THE CRAFT OF FIRE

Winter, with regular temperatures of -22°C, is a perfect time to find Craft activities that can be done indoors. For example, mold-making! While not dealing with fire or heat directly, learning to make molds out of silicone rubber and plaster will prepare us for later when we start casting material melted in our kilns and forges... So this past weekend a bunch of us got together to start. We looked for suitable objects to copy, using some of the old examples a few of us had created in the past, or else finding new ones. For this first session we used prefab mold kits to keep it simple.  Although we started working with a modern material (silicone rubber), the theme of originals, copies and molds is an ancient one: “You, Aruru, who created humanity, create now a copy of Gilgamesh, so that when these two meet they will fight between themselves and leave our city in peace.” The goddess Aruru, hearing this request, concentrated within hers...

What are the chances? We had an amazing ice storm here around Xmas time and there was incredible damage to all the trees in the city, including all around my neighbourhood. In fact, there were large (I mean, large) branches down on every block around our house, and many people had their power totally knocked out, some for over a week.       this foto by Ron Bulovs, Wikimedia Commons                                                      So of course as I walked the dog I gathered up particularly good pieces of wood (i.e. no larger than about 2-inches in diameter) from around the 'hood and brought them home and piled them up in the front yard, for eventual storage in the garage in the back – and eventual burning in the mud oven in the spring. Free firewood! I had quite a nice pile of wood in the front, and then one m...