Happy. Made a lot of cool stuff in the pottery studio: a goat shaped teapot, a small paddled lidded box with feet, three bowls (one of which will be a small colander), a small pitcher sort of thing, a UFO shaped....umm....is it a vase or???? heck, I don't know. It just is... The teapot took the most time, about two hours, and that is only for the plastic stage; all of these pieces will need cleaning up as they harden into the leather-hard stage.

I made a big, freaky, morel mushroom shaped piece that is supposed to be a lamp or candle holder. The netted cap is cut through with the same diamond shaped netted pattern as on the real thing (well, sort of...) so that a source of light can shine out of it, and it just went into the bisque firing, along with my first two wood ash glaze experiments. :-)

I am ashamed to say that I am getting bored with the current range of available glazes....ashamed because really, it is such a wide array of choices compared to those available to most of humanity's potters over the centuries. The Greeks did most of their work in red, black, and white, and it was slip, not even real glaze!

We have:

• Emerald Green: fairly reliable, transparent green, like a clear forest green color, which crackles under the right conditions. Nice.
  
• Celadon: which is a baby-diarrhea yellow green with brownish black spots- yuck! But when over glazed with Seacrest Purple, it turns to a deep clear coffee brown.
  
• Seacrest Purple: Really more of a brown which can go to a deep denim blue-purple when reduced, and various shades of attractive browns. If you use this one glaze, the piece can look as if you applied several colors. This is a good default because it hardly ever looks bad, and it is always a surprise!
  
• Rose's Red: Has a split personality. It can be a pale, delicate celadon type green, or when reduced, a vibrant, streaking red, sometimes with hints of pink. The last batch hardly reduced at all, so a lot of piece which were supposed to be voluptuously red turned out pale green.
  
• Iron Red: more reliable than Rose's Red if you want Red, but also a lot more opaque, and can run the risk of looking dead. When it looks good, which is often enough, it is great, and frequently has exciting metallic effects.
  
• Kansas Black: doesn't always turn black. Sometimes it is red, or a brownish red. It also has the capability for metallic effects, and I haven't had an ugly piece with this color yet that I can think of.
  
• Lapis Blue: Ranges from a pale, washed out matte opaque blue to a beautiful but thin transparent blue that approaches cobalt in color. The thing is, you can't be certain which you will get, and I am a sucker for true blue.
  
• Mamo White: A milky opaque white with big brown dots and brown speckling. In my opinion, sort of ugly, but very nice when combined with certain other colors.
  
• White Night- very white, no brown dots; I haven't tried it.
  
• Shino: From oatmealy textured off whites to pleasant apricot, occasionally a little darker. Another fairly reliable glaze that usually turns out nicely.
  
• Transparent: what it sounds like, a clear transparent glaze which can be used over slips and uderglazes.
  
• Green with Envy: I haven't tried this one either, because it is this very intense, very opaque, flat turquoise-teal green color that I am not too fond of. However, after seeing how well it went under Mamo, I might give it a try. The white toned it down quite a bit.

And I think that's all of them.....so I really shouldn't complain. It is just that I really want the deep cobalt blue that comes from cobalt carbonate....

Also am trying to remember if I have done any test glazes combining Shino and black, or Shino and red.....hmmmm.

But yeah, now that I'm over the stomach flu, it's been a great week. :-)