One time while helping babysit kids, we ran through this small project where you make a sundial out of easy materials to help teach them how time works.

The one complaint I had about it was an eyesore! It was a paper plate and a pencil

Truly an exercise to teach kids something, and then be disposed of afterwards. So, to fill a gap that nobody asked for, I decided to make a more complicated version of the same thing that could left in your garden as the opposite of an eyesore! Some kind of sundial-based eye-drops, maybe.

After doing some research about sundials, I found out that they require some geographical math to be completely accurate. The angle of the Gnomon (the object that creates the shadow) needs to be based on longitude, latitude, and other earthly measurements to truly tell the time, but since it’s relative based on location (and I’m more concerned with making a cool garden decoration) I’ll be doing none of that!

I mostly included this to notify you to that fact. If it sounds cool to you to create a historically and geographically accurate sundial, there’s probably a few more steps before getting started.

It's worth noting that this process can take a long time since you're relying on the sun. Consider coming back to the instructions the next day if it's raining or dreary outside, which happened to me multiple times throughout this process.

Supplies

Because these are highly customizable, you might want to use a different spread of materials to achieve the same goals. Here's what I used to make mine:

AFlowerpot with drainage hole
A Wooden Dowel
ACompass (You can find many compass apps on your phone)
Repair Putty
Masking Tape
A Pencil

I used some other items to help with the process: scissors to cut masking tape, a paper cutter (to cut masking tape very thinly), and a couple of sharpies. These things aren't super important but made life a little easier.

Step 1: Adding the Gnomon

Our gnomon is going to be a wooden dowel. First, turn your flowerpot upside down and ensure that it has a drainage hole. Yup, that's a hole for water to come through. We're gonna plug it up. Stick the dowel through the hole and lean it all the way to one side so that the end of the dowel is touching the edge (like in the second picture). I taped mine down there with masking tape to make the next part easier.

Once it's in place and is moving much less, take your putty (or clay/glue) and mold it around the dowel. Once the putty sets, it should be as hard as the ceramic and not moving on its own.

Step 2: Marking the Lines on the Dial Plate

This step isn't complicated but it is definitely the longest step. Sundials use the gnomon's shadow to denote time, so we're going to need to mark where the shadow is at different times, starting early and moving into the afternoon.

There are a couple of important details to this step:

Set your flowerpot at the location you intend to display it
Point the gnomon North (I placed the compass as close to my pot as I could and lined it up)

Check the weather the day you plan to do this if you'd like to complete it in one go. If it rains you'll have to wait until the sun shines again to get the shadow marked down (although sometimes you can see a faint shadow when it's cloudy outside). I began marking at 7:00 AM, and continued until 7:00 PM, spread out across days when the sun was available.

Step 3: Setting Up to Paint

Rejoice! The hard and most time-consuming part is behind us. Using those pencil marks, we can see where to paint the time marker lines. Since I'm planning to spray-paint the pot, I'm using masking tape to separate and protect the parts that I don't want colored in.

Step 4: Time to Paint

After you’ve got your lines set with masking tape, it’s time to paint it! I decided to paint this with the 12:00 PM line in a different color than the rest, so I covered the center line with masking tape, and used a sharpie to mark which tape to remove after the rest of the paint dries. I set up paper on the floor and cardboard to block the spray-paint from touching the spots I wasn't ready to paint yet, and painted the final red stripe by using more cardboard to block the recently painted silver.

After some generous paint-spraying (and time waiting for it to dry) we get to peel off the tape and see what we’re left with!

Step 5: Optional

If you'd like, consider completely intentionally and artistically shattering your pot at this point, instigating social commentary on the necessity of wanton domicile adornments. Write a treatise on representational accessorizing and its relation to social status because you want to, and not to cope with the loss of your hours of work.

Repeat every step with a second ceramic pot up until the removal of the tape and continue as if nothing happened.

Step 6: Finishing Touches

If you are more capable of moving gracefully than I, you can instead peel the masking tape off of your pot, revealing the clean painted lines beneath them!

The only thing left to do is carve the wooden dowel down a bit so it looks less boring and we’re left with a nice flowerpot sundial! I chose to leave one line red to tell how far from noon it was, but you could also mark the lines with numbers, roman numerals, or other markings to make it even clearer what time of day it is!

At this point, you could set it down in your garden where you measured the sun lines and be able to tell mostly accurate time at a glance! Thanks for joining me on this journey of moderately successful decoration!