In any rural area, previously in everyday use at home
a stupa was used. Country man with carpentry skills
made the stupa with his own hands.

Today, few people can thoroughly explain to you how a stupa works, much less show you clearly with an example. To do this, the stupa still needs to be found. And now, using the example of this article, we will try to explain to you what a stupa is, and how more than one hut could not live without it before. A stupa is a breadwinner in any rural hut. You've never seen porridge without a mortar before. The stupa was used by everyone, young and old.
The stupa, like other household items, had miraculous powers and was an intercessor
in the house, it was used during rituals. A large, clumsy woman was often compared to a stupa.

Pounding water in a mortar is a really stupid job.

About fools: Make him pound in a mortar and he will break the bottom;
You can't talk about a fool in a mortar. Today with the advent social networks The stupa is often already remembered in more modern terms. For example, pound verbal husks in a virtual mortar. This means useless correspondence on a social network.

To make a stupa, a log of strong birch or oak wood was used, mainly bottom part trunk without knots.
The inside of the log was hollowed out into a cone
a recess 60-70 centimeters deep. And this prerequisite, stupa
should initially be made from a single piece of wood, and not from parts.

A pestle was made for the mortar from a piece of strong wood.
The lower part of the pestle was the same diameter as the bottom of the recess in the mortar.
Not a single rural hut could cook porridge without a mortar.
To peel buckwheat grains from the husks, you need a mortar so that
Millet is made from millet; you need a mortar to remove the husks from oats; how can you do without a mortar? Grain was poured into the mortar and crushed with a pestle. They were accustomed to this work from childhood. It was not convenient for an adult to use the stupa, because
it was lower than the table height, and you had to bend over. And for teenagers,
village girls just right.

In early spring, we ran out of meat and mostly ate porridge. Grinding grain in a mortar is a tedious, monotonous process and requires patience.
You need to start slowly, gradually, so as not to scatter the grain around the mortar.
When the husks begin to appear in the mortar, you can start hitting harder with the pestle.
During the process, they removed the pestle from the mortar and checked with their hands how many grains were in the husk and how many were peeled. For example, it was impossible to grind grains
for the whole week. It was daily work, preparing food for ourselves. The 95 percent purified grain was poured from the mortar into a bucket. The mortar was turned upside down and the pestle was placed in a corner. They took a bucket of grain, and
went out into the yard.
Some kind of cloth was spread on the ground, and grain from the husk was winnowed
in the wind. Clean cereals were collected in a bowl and washed with water. And in the house, cow's milk was already heated in the oven.
They poured cereal into a boiling cast iron pot with milk and poured it in. Then they simmered in the oven a little more.
And the porridge turned out sweet and tasty even without adding sugar. Because homemade milk contains all the necessary elements.
And I assure you that porridge prepared in this way is much tastier than simply made from store-bought millet and milk.

Picture of pounding grain in a mortar

During the famine years, in some Svyatogorsk courtyards there were still stupas in the huts.
Potato peelings, rotten potatoes, and beets were cut into pieces and dried.
Then everything was mixed and pounded in a mortar.
The resulting flour was diluted with water and baked very delicious flatbreads! Those who survived the famine remember that time with tears.
Today, many housewives use small mortars and pestles, in household. But this is just a small memory of that large stupa in a rural hut that fed a whole family.

In our village, in every house there was also an Austrian copper “mosder” (bronze mortar and pestle). And I couldn’t understand why it was needed and why my grandmother treated this “rarity” so carefully. Now that we have actively begun to get involved in cooking food from, this item has become indispensable for us in preparing seasonings.

One day you will outgrow the usual store-bought spices in bags, and you will want to grind fresh seasonings yourself, for which the most the best tool there will be a mortar and pestle. Spices, garlic, nuts or seeds, crushed in a mortar, release natural aromas and oils; you will immediately notice the difference in taste!


You will improve your culinary skills several notches.
The mortar is a small bowl, and the pestle is a wide stick, shaped to fit into the recess of the bowl, in order to perfectly grind and grind everything that comes between the pestle and the bowl.
They can be made of wood, metal, stone or ceramics. Choose the material that suits you based on your culinary and personal preferences.

To prepare, for example, kutya (grinding poppy seeds and nuts in large quantities), we use clay makitra and makogon.
If a recipe requires using crushed rather than ground spices, this means that they do not need to be ground into powder.

A mortar and pestle is great for cooking herbal oil, crushing garlic for garlic croutons, making hummus, almond butter, or making old-fashioned flour.

for preparing seasonings

You can start with simple things, for example, making a mixture of different peppers (black, red, allspice) or grinding cinnamon.
If you add dry herbs to regular coarse non-iodized salt: hops-suneli, basil, marjoram, dill and parsley, bay leaf, peppermint, coriander and red pepper, and grind it, you get an excellent mixture, analogous to the Georgian Svan layer.


in the magazine “”, there was an article about spices and the following recipe was given:
- 1.5 tsp. dried oregano,
- 1 tsp. ground cloves,
- 1 tsp. garlic powder
- 1 tsp. paprika,
- 0.5 tsp ground ginger,
- 0.5 tsp salt,
- 0.5 tsp ground black pepper

Seasonings instead of dry cleaning

Try using dry rice to get rid of stubborn odors and stains. Sometimes it can be difficult to remove stubborn stains and odors from strong spices. An excellent way to get rid of them is to finely grind dry white rice, which should absorb the smell and color of the last crushed spices. Replace the rice and repeat the process until the ground rice remains white after grinding.

Based on sources

(Shamanism)
Complexity: 20
Difficulty of learning: 10
A ritual that in the old days was very popular among elderly sorcerers and witches, whose age did not suit them to use some kind of vulgar broom. The stupa is noticeably different from the last one more comfort and load capacity. The maximum weight lifted by a stupa depends on its size and quality of workmanship, averaging from two hundred to five hundred kilograms. (The Institute’s museum had a specimen that could lift about one and a half tons. Unfortunately, it disappeared during the disaster and is considered destroyed.)
Since the process of making a stupa is very labor-intensive and time-consuming, at present it is unlikely that anyone will do it. However, in the outback you can still find working specimens - a well-made stupa could serve more than one generation of village healers.
The principle of operation of the stupa is based on giving it, through special magical treatment, increased attractiveness to the spirits of the air, who find it very convenient to hold on to it. However, the stupa is not a permanent abode for spirits, and only works together with a separately enchanted broom, some of the spirits from which pass into the stupa, neutralizing its weight. After this, the spirits remaining in the broom can push the mortar in any direction.
Using the stupa is simple: you need to sit in it, pick up a broom and say the activating spell. After this, the mortar will move in the direction where the broom handle is pointed. The maximum speed and flight altitude are the same as the broom itself, but maneuverability is much worse due to its massiveness. The bottom of the mortar is always directed towards the resulting acceleration vector, so the pilot does not need to maintain balance, but when colliding with something, a somersault is quite possible. To land, you need to either say a stopping spell, or maneuver the mortar to the ground and jump out. If contact with the broom or pilot is lost, the mortar begins to slowly decline, simultaneously dampening the horizontal speed due to air resistance.
Operating the stupa requires the Aviation skill, but rolls from the Dexterity required to manipulate the broom.

Elements:

Making the stupa itself:
Solid butt of a tree that has dried up naturally (7)
Fire lit by natural causes (3)
Tools made by hand (4) by the magician himself (2) and never used before (3)
The material is usually oak - it is difficult to find another tree of suitable size. A piece is cut out of the trunk, its core is carefully burned out, after which the product is brought to condition with a chisel and chisel.
The job requires knowledge of blacksmithing to make tools and professional woodworking skills (crookedly made tools increase the difficulty further).

The ritual itself:
Hollowed out stupa
Shaman's drum
Preliminary fumigation of the stupa by smoking from forest herbs for three days (9)
Ritual dance (4) and spell 2 hours (8)
During the final spell, the texts of the activating and stopping spells are also determined, which can be absolutely anything at the discretion of the magician. Quite often, magicians carved the texts of spells on the edges of the stupa so that they were always at hand.
Level of disharmony(0): the stupa rises into the air and flies, but after 1-6 minutes it completely loses stability, starting to randomly rotate along all three coordinate axes.

Useful tips:
For the sake of nitpicking, the maximum flight acceleration in meters per second per second is calculated using a simple formula: the lift of the broom used divided by the total take-off weight of the stupa, multiplied by 5.
For reckless drivers: the contact of the stupa with the ground at high horizontal speed converts forward motion into tumbling motion.
The suitability of a stupa for use is determined by whether it can theoretically hold water inside itself (two or three bullet holes don’t count).

Baba Yaga is one of the most striking fairy-tale characters of Russian folklore. Many cartoons and films depict it in different ways. She is an evil old woman who steals children and wants to eat them, but sometimes she shows pity for the hero, and in many films she is portrayed as funny and cheerful. This is probably why the kids still love her. She wants to eat someone, she threatens, but she hasn’t eaten or killed anyone yet. She can fly, but she can’t catch up with anyone.

Baba Yaga’s crafts are also all funny and not at all scary. Children happily convey the image of this resident of the hut on chicken legs in their drawings and applications. A broom is also made from plasticine. A mandatory attribute of this fairy-tale heroine is a flying stupa.

Let's look at Baba Yaga's crafts from natural material can be done, for this you need to collect in the park, what you will need additional materials for connecting parts together.

Baba Yaga figurine

To make such a character, you need to have a fir cone, a small pine cone, Christmas tree branches, rowan berries for beads, hemp rope for tying branches and making hair, and twigs for a mortar.

The big bump is the torso. To easily install the head, you need to cut off a few of the top scales from it. A small pine cone is glued onto the plasticine into the resulting hollow, with the blunt part facing forward to make it easier to stick small parts.

The body and head of the headstock are ready. One branch of the Christmas tree is cleared of needles, which are attached to the neck on plasticine. These will be the hands of a fairy-tale heroine. Hair is knitted from rope as follows. Segments are cut to the same length, folded in half and tied on the loop side with a knot. Then they are glued to the small bump on top. The more segments, the more voluminous the old woman’s hair.

Eyes, a mouth and a hooked nose are made from plasticine. As a nose, you can use one curved pasta glued to the base.

Now we’ll take a closer look at how to make the main part of Baba Yaga’s craft - a flying stupa.

How to make a stupa?

In fairy tales, the grandmother moves through the forest exclusively on a mortar, controlling a broom. The stupa has the shape of a truncated cone. Therefore, in the manufacture of this transport, a plastic disposable cup is used. First, the plasticine is softened and the outer part is completely coated so that the branches are firmly attached and do not slip on its surface.

They should not be thick, as the glass will be deformed. In order for the sticks to hold well, you need to tie them with thread. All that remains is to plant Baba Yaga’s craft inside.

Broom

The fairy-tale character's transport, which she also uses for flying, is a broom. It's simple to make. To do this, you need to have one thick twig and several small and thin ones collected from bushes. They are cut into small equal pieces, collected in a bunch with a thick stick in the middle, and tied with a rope.

This attribute always finds its place in Baba Yaga’s crafts. Usually the broom is either attached to the old woman's hand or to the mortar. You can also put a scarf on her head, because previously in Rus' all women wore these headdresses. In all films and fairy tales, she is also depicted wearing a headscarf.

Hut on chicken legs

If you ask any child, the answer will be the same for everyone - in a hut on chicken legs. When making Baba Yaga's crafts with their own hands, many craftsmen try to build her forest dwelling nearby. This house is not simple; it itself is a fairy-tale character. He can run, jump, turn, kick someone, sit down and refuse to obey his owner.

It’s difficult to make even a simple house from branches, but here it still has to stand on two legs. How to do this? Let's try to explain in detail now.

How to make Baba Yaga's house?

In order for the structure to hold firmly on two pillars, you need to select either thick cuts of branches, or take two wooden spools of thread. The second option is preferable, since they have a base that expands at the bottom, which will securely hold the house.

If you still use cut branches, then you need to strengthen them with plasticine on the base of the craft, making claws splayed in different directions. They will give stability to the structure.

The house itself is made from a flat foundation. This can be plywood or a piece of very durable cardboard. The ceiling above is the same. Straight branches of any tree are glued between these two planes. You can fasten them with wire or tie them together with rope.

Also, for strength, the walls of the house are placed on a layer of plasticine, which is attached along the entire perimeter of the house with inside both on the floor of the house and on the ceiling.

The roof can be made from cardboard by gluing together a pyramid. Place a layer of autumn flowers on top of it with glue. yellow leaves. Such a composition can be entered into a competition as autumn crafts Baba Yaga.

Option from cone and nut

Even a child can easily make such a Baba Yaga craft from natural materials. kindergarten. You will need one fir cone for the body, walnut for the head, a few twigs for the broom and hands, plasticine, threads for hair (they can be made from straw or willow leaves). The old lady’s scarf can be cut out of paper, or you can wear a fabric one.

The parts are fastened together using plasticine, from which small parts of the face are also made - the nose, eyes. Next to Baba Yaga, you can make her for an exhibition best friend goblin. It is also created from a spruce cone by gluing a paper cone or a plasticine fly agaric mushroom hat onto the head. He has a stick in his hand.

You can also make the head from chestnut, and the arms from ash seeds. The mortar can be covered with small scales of cones or tree bark. It's interesting to carve a house out of a pumpkin. There are many options for using natural materials for such crafts. After looking at the samples, you can safely create your own works, adding your own details. After all, you always want to do everything your own way, not like others. Create and imagine!

This video is about how to make a stone bowl, mortar and pestle from ordinary cobblestones with your own hands. To do this you will need a cobblestone, an angle grinder, several attachments and 1 hour of free time. Modern household tools cut granite, almost like wood. Hard stone is processed even faster after wood. Surprisingly, the mortar is pleasant to use for its intended purpose. The pestle fits comfortably in the hand. Grinding pepper in such a mortar is difficult. Freshly ground pepper, especially with your own hands, is always more aromatic, and food tastes better with it.

As an experiment, lawyer Egorov, the author of the video, baked rainbow trout over a fire and used spices ground in a stone mortar. This is not very practical, the mortar is heavy, but the process brought not only gastronomic, but also aesthetic pleasure.

Given the unexpected ease of processing granite, the author plans to find a granite boulder and make a sink from this material. Polish inner surface the sink will be even simpler, since it has a less curved surface.

In such a bowl it is appropriate to store keys or small change in the hallway. In the interior modern kitchen This mortar looks very brutal. And in nature it looks organic and natural.

The process of making a stone mortar.

To begin with, I went to the quarry and selected several stones as a material. The work is dusty, so workplace organized under open air on a compost heap made of geotextile mesh. By the way, very comfortable compost heap in all respects.

Do not work as shown by the author with an angle grinder! When processing stone (for example, when processing a pestle), there is a decent chance that the hand with the grinder will come off and the cutter will enter the palm of the left hand. Spend a little time and secure the product and never (!) hold the object being processed in one hand and a grinder in the other! Remember - you have 1 left hand and one is right, and there are no spare parts!

To select a hole in the stone, I did diamond blade made several cuts in the stone, then used a chisel and hammer to gouge out the main volume of this recess. Since it was not possible to make slots of the desired depth in one cut, the recess had to be modified by making shallow cuts in a checkerboard pattern. In the whole undertaking, choosing a hole in the cobblestone is the fastest and easiest operation. It takes much longer and more difficult to level and polish roughness on the inner curved surface. Polishing a flat or convex surface is not difficult.

With some skill, roughness can be leveled out cutting disc. But it is more convenient to work with a cutter with a larger working surface.

There is a thick layer of moss as the base on which the stone lies. Wet moss retains most of the material, but professionals and ordinary masons recommend using a loose substrate - sand or earth.

After processing with a rough diamond cutter, noticeable risks remain. It is convenient to sand them using a fiber stone disc. In total, three such discs were used with different abrasives, starting with 24 grit. After it, the risks became significantly less. Then I changed the disc to 60 grit, after which a gloss appeared on the treated surface. I finished sanding with 80 grit abrasive. After that all that was left was polishing. The performance of such a disk turned out to be higher than expected; it hardly wears out.

Everything is ready for polishing. The so-called turtles, that is, nozzles for polishing stone. IN right hand nozzles for dry polishing, on the left for wet polishing. Only dry polishing attachments were used here. These attachments have 3 grit levels. 100, 500 and 1000 grit. The main problem is that they are not designed for polishing concave surfaces and you can only work with the edge of the disc; it wears out quickly. On a concave surface, these discs had almost no effect. The shine was achieved using a petal disk. Making this bowl is more fun than business, the master did not try to achieve ideal surface, but I just wanted to give you an idea of ​​working with stone.

Cut flat base The mortar turned out to be quite simple. And so that the bowl stands on flat surface the table did not move, the master used an improvised calibration plate. To do this, I stained the stove with oil chalk and rubbed the bottom of the mortar on it. The protruding parts have become dirty; all that remains is to remove them and obtain a relatively flat plane.

The bowl is ready. To use it as a mortar, you need a pestle. Theoretically, you can take an ordinary stone, but traditionally, for convenience, the pestle is made oblong and with a neck. This will make it comfortable to hold in your hand. During work, it is recommended to protect the respiratory organs from dust, the hearing organs from noise and, first of all, protect your eyesight. As a result, it turned out that the stone was given the shape of a stub. Its working surface was also rounded.

To process stone, just a few attachments on the grinder are enough. After the first experience of working with stone, I got the impression that it would be possible to carve a full-size bathtub from a boulder in just a couple of days. Next is a video about creating an unusual mortar from stone with your own hands in one hour.