Fig. 66
Birds' Drinking Dish
| Materials Required: | About 2 ½ pounds of clay, |
| The wooden modelling tools, | |
| The oval tools of sheet steel, | |
| A bowl of slip, | |
| A low wide bowl, | |
| A small sponge, | |
| A knife, | |
| A ground glass slab about a foot square, | |
| A cloth in which some ground flint is tied. |
One of the best ways to attract the birds is to have a drinking dish, wide and generous, always ready for them on the lawn. This is of course taking for granted that you live at least a part of the year in the country. Isn't it delightful to think that you can make such a dish with your own hands? It is a little more difficult than the other things you have made, but what of that—it will be worth the trouble if you can give a lawn party to the birds every day! As this is to be quite a large dish, you will need to have a mould to form it in, or at least to support the sides in starting. Choose some low, wide bowl or dish, one about two inches high and ten inches across the top. Have ready some powdered flint tied up in a piece of cotton cloth—you can buy it of dealers in potters' supplies or possibly at the pottery where your clay work is fired. This is to dust over the inside of the mould to prevent the clay from sticking to it. Take a lump of clay, about two and a half pounds, knead and pound it until all the air bubbles are worked out. A small piece of the clay is then patted out with the hands on a table or board and rolled smooth with a rolling pin until it is three-eighths of an inch thick and about two inches wider than the bottom of the bowl you have chosen. Lay it in the bottom of the mould, which has first been dusted with ground flint. Press the clay lightly but carefully against the bottom and sides, making sure that it fits close against them. Then cut the top edge even with one of the wooden modelling tools. With the same tool cut crisscross strokes in this upper edge and wet it with slip, to prepare it for the first coil of clay, which is made and attached like those used in forming the whistle. These coils should, however, be larger—about an inch wide and long enough to go all around the bowl once. Join every coil in the same way, taking care to press each one against the sides of the mould as well as upon the coil beneath, and to smooth the inside of the bowl with your fingers and the modelling tools. After attaching a coil, let the bowl dry for ten or fifteen minutes—in the air, unless it is a cold day. Be careful never to let your clay work freeze or it will be spoiled. When the bowl is about two inches and a half high set it away overnight to dry. In the morning it will have shrunk so that it will slip easily out of the mould. Turn it bottom up on a table and wet the cracks between the coils with slip, then fill them in carefully with clay of the same stiffness as that of which the bowl is made. Never put water or wet clay on a piece of clay work that is almost dry, or it will crack. After it has been set away for a few hours to harden, make it smooth and even as follows: First take the oval tool of sheet steel with rough edges, hold it in your right hand, not straight but bent to fit the curves of the outside of the bowl; with it scrape the large humps away from the sides of the bowl, making quick, light and short strokes in every direction—up, down, across and diagonally. When the largest humps have been removed, go over the bowl in the same way with the smooth-edged oval tool. Then take a damp sponge, one from which the water has all been squeezed, and pass it lightly over the bowl, smoothing it with the fingers. Make it as even and perfect as you can.
Next the bottom is to be finished. Draw with a pencil a circle on the bottom of the bowl, about an inch in from the edge all around, and scrape, with the sharpest wooden tool, a layer of clay out of the bottom within the circle, so that the outside ring shall form a ridge about one-sixteenth of an inch above it. Now cut the top edge of the bowl as even as you can by eye, using a knife. Then make it perfectly even in this way: Pour a little water on the ground-glass slab, hold the bowl bottom up and move it firmly yet quickly round and round on the wet surface and then quickly slide it off at the edge of the slab, before it has a chance to cling to the glass. If the bowl seems too heavy for you to hold securely in moving it about so quickly, it will be wise to let an older person do this for you. Then there will be nothing more to do but let it dry for a few days and send it to the pottery to be fired.