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Little did she know when she bought a bowl mold, some liquid clay and decorating colors at the pottery supply store that she'd just bought herself a money-making hobby that was to grow into a part time business!

It wasn't long before Phil was spooning cereal at a great rate in order to see the cow jumping over the moon at the bottom of his new bowl. The picture, copied from an old nursery rhyme book, was amusing. But Irene Heiland's friends were especially impressed with something else—the words: "Philip Heiland, November 27, 1948," printed on a band of color around the rim. They all agreed that they'd never seen a bowl like it and every young mother among them left an order for one at $4 a bowl.

WITH THE expert help of her husband, Bob, a production engineer, Irene set up shop in the basement. The Heilands' house once belonged to Irene's grandmother and that lady left an attic full of useful things. For this venture it supplied a couple of old foot treadle sewing machines. Bob attached their legs to long, heavy planks to make an extra strong worktable that stretched almost the width of the cellar. This could hold any number of baby bowls as well as all the necessary equipment for making them: plaster of Paris bowl molds, gallon bottles of liquid clay, a sponge for moistening each mold before pouring in the clay, a large strainer through which to pour the clay, a penknife for scraping flat all joining seams, sandpaper and steel wool size 00 for smoothing raw edges, pencils and tracing paper for transferring the design, a compass, underglaze decorating colors that keep their hues under high temperatures, and a bottle of camel's hair and red sable paintbrushes. Out of grandma's attic, also, came a marble-topped washstand that served perfectly to hold Irene's small kiln where it would be handy but not under her fingers to burn her as she worked on the table.

Nothing should be rickety when you're working in ceramics, Mrs. Heiland advises, because breakage sets you back so far in your orders. If you don't have a plank table, an ordinarily strong kitchen table will do. Two tables are better, as then there is room enough for work in progress, equipment being used, and finished work waiting to be delivered.

YOU CAN follow two methods in making pottery. Mrs. Heiland has tried them both. You can be entirely self-sufficient—dig your own clay, make your own molds, and do your own firing and glazing in addition to the designing and painting. If you follow the self-sufficient method, however, you must remember two things: the first is that to have a marketable product you have to keep each process up to professional standards. You must, for instance, refine your clay so that it is as good as "slip," the ready prepared liquid clay that you can buy for $1.50 a gallon. Native clay, found in hillsides and creeks, unlike kaolin, the best clay for porcelain making, has impurities that you have to remove before you can fire it successfully.

Irene Heiland still smiles ruefully over the dinner set she made for their third wedding anniversary. She decided she'd decorate the dishes with authentic Pennsylvania Dutch designs of their surrounding countryside, just as she had decorated their kitchen cabinets. What could be more appropriate for the dinnerware than their beautiful buff-colored Pennsylvania clay? she thought. Mrs. Heiland made a special trip to a friend's farm. After hours of back breaking digging into a clay filled hill that seemed as hard as stone, she had three bucketfuls of the stuff. When she got it to her basement, she put it in a burlap feed sack and pounded it with a heavy mallet to powder it. Then she sifted this powder through a sieve with ¹/8-inch meshes. Now it was ready to be wetted. This had to be done slowly. First, Mrs. Heiland put water into a large earthenware jar up to the half-way mark; next she sprinkled the sifted clay into the water very slowly until a small mound rose to the surface. Then, because Bob was due home any minute and she wanted the set to be a surprise, she put the jar away for the clay to soak overnight, although it is only necessary at this stage to soak the clay a little more than an hour.

The next day Mrs. Heiland put her arm deep into the jar and stirred up the clay. It felt much too sandy! Too much sand makes the clay unworkable. She let the sand settle and then poured the top part off into another jar and threw the sediment away. It still felt too sandy! So she had to repeat the operation. "That's a thing the roots-and-berries school of self-sufficiency doesn't tell you!" says Mrs. Heiland. "You can learn the feel of clay only by experience. If your clay isn't sandy enough, that's just as bad. Then you have to mix in a little fine sand. After you have the slip in a workable state, pour it through a fine sieve into a big jar and let it stand over-night. Then pour or siphon off the clear water on top. You must keep doing this until the slip is creamy enough for casting. Large pieces need a thicker slip than smaller. As a rough guide, a pint of slip should weigh about twenty-seven ounces.

"So, you see, it was days before I had even the clay to start with. In the meantime, I began making the plate molds. Using an old plate as a pattern, I made two-piece, plaster of Paris molds. They are not difficult to make. For those interested, there are books in the library that tell you how. I used 'Pottery Made Easy,' by John Wolfe Dougherty (Bruce Publishing Company, 1939). A recent book, 'Ceramics and Pottery Making for Everyone,' by Carol Janeway (Tudor Publishing Company) has, been issued in a dollar paper edition. I was also, at the time, taking a course in ceramics at the Allentown Y.W.C.A. There are many inexpensive courses in ceramics.

"Time was, however, spinning by, with our anniversary getting nearer and nearer. After I came to cup molds—the handle alone is a two-piece mold—I decided to pay a professional mold maker to construct some from my own design.

"At long last, I had the unfired set complete—all in beautiful buff clay. On it, I drew the Pennsylvania Dutch designs in red, real folk designs from this countryside—the distelfink (a type of bird), the peacock, the hearts, the tulip, the little winged angels. Then I fired the set, thinking how the red designs would stand out.

"Imagine my unhappy surprise when I took the pieces out of the kiln. The background clay was red and the designs were all but invisible! Bob was nice about the set—said it was cute. But it wasn't what I wanted—the cups were warped, the designs didn't show. It had that childish homemade look instead of a handmade look. I couldn't have sold it if I'd wanted to. And even though I hadn't made the set to sell, I realized what a lot of time I'd lost for such meager results!"

And that's the second point you'll want to remember in making pottery to sell—how much is your time worth? Is it more profitable to buy your slip and molds and perhaps even have the firing done than to perform these processes for yourself? For Irene Heiland it is, because besides giving each bowl professional smoothness, it leaves her more time for her specialty, the personal touch that sells the bowl—its little future owner's name and birth date in hand printed letters and the hand-painted nursery picture.

MRS. HEILAND buys mold bowls for $3 apiece from a pottery supply store in Allentown. Pottery supplies are well distributed throughout the country, as pottery making is an old business with a tradition behind it that goes back to Colonial days. A plaster of Paris mold will last for years if you don't drop it. Mrs. Heiland has had her original molds since she began making bowls. White liquid clay costs her $1.50 a gallon or 50 cents a quart. Colored clay, and you can get it in pastel shades—pink, blue, yellow—costs her $1 a quart. The clay, both white and colored, comes in jars mixed ready to use. It merely needs a thorough stirring just before use to be sure it's of even consistency. One gallon of clay will make eight to ten bowls if you don't waste any. Always be sure after you have finished pouring it that you close the jar tight so the clay doesn't dry out.

In making bowls you can, if you wish, use the assembly line method for the preliminary work—if you have enough molds. Mrs. Heiland prefers to confine herself to four bowl molds, rather than having to store more between orders, and risking breakage.

Before she pours the clay into it, Mrs. Heiland first sponges out the mold lightly to make it more absorbent; then she pours clay until the mold is full to the brim. This must stand for ten minutes to allow sufficient clay to adhere to the porous surface. Then she pours back into the jar all the clay that has not adhered. This leaves a half-inch shell of clay in the mold.

The mold is then set aside until its shell of clay is "leather hard," a process that takes about four hours. You can soon judge the right feel of "leather hard" by experience. When the clay shell is ready, slip it out of its mold carefully onto your flat palm so that you don't nick or drop it. Now it must stand another four hours in order to let the air make it "bone dry."

YOU CAN use the time while the bowls are drying, as Mrs. Heiland does, to draw your design on heavy tracing paper so that the same design can be used for four or five bowls. Mrs. Heiland uses an old nursery book for the inspiration for her designs. But if you don't trust your free hand drawing, you can choose a picture of about the size you need for the inside bottom of your bowl and put the tracing paper directly over the book and trace it without harming the book. When Irene has finished drawing the design, she turns the tracing paper over and using a soft lead pencil, blacks the back of the drawing. This makes it an easy matter later to transfer the design to the inside bottom of the bowl. You merely put the design, blackened side down inside the bowl and go over the lines of the design with a sharp lead pencil just hard enough to imprint a carbon copy on the clay. There is no need to worry about pencil marks—they disappear in the firing.

Before the bowl can receive either printing or design it must be smooth. It is a matter of fifteen minutes' work to smooth any rough places with sandpaper or steel wool size 00.

The printing goes onto the bowl before the design because the length of the child's name and birth date help determine the placement and proportion of the center design.

Mrs. Heiland places her printing on a band inside the bowl around the top. For this, she uses a compass. She first finds the exact center of the bowl by placing the compass point in what she believes to be the bowl's center and running the pencil along the rim of the bowl. If the pencil marks the rim all the way around she has found true center. If not, she adjusts the compass until she has. For the mathematically minded, there are geometrical roles based on triangles for finding a circle's center. But Mrs. Heiland maintains that the curving sides of the bowl make her trial and error method the simplest. In a matter of seconds, she finds center. Then, keeping the point on center, she contracts the compass an inch and swings the pencil around the inside of the bowl, making the top guide line for the printing. In the same manner, she contracts the compass another inch and draws another circle, making the bottom guide line for the printing.

For balance, Mrs. Heiland prints the name opposite the birth date. At any point on the band she has just made she draws a line downward from the top guide line to the bottom guide line. Then, at the point directly opposite this vertical line on the bowl, she draws another vertical line. This divides her printing area into two equal semicircles. Referring to her order book for the child's full name, she adds the number of letters, counting the space between names as one letter each. Thus, the name James Arnold Jones, for instance, would add up to eighteen, breaking between the n and the o in Arnold. This means that the vertical line on the printing band comes between the n and the o. Irene always begins the right hand printing first. In other words, she lightly pencils in the last half of the name and then prints in the first half. She pencils in the letters directly on the clay, preferring free hand lettering to the old method of blocking off equal spaces for each letter, which she says results in disproportioned appearance in the case of narrow letters such as i's and l's.

In the same manner, the birth date is evenly divided around the other vertical line. If the date contains one of the months with many letters such as December and the name is a long one, the band is sufficiently filled out by the printing. But if the name and the date are short, Mrs. Heiland finds it necessary to extend the design a bit up the sides of the bowl to fill in empty spaces. Recently, she used an illustration from the rhyme of the three little kittens. She chose the verse:

"Three little kittens washed their mittens and hung them up to dry."

One little girl, born May 1, had a short name, too. Mrs. Heiland, therefore, extended the washline with one pair of mittens hanging on it up the left hand side of the bowl. On the right side, she drew in a bird perched on a bird house. He watched a soap bubble that floated out of the suds filled tub around which the kittens were bending to scrub the remaining mittens. Some designs do not lend themselves to such extension. In that case, Irene draws tiny flowers in the empty spaces in the border.

After the printing is completed and the design traced in, Mrs. Heiland colors the letters and the pictures. She uses Underglaze Decorating Colors for painting on the design. These are made to fire at high temperatures and can be used for eight or ten designs, depending on how much of each color you use. They are 35 cents a pan. If you use a lot of one color you may find it worthwhile to get a bottle of that color alone for 50 cents.

NOW THE bowl is ready for firing. Mrs. Heiland sends her bowls to a woman in Allentown who gives each two firings and an overglaze for 60 cents. Firing prices are gaged by the cubic foot. Large objects naturally cost more than small objects.

Mrs. Heiland does, however, use her small basement kiln for baby mugs to match the bowls when someone wants a set. The same picture or another part of the same scene can be used on the mug. For example, the little dog playing the fiddle accompanies the bowl picture of the cow jumping over the moon. These baby mugs sell for $3 each.

Mrs. Heiland uses slack seasons to make other small objects that she can fire in her basement kiln: Salt and pepper shakers selling for $2 a pair; candlesticks for $4 a pair; cigarette boxes whose handles are ceramic flowers at $4 each; figurines at $5 a pair. The figurines Mrs. Heiland buys already cast, then paints and fires them. She also fills special orders for objects such as lamp bases without wiring at $10 a pair.

On the bottom of every piece she makes, Mrs. Heiland prints Irene Heiland, Passer. Although she lives in Passer, her mailing address is R.D. No. 1, Coopersburg. These double addresses are usual in the Pennsylvania countryside.

AT FIRST, to get her ceramics before the public, Mrs. Heiland used them as shower gifts. Her friends and acquaintances became the most frequently showered people in the world—baby showers, wedding showers, anniversary showers, surprise birthday parties, even showers by mail. Mrs. Heiland used her ingenuity in thinking up unusual showers such as the long distance telephone shower for a young bride who'd moved to California. The party was held at the Philadelphia house of the bride's mother. Each friend of the bride took a gift to the party. The mother's gift was the price of the long distance phone call in which the girls described their presents to the bride. Then every one had refreshments before wrapping and mailing her gift.

The showers started sales off to a flying start and sent Mrs. Heiland's ceramics as far south as the Carolinas, as far west as California. For a while the showers worked somewhat on the chain-letter principle. Women brought new friends to the showers and through that Mrs. Heiland gave more showers. But then, also like a chain letter, new people ceased to come into the circle and there were less and less opportunities for shower giving. The influence of the showers lasted somewhat longer, however, as first orders continue to come in sporadically from women who have just seen friends' ceramics.

Looking around for some other form of promotion, Mrs. Heiland chose the playbills of the local high school for her advertisements, on the advice of a cousin who is in the tile manufacturing business. Since this affords her only a chance to advertise three or four times during the school season, she also sends out postcards to old customers in October and November, reminding them that Christmas is coming and that they must place orders immediately if they want ceramics in time for Christmas. She also exhibits her ceramics every autumn in the local farm show held at Pleasant Valley, Pennsylvania.

Perhaps because she makes up orders to suit individual preferences and because her business is by no means a mass production one, Mrs. Heiland has not found the selling methods of other pottery craftsmen especially successful for her. For a while she placed her ceramics in gift shops but withdrew them when the one hundred percent mark-up of the gift shops forced her to lower her own prices too much.