Table full of test tiles

Yesterday was my Mother's day off; and of course I didn't get to all those paper piles, but I did get to actually read the whole Sunday paper on a Sunday. I usually don't get through that till Tuesday or later. A couple of household and gardening chores were done early in the day and I updated some glaze notes and did some glaze chemistry.

Jim took me to dinner at the Rogue River Lodge, which was good enough to go back another time. The drive is lovely and the river is always beautiful. We even saw a couple of pairs of Canadian geese and their goslings relaxing at the rivers edge.

I quickly perused these test tiles and made a couple of follow up notes Saturday and got a couple more tests weighted out, and threw some test tiles. The stains and lug and velvet under glazes give luscious colors, but I'm hoping to get a couple of these colors in slips without having to use expensive stains for large batches of dipping or pouring slips, so I'm going to do a couple of more of the green tests and see if I can refine some the colors I've already gotten. Ideally, the lugs and velvets will be used for small accent colors.

This morning was spent hand watering and planting a few more annuals and filling out a whole bunch of papers for our new doctor. We've been here a year and still didn't have a family practicioner. Then I had to get on the phone to order some things.

Next stop will be the studio for me to do weight out a couple of the altered green slip recipes and get those on to the tiles I threw Saturday.

All in all I'm happy with these tests. Some are what I was looking for and others are close enough to give me a clue as to how to tweak them. So far, I have my own clear glaze which is really good; and it doesn't rely on ghastly borate. The black slip tests are fine, so I'll be making a small batch of that soon. I figure that will be lovely on small pitchers, mugs, slab trays, etc with green, yellow or orange slip trailing.

 I'm close to the warm, buttercup yellow slip and somewhat close to the two light greens I'm looking for, so I'll weight those out today and get them on to the test tiles which are leather hard now and hopefully they'll be dry enough to fire Thursday.

Time to get moving. I have five hours before I have to come in and start on dinner.