In love with my friend Tasha who checked on the start time for today’s Stone Age workshop and realised it was 10am, not 1030am as I had thought, text me to let me know so we could arrange to pick them up half an hour earlier. And she made soup and cheese scones and brought enough to share with me :). ♥
Less in love with trying to put my new spare wheel back in the special hanging under the car place. I failed and got black hands in the process. Serves me right for being impatient about just sitting in the car waiting for the windscreen to defrost and thinking I’d use the time to do something efficient instead. ♥
In love with my fab local Home Ed friends. M who ‘found’ the flint knapper guy and set up the workshops, Caz & Bid who provided the venue, D, K, O and various others who have been at the workshops, all the kids mates who have also been there and made their learning a fun, group experience. ♥
Slightly in love with flint knapper guy. Partially due to his Ray Mears-ness, I do love a man with strong arms and thighs who knows enough to hunt meat for me and show me how to make nettle cordage but mostly for his passion about his craft and his excellent gentle, patient teaching methods both to our children and to the interested adults in the group. ♥
In love with Ady who drove to Croydon to get stuff for camp for me, got a fire going when I was freezing cold and has changed the bedcovers ♥
Deeply in love with my children who have had the exact same long day at the end of a long week as me but still ended it happy, lovely and gorgeous with Scarlett skipping off to bed declaring it ‘one day til camp, eight days til the zoo and nine days til my birthday!’.
The workshop today was Stone Age harpoon making. It wasn’t cheap at £25 each for the kids but worth every penny I thought. First Karl talked about what harpoons were used for and how hunting and gathering worked in prehistoric times. They discussed the types of animals hunted and what tools and methods would have been used. Next which materials and techniques used to make the tools to make the weapons.
Karl had some deer antlers and showed us how they would have removed strips of antler to create the harpoon and then handed out an antler ‘blank’ each. Next step was to create a saw from flint which he did by making thin slices of flint then nicking out a series of teeth
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which was then used to saw a series of parallel lines along the length of one side. This was hard work and required patience but gave a really clear idea of just how labour intensive tool making was. We finished the morning session with everyone having a harpoon with lines sawn. The kids went off to run around for an hour while the grown ups sat and chatted. Really enjoyed talking to everyone about the meaning of life and simpler versus richer.
After lunch we brought out the metal and used little hacksaws to finish off demonstrating how much easier tool making was once created materials and tools had been discovered and invented.
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Next the in between bits were snipped out, again using modern tools for speed, then back to a knapped bit of flint to be used as a polisher to take off some of the outer brown layer of antler. Karl talked about how archaeological finds from this era show they had started to apply decoration to tools by this time.
The final stage was to drill a hole through the harpoon so cordage could be attached. The harpoon would then be thrown by hand or attached to a stick. The drilling was done with another piece of knapped flint, this time into a tiny sharp point turned and turned in the same place on one side of the harpoon.
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This was hard work, not least because the flint sharp bit kept breaking off. Tasha and I grabbed hammerstones so we could re-knap to put new sharp bits on them and many of the group joined in with our re-doing of ‘U can’t touch this’ by MC Hammer, using instead of Hammertime, Hammerstone. Very catchy :).
Once you were nearly through the antler if you held it up you could see light through it and knew you were nearly there. I encouraged Davies and Scarlett to ‘drill for Jesus’ as we had ‘seen the light’
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Then they were done 🙂
The kids all went off for half an hours more playing while we had another cup of tea and some cake and chatted a bit more.
Then we came home, dropping Tasha and Toby off on the way. I put the chickens away and Ady got home shortly after us. We then had a dilemma about eating as our initial plan had been fish and chips for dinner before going back out but noone was really hungry enough for dinner so we all had a piece of toast and voted to get KFC on the way home for late dinner instead.
We were off to see an adaptation of A Christmas Carol at Worthing theatre. I’d booked in as part of my drive to do lots of theatres and cinema visits and thought it would be perfect a couple of days before Christmas camp to get us in a festive mood. Really it was a but much at the end of a long week, on an evening that could have been better spent preparing for camp / getting the house ready to be decorated, at the end of a day already spent doing lots of sitting down concentrating but it was really good and worth all of the above minor quibbles.
We all really enjoyed it and although tired and very cold were glad we went. We got a bucket of chicken on the way home, ate and snuggled and the kids went to bed just before 11 and were asleep very soon afterwards – they don’t need to be up in the morning anyway.
I do need to be up in the morning as I’m working and still have stacks to do for camp but it’ll all come together, or it won’t and that won’t matter either. Friends, mulled wine, high possibility of snow and plenty of Christmas cheer, what more could one possibly need and how little could anything else matter?
The blog title is inspired by Scarlett who asked ‘what day is it today?’ and when answered ‘Friday’ replied with ‘Friday, I’m in love?’ 🙂 but it’s not sponsored by The Cure and no money has changed hands 😉
rofl at last paragraph! I’ve found I’ve become less drawn to the blogs that have a prevalence of sponsored post activity. Sounds like a fantastic day. Will miss you all next week :-(. Think you’ll have a fantastic time.
Comment by michelle — 27 November 2010 @ 11:20 am
Oh, I couldn’t put my wheel on that hanging thing under the boot – there’s a point where I had to be holding it up with one hand whilst the other hand did something else, and I just wasn’t strong enough to do that.
Harpoons look cool – will look forward to hearing about the first trout caught with one!
Comment by Alison — 27 November 2010 @ 5:16 pm
Harpoons look very cool. Look am reading obviously waiting for Camp Blog.
Comment by em — 04 December 2010 @ 10:10 pm
lol, it’s coming. I’#m up to Stew Day (Tuesday) so far….
Comment by Nic — 04 December 2010 @ 10:14 pm
i have got to wednesday 🙂
Comment by HelenHaricot — 04 December 2010 @ 11:19 pm