Secondly, it is to dig a kiln.

Because there are not many pottery to be fired, it is to use a hoe to dig a cave about one person high on the side of a small soil slope that is strong but not high, the entrance of the cave is olive-shaped, and the two sides of the hole are oval to the top of the cave, so that it is not easy to collapse, and the effect of pulling the fire is good when the fire is burned, that is, the fire is easy to go up, and it does not cost firewood and less time. The depth of the hole should be for one person, and the ground should be flattened.

When digging a hole, in order to prevent the top of the hole from collapsing or digging when pulling a large piece of soil to fall down and affect the shape of the hole, the whole process should be careful and careful, gently dig a hoe and look at it for a while, if you encounter a large piece of soil, you should always be ready to prepare a basin of thin mud to block and wipe evenly, to prevent a greater collapse, if this is not stable, you must first use wood and slate or wooden board to top up the collapsed place that has just been repaired, and it is no problem to heat and harden the kiln during the firing process.

In the process of digging the kiln, if you dig a hole that is connected to other places, or a fork formed by a dead tree root, you must clean these forks, plug and tamp them with stones and broken soil, and finally smear the outermost layer with thin mud to prevent air leakage after sealing the kiln.

After the cave of the kiln is dug, it is necessary to make a chimney.

Use a knife to beat the thick sharpened hardwood from the deepest part of the inside of the cave, and beat the wood vigorously with the back of the axe, and the wood will slowly drill out of the ground outside the top of the cave, so that the chimney is straight and smooth, and it is convenient to seal the kiln, and it is not easy to leak air after sealing the kiln.

The size of the chimney depends on the size of the kiln body, if the kiln body is very large, the chimney can be made very large, and several small chimneys can also be opened at the same time, in short, the amount of smoke exhaust should be appropriate.

A kiln the size of a house should have three chimneys the size of a basin at the back, left and right.

The chimney is too small, the updraft passing through the chimney is not enough to suction the fire, even if more firewood is added, it does not burn vigorously, which directly leads to insufficient fire power in the kiln, the temperature is not high, and the good pottery can not be burned, and the pottery can not be burned in serious cases, because the temperature in the kiln is not enough to melt the soil that makes the mud tire.

Similarly, if the chimney is too large, it will not only cost firewood, but also dissipate too much heat in the kiln, which will also lead to insufficient temperature in the kiln and affect the firing effect.

It can be seen from this that the chimney is very important for the firing of good pottery, which can only be grasped by experience, and it is not clear to say it by mouth alone.

Once you're ready to do that, it's time to make mud tires. Mud tires are also not easy to make.

First of all, it is necessary to dig a circular mud pit, remove all the large and small stones in the pit, and then turn the soil in the pit over, break it with a hoe, and fill the mud pit with some water, so as to water the soil thoroughly. That's when it's time to step on the mud.

There are two methods, if there is livestock, lead the livestock in the mud in the pit and step in a circle, if there is no livestock, it is only by people to step on, until the mud is soft and close to paste, but it can not be hard or soft, hard can not be made mud tires, soft mud tires can not sit still, easy to collapse, in short, slightly softer than kneading noodles. It will take years to grasp this.

After stepping on the mud pit, my father began to make turntables.

Fix a piece of wood on the ground, stand facing the sky, cut a groove in the upper and lower parts of the wood, install a round wooden disc on each side, and connect and fix the two wooden discs with a wooden stick, so that the wooden disc can be rotated by hand.

Subsequently, my father began to teach everyone how to make pottery bowls, pottery altars, pottery pots, and pottery stoves.

I didn't succeed for the first two days, and because I hadn't done it for many years, it looked really ugly, and it wasn't until the third day later that the thing I made looked like that.

They made twenty or thirty bowls, seven or eight jars, and two stoves.

Due to the large size of the pots and stoves, they need to be supported by wooden planks and sticks for a few days, and the soil can only stand on their own when the soil is a little dry.

Only when you do this can you make all the preparations.

The next step is to carefully put these dry mud tires into the inside of the kiln, which can not be stacked or stacked with each other, and a layer of soil blocks with cavities should be used in front of an earthen wall to ensure that when the fire is burned, the firewood will not touch the mud tires, and the flames can be burned to the mud tires through the holes.

Subsequently, the front of the earthen wall is filled with dry firewood and fir leaves, which are used to ignite fire. The final preparation procedure is to build a door at the mouth of the kiln with stones and mud, leaving a palm-sized hole in the middle of the door for adding firewood, and a fist-sized hole on each side of the bottom of the door for air inlet.

All the pre-firing work is ready, and it is time to ignite.

One evening, my father lit the fire in the kiln, the fire of the kiln is not easy to burn, at the beginning, the smoke came straight out of the hole of the firewood, choking the father's eyes with tears, and it has been lit for half an hour, the fire is considered to be ignited normally, and the green smoke and heat have found the outlet of the chimney, and no longer run around, so as long as the firewood is added normally, and the fire will not become smaller.

This kiln will take four or five days in a row, and in these days, someone will keep adding firewood to the kiln, and this is also the case on rainy days, if the fire stops, the things in the kiln and the previous hard work will be in vain, and it will be useless to burn it again in the future.

After the fire burned normally, the father and the children spent another half a day building a shed outside the kiln gate to protect them from the wind and rain.

When digging the kiln, due to the shortage of manpower at the time, the location of the kiln body was selected in the middle of the field and the wooden house and the house, so that both ends could be taken into account, and the two places could be seen, as long as there was a shout, you could hear it. Even so, my father didn't dare to be careless.

During the day, it was easy to say, and it passed casually, but at night, the father still asked the mother and the mother and the elder sister to take the baby dog and a big dog to watch the house and the piglets, and he and the younger son brought two dogs to watch the kiln fire together, and let the eldest son and the second son take three dogs to watch the crops in the vegetable garden and the field.

In the second half of the night, the vegetable garden has to be changed with the kiln to prevent the delay in sleeping, and to take time to go home to see the mother and the full sister and the little piglets in the yard.

On the morning of the fourth day, when my father looked through the hole in the earthen wall in the kiln door and saw that the mud tires had burned red and glowed red, my father estimated that the things in the kiln had been burned and needed to stop the fire and seal the kiln.

After adding a stove of dry firewood, my father hurriedly prepared some small stones and a pot of thin mud, and quickly used these things to block the wind intake, wood hole, and chimney, and smeared them with thin mud until no smoke came out of the hole.

On the morning of the sixth day, my father opened the kiln door, gently peeled off the earthen wall, and looked at a bunch of flower bowls and other things that burned red and blue in front of him, and jumped up happily.

Anyway, everyone is happy, and life is getting more and more convenient.