Saturday October 16: Paper-mash masks # 2

Session number 2 with the paper-mash masks making. This time for painting them!
This time around there were more participants. Actually, the new students, who arrived thrilled to make their own mask, could not be exactly (or technically) classified as children, considering their age. But why limit our workshop because of that? After all, we're all children...  And besides, our grown-ups can go home and show the kids (or even Dad) how to do it.

Everyone chose the shape to give to their mask. Our endlessly distracted mum, more concentrated on chatting than listening to the instructions, found herself painting before even cutting the holes for the eyes, nose and mouth!

From 1 to 3 pm we had a lot of fun, creating, laughing, enjoying our work.
Kids liked the painting phase a lot. They love getting dirty with colors.

Our masks now have a shape and they're ready to be worn for Halloween!
Will our talented handicraft makers turn into monsters?

In the following session we'll let new participants play together: we'll have Polish and Iranian children learn some of the innumerable ways of not wasting, and re-using things!

Saturday October 9: Paper-mash masks # 1

The workshop officially started!
Not many students for the first day, but we didn't lose heart.
Francesca was the only teacher that day, but the mother of two children was there and she was very active and helpful.
First step: explaining to the kids how to tear newspaper pages in order to obtain straight stripes - almost perfect ones. The two students got it quickly and started to work on it with no problem.

Their mother was too busy talking to me and not concentrating on this first operation, so at the end we were laughing at her and her bunch of useless unshaped pieces of papers. Trying to figure how that could have happened, one of her sons promptly pointed out to her "You were not paying attention when Francesca was explaining the procedure!"

The rest of the workshop day went along in a very relaxing atmosphere and after 2 hours we had our paper-masks ready.

Then we all cleaned the place and we did it in the same spirit: not creating new rubbish. In fact we used cloth instead of paper towel!