If you've been doing glass work for any length of time, you know the binder. Maybe yours is a three-ring stuffed with loose pages. Maybe it's a spiral notebook with sticky tabs falling off. Mine was both, plus some random scraps of paper floating around the studio.
This was not a good system.
The thing about firing glass is that the details matter. Temperature, hold times, which kiln you used, how full it was. All of it can change the result. And when something turns out beautifully, you want to be able to do it again. When something goes wrong, you need to figure out why.
I ruined a project once because I was sure I had the most current firing schedule in my binder. I didn't. Somewhere between updating my notes and actually finding them again, I'd lost track of what was current. That piece of glass was expensive. The mistake was more expensive.
And here's the other thing I always wanted: photos. Notes can tell you what you did, but a photo can show you something notes can't. I wanted to look at my finished pieces right alongside each firing log, so I could quickly see which schedule produced the look I was after, instead of trying to describe it in words.
So I built My Kiln Journal.
It lets you log every firing: schedules, notes, before and after photos, even ratings for how the piece turned out. You can search by kiln, filter by tags and ratings, and track maintenance across multiple kilns. No more binder. No more guessing if what you found is the most recent version. No more losing the thing that finally worked.
I built it because I needed it. After 20+ years of glass work, I was tired of wasting time searching for information I knew I had somewhere. If any of this sounds familiar, check out My Kiln Journal. You can try it free.