In order to get a feel for ceramics, I decided to try out producing something in ceramics old-school-style. I took a potter's wheel induction class and had a great time playing with clay. After some practice, I managed to throw a tea cup very close to the one that I have in my mind for my tea set. The picture below shows my tea cup, right after I took it off from the potter's wheel (throwing clay on the potter's wheel is a very messy business so I didn't want to take pictures).
I let the cup dry for a night. When I returned to it the morning after, I was too scared to put it back on the potter's wheel to shape the bottom. So I just decided to carve it round with a knife.
I left the tea cup to dry for over 10 days, until it was bone-dry. I then biscuit fired it in the kilt at low temperature. This enabled me to grind the bottom of the tea cup with sand paper in order to make it more smooth. If I had fired the cup at a higher temperature, the cup would have become too hard to grind it.
Voilà, my interim prototype, consisting of my 3D printed tea pot and my hand thrown tea cup.