The more seriously we take our writing, the more we can forget how much it relies on play – that our inventiveness has its roots in playfulness, even silliness. Taking a little time out to play can inspire us with new ideas, relax and calm us, and help us write in new ways. I can pretty much guarantee that you'll write differently on your own handmade "parchment" to how you would in your usual notebook or Word doc! For the Creative Play workshop, I'm sending my students some fun, silly, and creative things to do as optional prep, and I thought I'd share them here.
First up is making "parchment", for all your wizardly, monsastic, piratical, or historical needs. The video shows you exactly how; if you prefer written instructions, they're underneath it. And I can personally vouch for how calming it is: the ten minutes I spent making my parchment and trying it out left me feeling more relaxed than I had all week!
How to make "parchment"
You will need...
- a teabag and hot water
- plain white paper
- optional seasalt flakes
- any props that help you get into the mood (I gathered up a candle, my pirate chests, and a small orrery)
Prepare the tea "paint" by soaking the teabag in half a cup of boiling water and leaving it to cool. Once it's completely cooled, you can use the teabag as your "paintbrush" to spread the tea over the paper. Make sure you're on a surface that won't suffer from tea stains – the kitchen counter rather than a wooden table! You can get different effects by crumpling the paper before you tea-stain it (it makes the crumpled lines darker), scattering salt onto the tea-stained paper (it creates lighter patches where the salt falls), and scattering tea-leaves from the bag onto the tea-stained paper (it creates darker patches where that falls). When you've tea-stained it, put it somewhere to dry, held down with rocks / coasters / mugs to keep it from blowing away. When it's completely dried, it takes all kinds of ink well, without bleeding or scratching the pen nib. I tested it with my fountain pen, a gel pen, and a Sharpie, which all worked beautifully. And then you can discover what kinds of things you write when you're writing on your very own parchment.
If you'd like to find out more about the Creative Play workshop and the other Summer of Writing workshops this August, you can read about them and book here. You can also subscribe to the blog for future creative and writing suggestions, on the side / beneath this post.
Details about each of the workshops and how to book are here. The first workshops start this weekend, on 1 August.
