to come back and find the glass had fallen off the clay mould. In doing so it had then curled up. This made me laugh - there is no way I could have done that if I tried!
So that didn't work and I was reluctant to waste any more glass, and time was running out. However, while moaning about it, I had a new idea. What if they were just flat pieces of glass cut to a 'price tag' shape.
I cut them, did a little fuse to take the sharp corners off, drilled a hole in the top and threaded some festive string through. Done!
They worked perfectly! Easy to read, easy to change if needed and looked fun. I had some lovely comments from people about them. So while they didn't turn out quite as I imagined, I was able to pivot and still do what I needed to. Win!
