It's the end of the year as we know it

My holiday season officially ended yesterday morning, when I mailed off all the Christmas packages to family in the midwest. We'll still be taking it a little easy, watching Dr. Who on New Year's with snacks and cider, leaving the tree up until Epiphany, but as far as pottery goes, I'm already back to work.

Decided to start slowish, with some unusual special orders. By next week, I'll probably be in production mode, whilst also dealing with Clay Fest and Clayfolk meetings, getting organized with show applications and starting to think about Ceramic Showcase graphics. Yesterday and today, though, I concentrated on 25 lbs. of weird stuff. 

Giant coffee mugs and little mis-en-place cups for a regular customer, and cat-handled mugs, a discontinued item I'm doing just this once.

And a couple of international designs: canning funnels from the Alsace region of France, and a very odd olive oil cruet modeled after a Near Eastern original.

I'm not sure what I want to do next: boring production pots, or more tricky stuff. I have an order for an oval platter, and I really need to stock up on teapots...