New Glaze Tests

Glazing is the one pottery task that I have struggled to embrace.  I am always worried that I have messed up a beautiful piece and there is not much you can do about it.  In addition, waiting 24 hours to see if you did screw up is excruciatingly painful for a person not blessed with patience.  I have found that documenting my tests is making the process more bearable, even fun.  The tests below are done on a medium dark stoneware clay.  Some of the colors we use regularly and others are new.  As always, if you have questions or want recipes, just ask!

This is one of our favorites.  It is Celestial Blue over Red Gold.  It is drippy and runny often drips on our shelves.  But, if we are careful it makes beautiful pots.

 Red painted over Red Gold.  This combination is pretty stable and doesn't run.  It does vary in the redness.

 I was pretty excited to try this combination and a little disappointed in the results.  This is Moss painted over Red Gold.  It started as a stripe of paint, and as you can see, ended up a blob of color because it ran so bad.

 This tile is Celestial Blue.  We use this as an accent color a lot.  It is nice alone or on top of other colors.

 This is Tom Grey Red.  We love it alone or with other colors layered on top.

 Scapes.  This is a glaze combo that starts with Tom Grey Red as a base and has orange, red and blue layered on top.  It is slightly unpredictable as it can turn out with very vibrant colors or muted with lots of gold like the tile on the left.

 This is the most interesting test I did.  I think we may have mixed the glaze wrong.  This is called Field Mouse Brown.  It looks very black except for where the glaze broke over the number.  We will be mixing and testing this again.

 Spearmint with some alterations.  I love this color but it didn't photograph very well.  It has some hints of blue green in it.  I think we will be mixing another batch and see if we can lighten it up just a little bit.





This is Everglade.  It looks a lot like the Gun Metal Green that we already use.





I am already working on the tiles for my next glaze.   I am hoping in the next month or so we will have some new colors to put in our Etsy shop.

Hell is being a gardener in Montana

The weather has been decent here for a couple of days which means it hasn't rained and our property is not flooded. Because it has been so nice I decide I would plant some more cucumbers in my raised bed for the THIRD time. They have frozen twice now and I have woke to tiny shriveled plants that were, the night before, tasty fresh cucumber salads and fabulous pickles. As I am planting these tiny plants of hope, I realize that I am humming "Hell is for children" by Pat Benatar, only in my head it is "Hell for gardeners". Then I remember the pictures my Mom posted of her garden and the words become "Hell is for Montana gardeners". (Mom, I love your garden pictures so please don't take this to heart!)

When I moved into my boyfriend's (now my wonderful husband) house, it looked like the picture below.

There was nothing. I didn't understand why you would have that much space and not plant a single thing in six years. I understand now. It breaks your heart. All the hope and anticipation is wiped out in one night by a hard frost on the Fou

rth of July, a herd of deer or a tiny bunny that you once thought was cute but now only wish your air pump gun would shoot harder and farther.

The really sad part of this story is that no one told me that my heart would be broken. When I talked of planting beautiful flowers and tasty vegetables the locals just nodded their heads and gave me that "poor, poor girl" look. It is only recently that I realized it was the same look my husband gave me as I was buying plants at the nursery to create my garden wonderland.

I have managed to get some things to grow as the after picture below shows. But my little gardening heart is still broken in this mountain climate every year, and I still have not managed to get a single cucumber plant to grow here.