Can you flatten this bottle for me? It's for a gift.

At Color Me Mine, I get a lot of odd questions from customers. Every couple of weeks (sometimes more frequently) people will come in with old ceramics they painted or made years ago that have since broken or chipped. Sometimes they've shattered. They'll ask if we can touch them up or re-fire them. We have a strict policy about not firing outside pieces which we explain as kindly as possible. Of course we're still often met with aggression over this fact. But usually it's very simple. We're all used to answering that question by now.

Sometimes people will come in and ask us to order replacement accessories (like iron holders for serving pieces or caps for travel mugs) for pieces that are over 20 years old or just simply not from our catalogues. That's always kind of weird, but I get why they would ask. We can never help them, either.

Occasionally the questions will get even more obscure like asking for a specific type of metallic paint from the seventies and wanting us to order a bottle so they can use an ounce (which they would presumably want us to fire afterwards, even though we don't fire outside pieces). We don't even use metallic paints (especially ones from the seventies since they'd no doubt have lead in them), much less have a supplier of old glazes.

We once had a woman go to a potter to get a custom piece made and then come here to have it fired. Insisted that we fire this piece which she had custom made because it was important to her. She paints here all the time and the pieces come out fine; why wouldn't this? She got increasingly more agitated as it became clear we weren't going to fire it. She clearly misunderstood our very clear conversation about not firing outside pieces and decided to threaten to get what she wants. Told us she would tell all of her friends not to paint here anymore and go to our competitor; and she has a _lot_ of friends.

We didn't fire the piece.

But today I got possibly the _weirdest_ question I've encountered. A very nice woman came in with a wine bottle that she'd carefully removed the label from. She asked me if she could rent our kiln to fire the bottle and flatten it. I'm not even sure what she's talking about. I have a very minor idea of how to work with glass (we considered doing certain glass projects here but decided on mosaics instead). But I have no idea how to flatten a bottle with a kiln and, moreso, why you'd want to. In my mind, it would just end up a misshapen long piece of glass. But I'm sure there are ways for it to keep it's shape; I just wouldn't know how. I ended up explaining to her that we both don't work with glass, only ceramic, and also don't fire outside pieces. I pointed her to Glassworks which is a similar concept to us but they work with, shock, glass. She was grateful and hopefully she'll let me know how it goes.

I was very excited. Sometimes I just _love_ the weird shit that comes up here. And I hate that I forget probably most of the best examples. So I've decided to start documenting them with a blog post every time they come up. Then one day hopefully I can write a book or my brother can make some Clerks-type movie and I'll be really wealthy.

Or at least I'll be entertained.