A Path to Simplicity: Michaelmas Lanterns

At our Steiner School playgroup this week, we celebrated Michaelmas together. We feasted on bread we made together, apples and homemade jams and chutneys.

We also made beautiful colourful lanterns to light and warm our dark winter nights. Leela was so engaged with it, spending so much time 'painting' the PVA glue onto the glass jar, tearing up the orange, yellow and red tissue paper and sticking it on.

{Bringing warmth and light to our home shrine}

I made a twisty for the handle. If you are not sure how to do this, I would urge you to give it a go (but be warned as it is surprisingly addictive). Now that I've looked it up on the internet, I'm not sure if that's the real word for them, so I'll tell you how to do it anyway!

To make wool twisties...

Take at least 2 pieces of wool (you could do this with as many as you like to make it thicker or thinner). Using different colours works well. The final twisty will be around half the length of the original pieces of wool, so keep that in mind.

If you have another pair of hands to help with the next step, that's great! If not, simply tie the wool lengths onto something, such as a door handle. Then start twisting it. If you're working with a partner, each partner twists in the opposite direction so that the wool pieces twist around each other. Keep going until the wool starts to want to 'buckle' or loop up.

Then comes the fun part! Take something to act as a weight, say a pair of scissors or a spoon with a hole in the end, and carefully thread in onto the twisted wool to about half way down the length. Then, holding the weight and keeping the tension high, catch hold of both ends of the wool so that the weight is now hanging down with all the ends at the top. When you're ready, let go of the weight and watch it spin, twisting the wool as it goes. Get ready to catch the weight as it slows and then tries to twist back the other way. Once you've caught the weight, simply cut it off the wool and tie both ends of the twisty. The wool will now stay in this twisted rope-like state and won't unwind. It makes a very much stronger and decorative twine which can be used for all sorts of crafts.

(If you read my previous post about making bird seed cakes, we used short twisties as the hanging loops there).

There have also been some very nice Michaelmas lantern tutorials on these beautiful blogs.