The day started at 10.30 and officially finished at 5pm, though there were still people finishing up when I left at about 5.30. The centre does various classes of wood and stone craft. I really recommend the class I did, and I’m considering booking another session to try out the “random weave” course too, to learn a different technique and see what other things are possible.

The first half hour or so was an introduction to willow and to the style of basket we’d be making. Our tutor, Anthea, lead us through the different types of willow and how it was prepared for weaving. Then we got down to business! Things were a bit shaky at first but once you get into a rhythm you just lose yourself. It took me the full day to make a short basket about 35cm in diameter. Apparently a professional would expect to make at least 5 a day…

The class had 8 other people, only two of which had done any weaving before, and that was just in another class a year ago. No one was an expert, and no one was really bad either. It was also remarkable how everyone’s basket looked very different even though we were all basically using the same template.

My basket is a single buff colour with no frilly bits. I wanted to keep things simple for the first attempt. There are one or two things I would have done differently in hindsight, where there are obvious gaps which should have been tighter. But I’m very pleased and have been investigating where I can get some willow of my own to do things with. I wonder if I should use something else to practise with, so that I don’t forget everything?

If you’re at all interested in this kind of thing I recommend you look them up, or find someone close to you. It’s great fun and very satisfying to take home your own basket afterwards.

At the top of the list, unconnected though they be, sit brewing and basket-weaving. Making home brews is a bit of a beardy-man thing to do, like medieval battle re-enactments or role play board gaming. It has an air of comic juvenility to it. But it’s also a culinary skill and an ancient craft, which is what I’m aiming for. It’s also something that I can try at home with a minimum of extra tools and materials. A large bucket and somewhere to store it seem to be the principal concerns.

Basket-making is another thing entirely. Thankfully Helen knew where to look. The Four Winds Inspiration Centre (I know, what kind of comedy name is that?) work at a nearby park and do day and weekend classes in basket weaving, furniture, stone and wood carving and so on. I’ll be giving them a call as soon as I can to ask about availability. There’s a class on Saturday 9 May for round basket weaving which seems like a good place to start. Here’s to another year of learning!

We decided to go the extra effort and made some moulded masks using a technique Helen learned from a youth drama group. This is how it’s done.

You will need:

Gummed Parcel Tape

This stuff isn’t easy to come by nowadays. It’s basically a long strip of brown paper (in a roll like masking tape) which is gummed on one side like a stamp. The glue on the reverse is quite mild and you don’t need to mess about with papier mache and the attendant bucket of cold gloopy paste. We had a short length of the tape pre-ripped into little shreds before we started. If you want to get a close fit to the face then small pieces are advisable.

Sponge

A nice wet sponge in a bowl of water will save your tongue from certain doom. I don’t know how horrendous it would be to lick all these bits of tape into place. Too much to contemplate.

Hair clips

If your hair is short enough you won’t need to bother, but if you’ve got any sort of fringe it’s useful to pin it out of the way. Kirby grips to the rescue!

Moisturiser

Don’t know if this is completely necessary but it probably helps to moisten up the skin a bit to survive the onslaught of the glue. By the end you’ll feel like you’ve had some sort of chemical peel. Also, I found shaving to be useful — I don’t think this would be possible with proper beard/moustache growth.

All you need to do is rip the tape into little bits: about the size of a pound coin is good enough. Regular shapes are not necessary. Just tear them up. Then quickly wet the shiny side and stick to your face. We found it best to start with the forehead because it’s wide and reasonably flat. The paper should stick easily. Then just expand out the way, overlapping the bits to build up a continuous covering.

Because there were two of us we sat face-to-face and applied the glued paper to each other’s faces. I don’t know what it would be like to do your own. After a while you have to concentrate on not making any facial expressions that you don’t want the resulting mask to reflect. It’s really hard to stare at someone for an hour without making any expression. Also, people who make no expression tend to look extremely miserable. It’s very worrying.

The area of face you cover is up to you. For our Ball masks we did the forehead, cheek bones and nose, adding on extra at the edges so there would be plenty to trim. When you think you’re done, so that the resulting mask will be structurally sound and well-covered, leave it to dry. Which is to say, sit back and try not to disturb it. The drying doesn’t actually take long, maybe half an hour extra.

Peeling off the mask is tricky, because you want it to just fall off your face, rather than actively pulling it off. Pulling at your cheeks to stretch the skin away from the paper, wrinkling your forehead and flaring your nostrils are all effective means of loosening the glue from your skin. I guess a good application of moisturiser would be good at this point. Vaseline or something might have been even better, but we didn’t go that far. I imagine a full face mask will be considerably harder to remove.

Once the mask comes off you can hold it up to the light and see if there are any holes that need patching. Weak spots will be quite obvious. We discovered that leaving the masks to dry facing up will tend to “widen” the face, so that it no longer fits so snugly. Try to avoid this. If you’ve got a half-mask it should be easy to prop it up so that there is no bad stretching.

Once it’s dry you’ll realise that your new mask fits your face perfectly and doesn’t need any elastic or anything else to hold it in place. Especially if your nose was moulded well you should have a very sturdy “second skin” that fits you perfectly and isn’t uncomfortable.

It took us a couple of days to get to the painting stage. First we had to trim the masks to shape, removing any rough edges and asymmetrical bits. It’s useful to draw on the mask with a felt pen while you wear it, to get an idea how it will look when you’ve trimmed it. Getting the symmetry right is really hard, and you have to do it with respect to your face anyway, since it probably won’t be millimetre-perfect either!

I used white poster paint for mine, which took about four coats to hide the brown paper underneath. Helen went for black and only needed one coat to hide the colour. Everything else was just touching up. You might want to use nicer paints or some coating to give a gloss (though this will tend to highlight the uneven surface below). At this stage you can just go with whatever fits your needs. We had no real plan so I just left mine plain, while Helen went with a simple gathering of black feathers from a haberdashery.

I rather enjoyed this little mask-making exercise and would definitely do it again given the excuse. The biggest surprise for me was how easy and comfortable it was to wear the resulting mask. It just sits on the face without clips, elastic, glue or the need to hold a stick.

My own face is layered in paper and glue at the moment, in a hopeful attempt to have a beautiful, original, exciting mask for a Masquerade Ball, chez Nick. There is still peeling to come, and then the artistry begins. But what kind of mask and, therefore, what to wear on the rest of me? As much as I’d like to go for a very traditional masquerade ball attire, that’s not so easy to knock up from the stuff we have to hand.

The purpose behind the exhibition was to follow through on one designer’s idea that more designed objects should cater to the sense of touch — that you should be able to tell something about an object through how it feels, or to have the feeling of the object reinforce the visual information. The finest example from this exhibition was a set of drinks cartons designed to feel like they were made of fruit skins. The banana carton had wide strips with sharp angles running the length of the carton, and waxy skin. The kiwi fruit carton was actually slightly hairy!

It’s a brilliant idea, and I’m trying not to enthuse too much about it or go off on some design-tangent. The important message is that this exhibition was really rubbish for two main reasons:

1. Most of the designers clearly didn’t understand the brief. You’d look at an object and think well what has that got to do with anything? There were so few exhibits (less than twenty, I think) that it was really obvious how many of them were useless and had totally missed the point.
2. The exhibition was designed such that you weren’t allowed to touch the exhibits. I know. It’s kind of like putting an art exhibition in a room with no lights. Instead, there was a finished object on the plinth in front of you, and a sample of the material they’d used that you could touch. These samples were often the unworked raw material, so didn’t feel like anything in particular. The fruit cartons had postage-stamp sized squares for each fruit skin, which had long since been worn smooth by two months of curious-fingered visitors. Some samples were missing altogether.

It was such a good idea and such a poor execution that I really wish they would do it again, but do it properly this time.

The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks

I “think” you’ll be “amused” by these photos of signs, advertisements and “serious” notices with excess punctuation.

Photoshop Disasters

Photoshop can be made to do amazing things in hands of a skilled artist. But skilled artists are expensive and won’t hang around doing DVD covers for straight-to-video slasher flicks forever, so these people made do with what they had. I nearly shot Fanta out of my nose while reading these…

Judge A Book By Its Cover

Laughing at dodgy book covers is a hobby in itself.