– Creek Road Pottery LLC Newsletter – August 31st, 2026 –
Hello from rural Pennsylvania, where the car finally got unloaded, the Milk Cup collection shipped out to the Collectors Club, and I spent an early morning fixing a stranger’s kiln in California from my kitchen table. The last two weeks closed out the Harford Fair, opened the door to family and the Washington County Fair in New York, and left me thinking hard about self-awareness, incompetence, and how much of what I do runs on autopilot until I stop and actually look at it.
This has been a season of shows back to back, and this newsletter reflects that. Breakdown days, sales tallies, dates with my wife squeezed in between twelve-hour shifts, and September looming as the month I need to build enough inventory to survive three shows in October. Here is the full report.
All Set Up, Then Not Selling, Then Selling
The booth went up at Harford, number 141, Main Arena Alley, alongside the rest of the Northeast PA Artist Collective. There is a particular kind of quiet in the minutes after a booth is finished and before the gates open, where you get to just look at a season’s worth of work laid out together instead of as a hundred separate tasks. For the first couple of days the pots did not sell while the other artists did well, and I made peace with that. My goal for almost any show is to sell one thing. One thing means you showed up and said look what I made. The satisfaction was always supposed to come from the journey and the firing, not the sales sheet.
Then Friday night came, cooler with no rain, and my wife worked the booth with me. A few pots sold. Family and friends stopped by. The crowd was different that night, families there for the rodeo as much as the crafts, and it reminded me that each show and each crowd is its own thing, not a repeat of the last one. We are not our past. Each day is a new version of ourselves with a new chance to do better, and each show is the same way.
A Kiln in California at 1 A.M.
One night my sleep pattern got flipped from working nights at the factory, and around 1 a.m. I got a text from someone in California with a stalled gas kiln. Images and video came through, I knew the problem right away, and after some back and forth the temperature started climbing again and made it to cone in a few hours. It is a strange kind of good deed, fixing a stranger’s kiln from three thousand miles away in the middle of the night, and I was glad to help save a load of pots I will never see in person.
That night reminded me how much of the value in this community comes from people willing to show up for each other at odd hours over odd problems. Nobody builds a kiln alone. Nobody troubleshoots one alone either, apparently, even across a continent.
Breakdown Day and the Tally
Packing up the booth and settling accounts is its own kind of work, separate from the making and the selling. We photographed all the sales sheets and had each artist tally their own totals, since nobody watches their own sales as closely as they do. I also ran the images through Claude A.I. to build a spreadsheet, which needed some back and forth over handwriting it could not read clearly. A.I. is simply a computer doing math tricks with rules people designed. I do not treat it as all-knowing. I am the cross-check, and I have learned to expect that role rather than resent it.
Small items outsold the expensive ones again this year, and what sold well last year did not always sell well this year. The crowd decides more than the price tag does. I am thinking about expanding the collective by a few more artists, which keeps the idea alive that we are all picking ourselves rather than waiting to be picked, and it also splits up the long hours at the booth. Tensions come up sometimes when people work closely together, a little like family bickering, but the collaboration is worth the friction every time.
Self-Awareness
Self-awareness is not the same as self-criticism, and I have spent years confusing the two. Self-criticism tells you what you did wrong. Self-awareness just notices what you are actually doing while you are doing it, without the judgment attached. It is what let me catch myself cleaning the shop instead of making pots, and see that the cleaning was avoidance wearing work gloves. It is what let me notice, ten years into running this pottery, that it had never actually been a daily practice.
The hard part is watching yourself without flinching from what you see. I procrastinate. I get distracted by interesting problems that have nothing to do with the task in front of me. Seeing that clearly does not feel good, but not seeing it keeps the pattern running forever. Self-awareness might be the skill underneath most of the other skills I write about here. You cannot test grace if you do not notice when you are doing it. You cannot catch self-sabotage if you cannot see the pattern forming.
Three Kinds of Incompetence
I came up with three forms of incompetence worth telling apart. Weaponized incompetence is doing a task badly on purpose, or claiming you cannot learn something, just to get out of responsibility. It ruins relationships and steals time, and it is better to just say this is not for me. Strategic incompetence is different. It is saying no thanks to a responsibility you genuinely do not want, treating each ask like a gift you are allowed to decline so you can protect your time for the things that matter more to you. The last kind is simply not knowing yet, the honest kind, where you say bear with me, I have no idea what I am doing, but we will get through it. That kind resolves itself through practice, the same way learning to fire a rocket kiln or build an arch resolves itself. When you hit a roadblock, you reroute, the way a GPS does, and keep moving toward the destination.
Looking Toward September and October
The end of the fair season means the start of the harder push. Three shows are coming almost back to back in October, and I have never been good at building inventory ahead of time. September needs to be the month where that changes, since October will leave no time to throw or fire once it starts. I am hoping to make more raku pieces along with a few new forms I have not tried before, bonsai pots, coffee pour-overs, and maybe some covered dishes. Two glaze ingredients I have relied on are no longer available, which means a glaze revamp is coming too, whether I planned for it or not.
I am also thinking about how I use my vacation days. Nearly all of them go toward working shows rather than actually resting, and that might need to change in the new year. For now, the priority is inventory, and I am trying to see the challenge as something that adds excitement rather than stress, even though by the time October hits I suspect I will feel both in equal measure.
I hope everyone is having a great start to fall. Every comment, visit, and bit of encouragement is most helpful to hear. Be sure to keep making work that matters for the people who care and pick yourself. Life is far too short not to.
Until next time,
Alford Wayman
Artist/ Owner
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