Polymer Nightmares
An evening of fruity filled fun
Polymer Nightmares
An evening of fruity filled fun
Last week, in the midst of a Toronto heatwave, my friend Erin snatched the last three tickets to a crafting event. The pamphlet outlined an evening unveiling the secrets of polymer clay miniatures, which seemed like a relaxing enough reason to migrate from our air-conditioned homes into the air-conditioned venue. The studio hosting the event, The Bentway, seemed welcoming enough, a bright space overlooking green grass, with lots of soothing wood encasing the walkways of the second floor. Distracted by the airy ambiance and the textures and colours worn by the attendees, I suspected nothing.
Squeezing between a sea of crafting hopefuls, we three took the last remaining seats at the juncture of two long tables, and got to poking the tools that had been neatly laid out: little chunks of colourful clay in red, burgundy, green, blue, orange, and brown, an X-Acto knife, and a little pokey tool which did not immediately betray its purpose. At the head of the room, the workshop leader introduced herself and pointed to the screen broadcasting her own crafting station. She let us know she was a full-time miniaturist and, given that she had the microphone and a fruit-patterned button up shirt, I took her at her word.
Lemons were up first, the microphone boomed, and the three of us studiously cut chunks out of our yellow clay pile. The flat screen at the front of the room showed our instructor rolling the pea-sized ball until smooth, and then tapering off the edges a bit to coax the lemony essence out of the material. With the mystery tool, which turned out to be a scorer, she lightly tapped on the surface of her creation, leaving behind the pockmarked peel of the lemon, which, had it not been for its lilliputian size, could have just come off a grove in the Sorrentino Peninsula.
Back in our corner of the workshop, the three of us struggled to taper off the ends of the lemon, diverging into squash, and, as desperation began to rise, banana territory. After covering our first attempts in lint and sweat, we tried to hone the technique with second and third lemons, encouraged by the instructor. As I took up revisions for my second lemon, however, the instructor began to roll a tiny blue ball, urging us to mix clay colours (just like paint!) to best match the shade of a natural blueberry. Because we still trusted her at this point, Sam got to work with some purple, Erin with some brown, and I opted for blending in some maroon. Immediately, all three of us realized our mistake. Clay, as it turns out, does not at all mix like paint. So, there we sat, grunting and sweating, trying to get two distinct colours to become one, as the instructor breezed through one, two, three perfect blueberries. We had finally rolled out our first ball and were working on teeny tiny blueberry tops, sharp and delicate, when our overlord announced the start on strawberries.
Strawberries, she said, drew from our previously learned skills. I looked up, sweat beading down my forehead and into the collar of my shirt, wondering who exactly had remained calm enough to learn anything in the past fifteen or so minutes. A woman with a crocheted top abandoned her chair and took a lap around the tables; another with beaded earrings began to self-soothe by tapping on her temples and jaw. Breaking my concentration to compare progress to others’ was a bad idea—when I looked back to the screen, the strawberry had already been shaped and bestowed its seeds. Goddammit. She was onto the leaves now, reminding us we could always tone down the furious green with brown in pursuit of a more natural shade. Sam, Erin, and I made eye contact, and silently agreed to remain a united, no-blending front. Fool us once.
In a moment of vulnerable joy, Erin dared express delight at the realistic texture of her now seeded strawberry. It was then that the instructor called our attention back to the front. In the time it had taken us to build a single passable strawberry, she had come up with a June field’s worth, and was promptly moving onto raspberries. The secret to raspberries, as it turned out, was to chop a long, thin sausage of deep maroon clay into a million neutron-sized pieces and then apply an ephemeral yet firm pressure, pulling the raspberry together just so, breathing body and life onto the previously unassuming pile of rabbit turds. Erin was wise, and opted to skip the raspberries. Sam and I did our best, but halfway in our clay sausage slicing, our fearless leader decided we were ready for peaches.
It was somewhere between scoring peach butts and the creation of their tiny, disk-like leaves, that we abandoned all sense of pretense and pulled out water bottles, chugging from them and wiping our mouths as though we’d crawled across Death Valley and no longer feared evil. The instructor showed no signs of stopping so I reached into my purse and felt around, grabbing a packet of mango ginger chews and panic-throwing them on the table, scrambling along my friends and neighbours to shove sugar into our depleted bodies.
With the zing of ginger and defeat still in our mouths, we looked up to find pears were the final frontier. The Bartlett variety seemed to be the inspiration, with its sexy shape and slim stem, a temptress which nearly caused a schism in our tightly knit alliance. While I was still squishing and propping up the would-be raspberry and Erin wrestled a leaf onto her peach, Sam quietly toiled away, meticulously working the nearly-neon green clay designated for pears. The curvature of her final product, along with the delicate stem with which she crowned it was so beautiful, so breathtaking that Erin and I lost precious seconds admiring it, threatening the quiet solidarity that had accompanied us thus far.
Envy, it turned out, had no time to set in, because the workshop helpers appeared with aluminum trays, urging us to place our creations in the designated quadrants for baking. The clanging of trays paralyzed me with fear, which was overpowered by the adrenaline that had been running through me since the blueberries, forcing me to frantically search for the shared piercing tool and make a last ditch attempt at turning my fruits into beads. The workshop assistants began to lose patience with us, rattling the tray next to our heads which caused Erin to beg “No, just one more second!” Seconds after her outburst, trays were snatched away, leaving us to care for our wounded and replenish fluids, a thousand-yard stare directed at the bountiful cornucopia decorating the instructor’s work station. I will spare the reader details about the process by which we selected beads from shared containers for our final projects; it was a fucking massacre.
In the end, we left with our respective products: Sam and Erin with a bracelet each, and I with a half-formed phone charm. Dazed by the setting sun, and calmed by the cool breeze that hit our still recovering frames, we made our way back to the parking lot.
“So...letterpress next?” Sam asked, twirling her bracelet.
“Oh most definitely,” Erin and I replied.
Ailén Cruz — 997 Editing
Strangest episode of Master Chef yet.