Making Papier-Mâché Beads - 3.

[@Olhamo]

Not sure why my wetted paper line has a strikethrough. wasn't meant to.

[@Olhamo]

Hello Hilary, I've been really enjoying your videos since I found them a few days ago - I appreciate your aesthetic, and your love for making molds of bits of nature, and love your thin woodburned (tool) flowers, gathered pipestems and nuggety "baroque" pearls. i have a small suggestion for the skewers: I use them too, for all sorts of things, and never thought of this until you mentioned scraping them-- then I got the idea; why not put spoon butter on them, before they get used? You can do a whole fistful when you buy them, that way, they would even deepen and darken and smell wonderful. ( I was horrified to see the microwave, thinking No!! :-) until you mentioned you don't use it for food...Four minutes sounds too long to me, for something small like beads.) The recipe for "spoon butter", that you can put on anything from bowls to cutting boards to -- wooden spoons, is coconut oil (the best, because it's germicidal and does not go rancid, and smells good), and beeswax melted, one to one. I make the same thing for lip and hand balm, because like you, I always have my hands in something fun. For the lip balm, I add a knife-tip of honey --goes beautifully with beeswax, as it would: one of those natural miracles. I have a small bowl of spoon butter just sitting open in my kitchen with a little cloth, half-used, and it's completely untouched by any insets, or any problem, has been sitting there for several months, into and through the immense heat of summer , and smells as beautiful as the day it was made. Thank you for making such lovely videos. I really like the 'in media res' low-key quality of them. All the best! Alison Armstrong-Webber

[@Olhamo]

I've been very inspired by the work you've shared, and seeing into your world. You have a unique way of taking rather large pieces of newspaper and couching them between damp cloths, laying up a whole newspaper section, that can then be applied, something closer to news- 'pelt' than the dry paper. It's in another of your videos. I used to make paper, with things like garlic skin inlay (beautiful!) and watermarks, using a lot of recycled materials, and this was a revelation to me --even though I have wetted the paper before, for the first layers of a sculpture-- to see this method you were using on a rather large bowl. The paper being returned to something much more like fabric. Really LOVE that, and the way it makes of the whole process something graceful, quiet, and more properly contemplative. I've been working on three trees, room sized, something like birches that go right up to the ceiling -the sense is they continue through the ceiling into another level of reality...their crowns exist in another place. This soft-paper way of working (that actually feels a lot 'faster' too than the dry paper method) is something of an Aha! to me. I do partly what you do, that is applying the thinned paste onto the object and then laying on the paper, rather than dipping the paper. It makes for a thinner, stronger more cohesive kind of 'wood', in my experience. But the couched paper, returned to its just-made state before being applied, is something that for me increases the value of the entire making, as well as the finished object. Big thanks for that. Alison

[@HilaryBravo]

Thank you Alison. I know I’m 6 years late I’m responding. I’ve only just seen it. 👍

[@tattooskin72]

I love what you did with the crab claw. I don't think I ever would have come up with that :)