Gallery view

 Meeting 4 :: 14 April 2024  7-9pm (GMT)

Notes form this meeting:

4 of us attended: Carola, Chris, Karina and me.

Karina began working with daffodil leaves and stems she’s been drying for 3 weeks. then later she moved onto raffia. Chris was workign with snowdrop leaves and mycelium rhizome thread he harvested from beneath a rotted bark of a beech tree? (if I remember it correctly). Carola continued working with rushes and also some ribwort plantain leaves. and I was working with cordalyne fibres I had saved and dried months ago while I was in the Scotland.

Onion cutting featured in our conversations tonight, too. I reported back on trying out this suggested different method of cutting following the grain/fibre lines of the onions. Karina shared further details with us about this. We talked about a wonderful film Carola and I watched, The Nettle Dress we would like to recommend to you all to watch. We are all looking forward to working with nettle fibres in the summer season. Also, three other books we mentioned going off on a tangetn talking about underground network of trees, roots and fungi.The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben, Entangled Lives by Merlin Sheldrake and Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard.

We were all fascinated by Chris’s experimental cordage twisting with the mycelium threads and I began wondering where the fungi ended and the wood began, whether they merged together becoming one, as fungi can be present living in host organisms.

We talked about current seasonal plant fibres growing around us with enthusiasm and what to forage for our next meeting. I suggested dock leaves, ivy and continue with rushes.

Speaker view

I introduced two stopper knots during this meeting: the crown knot and the wall knot (which I funnily manage to pronounce with my accent in a way that sounds like walnut. in this meeting from the Handbook of Knots by Des Pawson (it is on our recommended reading list - please see the pages photographed for reference below)

In this book stopper knots are defined as follows:

‘Stopper knots are used to bind the strands at the end of a rope so that they do not fray, to stop a rope from slipping through a hole, to weight a rope, or to provide a handhold. They are usually tied at the end of a rope, although some can be tied within the length of a rope. This family of knots includes some of the simplest and most commonly known knots.’