First, I will say that
normally I would prefer to buy the cheap $5 plastic cauldron but there is
nothing like that here. So I
googled ‘home made cauldrons’ and found several people who made them out of an
assortment of things. You actually
have to decide what it will be used for and whether it needs to last for years
and be weather-proof. Since ours
needs to be disposable, I am embracing the reduce-reuse-recycle credo and have
decided to make it out of papier mache.
Today is recycling garbage
day in Oyamacho. So I got on my
trusty bike with baskets both front and back and headed to the school bus stop
with the kids this morning. As we
passed each garbage pile, they evaluated the cleanliness and neatness of the
newspaper pile and loaded the nice ones on to my bike. We ended up with about a 3 foot high
stack of papers.
In our cauldron discussions,
there was some talk of needing two cauldrons: one to hold dry ice and look
spooky and a second, smaller one to either hold candy or be used as a ‘guess
what this is’ receptacle. The girl
child (13) had made a game like this last year for the boy child’s Halloween
Dance at Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy. She put cold, cooked spaghetti, frozen grapes and gooey
marshmallows in a small bowl inside the opaque container. Kids had to reach in and guess what was
in there, then they would get a prize. A small cauldron would work well for
this game. She was very concerned
that the kids would not speak English and she would not understand their
Japanese, but I think she will do fine.
I covered one pink beach ball
with a clear trash bag and enclosed our largest salad bowl in a second trash
bag. I used my purple vinyl all
purpose table cloth and tore up a newspaper into strips. I am using the white glue and water
method of papier mache. Flour glue
works really well but is prone to mould.
I used all of one newspaper to cover the beach ball and bowl with 3
layers of paper. I set them out in
the sun to dry then in the afternoon, I repeated the process. Once they were dry again, I took out
the insides (deflated the beach ball, popped out the bowl) so the insides could
dry over night.
When my husband came
downstairs and saw all the papier mache stuff, beach ball and so on, he said,
‘Now I KNOW it is time for me to go to work’.
I will continue to add layers
until the whole thing is thick and very stable. The beach ball cauldron will have a round base and a
smallish opening. The larger
cauldron, made from 2 paper bowls stuck together, will have three separate legs
and, hopefully, 2 handles.
The various websites
recommended using a sealer (like gesso), spray paint and, finally varnish (or
boat varnish if you need it weather proofed). I’d like to keep it simple and avoid a haz-mat suit, mask
and gloves but I still want the thing to look like a cauldron. I’ll keep ya posted…literally.