Ceramics & Kanban

As I’ve started throwing more bowls, pots, and vases, I’m trying to perfect the forms I make and also trying to experiment with glaze more. I’m producing more pieces and need to keep track of my work, and also need a way to log how I’m experimenting so I can recreate the happy accidents.

I’ve decided that means its time I use a kanban board through my current favorite productivity platform - Notion!

Its been pretty helpful for a few reasons - I go to a community studio so theres always hundreds of other pieces floating around the studio. I need to remember what I’m working on so I can find it in the shelves. There can be a week or more sometimes between when I put something in the zone for bisque firing and when it shows back up as been fired by the studio staff. I’m sure I would forget about some of my work if I didn’t track it.

More importantly, I’m using this as a way to track the effects different glaze combinations and applications have. Some are not successful at all and some look fantastic. Both valuable to note so I can recreate the stuff I dig.

Within each card, I track a before shot (so I can remember what the piece looked like when I’m searching for it), write the color combo and details of how I applied, and an after shot.

Scrum master might find my process terrible but this is a nice improvement over writing down nothing.