Send us your photos!

The original production color was to be bay, and several tests were produced. However, painting the black roached mane proved to be too exacting for large-scale production, so Joan chose a shaded light gray instead.

A batch of eight original finish gray Limericks was produced including several test pieces. The pottery retained two test pieces and sold the rest. But when Joan painted a custom chestnut for a friend, she realized that chestnut was pretty and producible, and it became the production color.

Within the chestnut run, there are three major variations in finish. Unlike some previous models, however, all of Limerick's variations were produced in reasonably large numbers, and the avid collector can obtain all of them for reasonable prices.

All chestnut Limericks have dark hooves and dark shading on the face, ears, knees, hocks, and genitals. They have a right front sock, a pink muzzle snip, and gray leg chestnuts.

The first Limericks produced had solid chestnut tails, and are called the dark tail tip variation. If your Limerick does not have a light tail tip, she was made early in the run. This is the rarest variation, incorporating less than a third of the run.

The next, and most common, variation is the light tail tip Limerick. As the name implies, she sports a flaxen tail tip. These models tend to have slightly more contrast in their shading than dark tail tip Limericks, and were made in the middle of the run.

The final variation occurred when Joan discovered that adding a dark dorsal stripe made painting easier— it alleviates the difficulty of matching across the topline when painting one side at a time. The dorsal stripe Limericks have a distinct dark brown dorsal stripe and darker coloring along the whole topline, which increases shading and adds a wonderful depth to the paint job. These Limericks were made at the end of the run.