10/21/2021
This is the giant project we took on as a group. 230 Chip and Dip sets in a month
During mercury in retrograde
Twenty years ago, my first teacher told me to never make chip & dips and then gave me a set of reasons not to. Being a contrarian, I spent the last two decades theoretically fixing all of the roadblocks in my head for these and when the team at Mike Albert called, it was the weird fulfillment of a dream.
Making them in two parts was to speed up drying time. It also lets you refill or refrigerate the dip without affecting your chip game. It’s also to help with the storage conundrum— platter form with a thing sticking up in the middle? Where do you store that?
Next up, I don’t have enough bats to throw them as platters. Solution? Bowl forms for the chip part. Also, that made it easier to fire. For part time potters or folks who don’t load your own work, it’s a lot of difficulty to load platters
Next issue, labor. I simply couldn’t teach someone else the form, and I didn’t have the physical strength to do this many myself in that short a time frame. So as a team we farmed out to each other the parts that we were all good at. I had help with trimming, glazing, firing, organizing, packing, everything. If I didn’t have the greatest team in the world to work with, this would’ve been impossible. Every day I spent an hour building capacity and trying to speed up the flow. When we started, I maxed out at 6 a day, 24 by the end of it ( production friends, I have so much respect for you all, it was truly exhausting)
Things that went wrong: our clay supplies ran low and new batches were WONKY. Overly dense on one batch, badly mixed on the next. Not showing up when expected (thanks, 2021). Next up, the kilns—they died. Three electric kilns, all went down at the same time. Then we had employees out on vacation (cause we gotta take care of ourselves before holiday busy-time). I can’t remember what the other issues were, it has all blended together, but this was a hell of a project and I’m so proud of it.
