This morning Jim and Dominique went on an adventure to the Woodbound Inn to have breakfast with the Jaffrey Chamber of Commerce.
This blog post is written through the perspective of Dom. I plan on having everyone take their turn to write blog posts, hopefully this will be successful and interesting to all.
I have not explored much of the Woodbound Inn, and today we got to experience a whole new little building around the back. We ate some breakfast and spoke with our neighbors for a bit before our speaker began. Today the speaker was Annie Card, who also helped our business when we were first starting up. She did a "Marketing Fitness Test" to help your business increase awareness and increase visibility. We are proud to say that we did very well on our test, a small reward for all of our hard work. One of the things that we lost points on was not maintaining a business blog. Here we are now, giving it a try!
At the end of the meeting a representative from the Shattuck Golf Course handed out fliers asking for vendors at "Shattuckfest". A vendor sets up a business display with a sign for free to decorate the golf course. Apparently the golf course does some very exciting activities in the fall including golf cart rides showing the foliage! Time to start brainstorming the kind of setup we may like to do! ... hmmm.... Glass pumpkins, a bale of straw, a glassblower scare crow! Oooo the possibilities. Maybe a "glory hole" and a bent blow pipe display. We need to have it figured out, and set up by September 20th.
Today will be a good day at the studio. I am still fighting a jaw injury, so first I will go to my physical therapist. While I have my appointment, Josh will be teaching our regular student Christine. What she wants to work on, I'm not sure. Christine is an amazing student, always present and focused throughout class. Every time she is in the studio she makes huge strides of improvement, it is wonderful to watch.
After Christine's class we have one basic intro class with two woman. Then we will begin working on making more small pumpkins. Today we are letting the furnace get really low, basically emptying out the pot.
For those of you that don't know what I'm talking about - We have one large furnace that runs at 2075 degrees all the time. Inside the furnace is a ceramic pot that holds 135 pounds of glass when it is full. After almost every work day we "charge" the furnace; we throw more glass inside. Overnight the glass melts down and the bubbles that got trapped between the nuggets of glass floats to the top.
Today we are letting the furnace get low for two reasons -
1. We keep finding little rocks in our glass and we want to make sure there aren't a bunch of them floating around in the furnace. If there are we may need to address an issue with the "crown", the ceramic chunks that sit over the top of the furnace. We also want to clean out as much of the rock chunks as possible so that they don't interfere with our work, our renters work, and our students work.
2. It is time that we start with some fresh glass. My comparison for this is as though you are constantly cooking a pot of chili. Everyday you add fresh ingredients on top of the chili. Eventually you want to empty that pot and start fresh. If you don't you will have chewy, stringy, overcooked chili. There is some glass in our furnace that is overcooked and it is time to start anew.
Well, I'm off to check e-mails and get settled before today's "real" work begins!
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