Preforming on leather hard clay phase 1 in Krăngọ village : Preforming the bottom of the cooking pot (góh dam)

Before preforming the bottom of her pot, Ma Ly polishes the rim and upper part of the pot with a kernel (plai kang) inside and outside. On the shoulder of the pot, she draws vertical lines with the polishing, that will contrast with the horizontal lines that she’ll draw later on on the body. She then starts preforming the bottom of the pot. To do so, she slightly pushes the bottom out from the inside, using her left hand as a support on the outside to prevent it from breaking. She pushes the centre being pushed around 1-2cm out to give the bottom a rounded shape. Then, she scrapes the outer part of the bottom with a ring tool made of bamboo to take off the square angle remaining from the previously flat bottom. Then, she takes the paddle, dips it in water and begins to pat the walls of the pots. Her movement is slightly diagonal to the walls, pushing the clay down and smoothing the surface. She concentrates especially on the lower part of the walls to erase the traces of the previously flat body, and to create a smooth curve of the walls. When she is satisfied with it, she takes back the ring of bamboo (kơnur) and uses it to scrape the bottom surface to regularise it and fill the cracks that appeared while pushing from the inside. She sometimes spreads some clay that she scraped out to even out the surface. When she is satisfied with the shape and the surface has been regularised, the potter wets her hands and rubs them over the bottom of the pot to finish to smooth it out. During the whole process, BBN and CdF interview Ma Ly about the process of making pots. The information from the interview are all summarised in the summary document for Krăngọ village .