Tedium pays off

 This baby pot is 1 1/2 inches tall or should I say 1 1/2 inches "short". This is before applying and firing with a transparent glaze.

 The "adult" pot is 8 inches tall including the lid.

When I threw this pot I was a little confused about the clay I had. It looked dark but after I had pushed the ferns onto the pot and actually painted on about three coats of slip, I had a memory flash. I remembered that the clay fired buff not brown and probably had iron speckles in it. The speckles I figured were a good thing but the buff clay wouldn't give me the contrast of dark and light that I was looking for. Ugh!  So instead of scrapping the plan, I took some dark brown slip and then painted each fern leaf. Talk about tedious. But it worked. What surprised me, was that the underlying clay color showed through the slip layer and gave it an antiqued look. I'm going to have to make more like this but without the tedious parts. A full layer of dark slip under the white slip should do the trick.