The power of second and third chances

Yesterday I was so excited to open my kiln, it is always exciting when you have new combinations of glazes, however I did not have good results!  I had to re-glaze at least half of my pots!!  I am so glad that it is possible to re-glaze.  Some of the pieces that I have re-glazed have turned out to be my most beautiful pieces.  I never take pictures of things that are ugly so I have no before pictures but trust me they were ugly.  This got me thinking about my own life, there have been a lot of really ugly moments in my life, really ugly but I didn't stay ugly.  Some people do, stay ugly that is, they are bitter until the day that they die.  Life throws really hard stuff at us at times and we can choose to stay in that place or we can allow the master potter to re-glaze us.
I may have gone through stuff that no one else would ever want to go through.  I have actual had people say that when they are feeling bad about their life they just think of us and feel that their life isn't so bad, not sure how I feel about that, lol.  The point is I didn't stay ugly, I really feel that I am more caring, compassionate, non judgmental and  more.
I get so excited when I take pottery out of the kiln that used to be ugly and now it is beautiful, some time it takes up to 5 firings to get something beautiful.  The only problem is, I can't recreate the piece, I can never achieve the same look again.  Each of us goes through different ugly periods of our life and if we allow God to re-glaze us, he will turn the ugly into something beautiful but it won't look the same as anyone else, you will be uniquely different.
Here are a few of my extra special re-glazed mugs!

Love this one!!

I wish I could recreate this combination, I love how it looks like fire.

Learning and growing!

The last two years have been a whirlwind of change.  I started my first pottery lesson 2 years ago in the fall 2014, opened my store/studio, the spring of 2015.  Yesterday I had to apply for a GST # because my sales were very close to the limit, crazy!!!
So I have been using the square for taking credit card payments for the past year and I just found out that you can build a square store for free, that's right free, how did I not know this! Another great bonus is it will keep track of my inventory, woohoo, that will save me lots of hours.
here is a link to my store

Here are some more glaze tests:

I love love these mugs, 2x of Oatmeal, 2x of Seaweed 3/4 down and 2x of Ancient Jasper on rim.

This, no clue, I thought I would remember but nope!

I need to write down everything.  I do know there was 2 base coats of Oatmeal, I think Textured Amber brown on the bottom, then chun plum, Arctic blue, seaweed, Textured turquoise and I think Ancient jasper on the rim.