Saturday with Lea
Which was good fun.
a day and a bit that seemed to be centered around eating British food and getting our hands filthy.
What did we do... pottery, of course -- that always happens -- which was so boring we decided to make a Goddess of Boredom status out of clay. We then put it in a really boring place, with the head facing a boring patch of wall and showered it with bits of boring food (namely, stale scones). And made sure to make boring sounds whenever we got near it. Worked wonders! Much less bored afterwards. Even if that did require a lot of Trivial Pursuit Impossible to pass time.
Then... we made faience jewelry! Absolutely awful, we must've been -reeking- afterwards.
How to make faience beads in the Bronze Age:
- stick dried seaweed in a pot in the fire, to get ash.
- grind down sand to get it as fine as you can
- choke on the smoke coming from the fire (no chimney hole, no ventilation, lots of smoke) then start retching on the small of burning seaweed. It STINKS so much. And we were starving too. Awful...
- then grind the seawee ash down. Make sure you're talking and laughing with a friend at the same time so that the finest seaweed dust will get into your mouth. A unique flavour. Must be savoured slowly.
- mix sand and ash with flour and water (<= glue), which'll give you a sticky, stinky black paste that stings like hell if you've got cuts on your hands. I have plenty.
- then spend ages shaping the beads. Only two shapes: tubes and stars. Stars with a minimum of 9 branches (most we ever got was 8 and it was about a third too big), tubes with fancy twirly bits. Yeah, right.
- then glaze them. Burn more seaweed ash and mix it with malachite. Cover beads
- realise that too many visitors have distracted us and that the fire isn't hot enough. Stick the beads aside and grumble
- start covering people with flour, water and seaweed ash.
a day and a bit that seemed to be centered around eating British food and getting our hands filthy.
What did we do... pottery, of course -- that always happens -- which was so boring we decided to make a Goddess of Boredom status out of clay. We then put it in a really boring place, with the head facing a boring patch of wall and showered it with bits of boring food (namely, stale scones). And made sure to make boring sounds whenever we got near it. Worked wonders! Much less bored afterwards. Even if that did require a lot of Trivial Pursuit Impossible to pass time.
Then... we made faience jewelry! Absolutely awful, we must've been -reeking- afterwards.
How to make faience beads in the Bronze Age:
- stick dried seaweed in a pot in the fire, to get ash.
- grind down sand to get it as fine as you can
- choke on the smoke coming from the fire (no chimney hole, no ventilation, lots of smoke) then start retching on the small of burning seaweed. It STINKS so much. And we were starving too. Awful...
- then grind the seawee ash down. Make sure you're talking and laughing with a friend at the same time so that the finest seaweed dust will get into your mouth. A unique flavour. Must be savoured slowly.
- mix sand and ash with flour and water (<= glue), which'll give you a sticky, stinky black paste that stings like hell if you've got cuts on your hands. I have plenty.
- then spend ages shaping the beads. Only two shapes: tubes and stars. Stars with a minimum of 9 branches (most we ever got was 8 and it was about a third too big), tubes with fancy twirly bits. Yeah, right.
- then glaze them. Burn more seaweed ash and mix it with malachite. Cover beads
- realise that too many visitors have distracted us and that the fire isn't hot enough. Stick the beads aside and grumble
- start covering people with flour, water and seaweed ash.