white picket pieces

I came home from a brief excursion on Cape Cod to a mailbox full of email. Something happened while I was away, something GOOD! Thank you Lisa!

Last week I did something really dumb. I was finishing up the final pieces for two orders, had everything glazed and it was sitting on my table ready to go and I noticed some bald spots in the glaze. I thought I'd better attend to them before loading the kiln so I grabbed what I thought was glaze from a box underneath my table and applied it to the thin spots on the work. The next day when I opened the kiln and peeked in I noticed something was funny. The vases did not look right, like they had a crackled white wash on top of the glaze. I paused, walked away from the kiln, walked back to the kiln, looked again, thought some more, going over what I had done the day before, then walked back to the table with the box of glazes and picked up the container I thought was glaze, looked at the lable...oh dear, I used engobe thinking it was glaze. See the containers for the engobe and glaze are exactly the same, I don't usually use engobe but had a container of it to experiment with and wasn't thinking to be careful about making sure the containers didn't get mixed up. I am guilty of grabbing and brushing. So now I have five vases that look like white washed picket fences. Sometimes these accidents with ceramics can be gifts, a new technique discovered but not this one. They're ugly. I don't know why but the whole thing kinda made me laugh. No matter how long I have been doing this mistakes still happen and with ceramics and one must always leave a wide margin for error as there is so much to be accounted for with the medium. I am usually lucky and have never made this mistake before. I guess it is my offering to the Clay Gods, seems they were feeling hungry and had a hankering for vases.