I spent a long time thinking about what I wanted to do for my Playtime, so in this instance I wasn’t struck by the lightning of inspiration, but rather spent a lot of time developing ideas. I wanted to maximise my time, so I jotted down in a notebook a list of challenges and gains - what I needed to work around, and what I wanted to achieve. I wanted something that would keep me invested and excited, a learning opportunity and something hands-on, away from the keyboard. Obviously with most of my day spent online, it was nice to use these hours to take a break.
There was one really significant challenge I was facing when I started planning this, and that is that the Auckland floods were happening, so I couldn’t leave the house. I had this huge big plan to go for some hikes, or get out in nature and take some photographs, and then the weather kicked in. So it had to be something I could do inside the house, that I could hop into and out of with kind of uncertain timing. It also had to avoid any costly materials, tools or investments - not that I could go out and get them anyway, because my courtyard had about a foot of water in it. So, I decided to do two different projects instead of one, at six hours each.
Where did the inspiration to do what you did come from?
My first project was small-scale woodworking, which I’ve always been very interested in from afar. A lot of my hobbies are quite traditionally feminine, passed down through the women in my family, such as fibre arts, writing and painting. These are wonderful, but I’ve always had a passion for breaking those gender boundaries, and getting into boyish things to prove I can do it all. I’d like to one day have a woodworking studio, and perhaps even a forge.
Then to complement this, I wanted my second project to be something that is a family tradition, passed down from my mother to me. I wanted to spend some time weaving, a great thing to do when it's storming outside! It means a lot to me to continue this tradition in my own home when I spent so much time growing up alongside it.
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How did you use the time and what did you do?
For the woodworking, I decided to get a little pair of knives and start some spoon carving. I was inspired by Welsh love spoons, and also a bunch of nice old men on Youtube, with five views each who had little tutorials they made in their wood shops. I thought they were really cute. The most fortuitous part of deciding on this project was the fact that you need greenwood for complex spoon carving. Usually, you can’t go around ripping branches from trees in the centre of Auckland, but there was something happening that was ripping branches off trees at the very time I decided to do this… the storms and floods.
The wood types I found were magnolia wood and cherry wood. The magnolia was taken from a tree outside my local shops, and the cherry was given to me by the crews cleaning up after the storm. I was too shy to ask them for a spare branch, but my brother would go up to every one of them, and finally found a lovely man who gave us a bundle of branches and logs. The carving itself only took two tools, a hook knife and a whittling knife, and you have to work quickly before the wood begins to dry out. My spoons are a little nubbly and rough, but it really satisfies the urge to cut things with a sharp implement that you have as a kid, when you get a pocket knife. I used to go around hacking at branches and sharpening sticks and things, and so this is the more elevated version of that, and it is very primal and satisfying.
For my second project, I wove a set of dish towels. I aimed for three, at two hours per towel, but I ended up weaving two and a half, as I managed to snap part of my loom near the end! That was unfortunate, but I managed to make two beautiful dish towels in a lovely orange theme to complement the rest of my home. I wanted to improve my skills and try something new. You can tell that I’m not a master at this with my slightly uneven warp stripes, but weaving is a very complex process, despite being so ancient. Setting up and warping the loom is a long, time consuming process before you even get to the weft. But with the help of my cat, I managed to achieve something beautiful and functional that brings me joy to look at.
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What did you learn along the way?
I think that it was really important that I had a few big limitations during this process, that helped nail down ideas and unleash my creativity. It felt good to balance two parts of myself - the strong heritage I have as a woman, and the new things I get to experience and create new traditions with. Both of these crafts are quite ancient skills with a long cultural heritage and history, which felt like a meaningful counterbalance to the predominantly digital and ultramodern work I do at Ghost. Life is always a tension between tradition and modernity, and I think this experience really showed me the importance of finding the balance between both in the things you do day to day.
