Lockdown

Cancellations

How is everyone getting along in these very strange times?  The activities of our society have been affected just like everybody else. The Spring Meeting, due this month, was cancelled. Judith Railton was going to give us a talk about her friend June Lancelyn Green who, as we know, sadly died last year. Hopefully we will be able to schedule this for the Autumn Meeting and will let you know when a date has been fixed. Our chairman, Liz Wright, was due to go  to Llandudno again this June to help them pick their Alice for the year, but that too has been cancelled.  The incumbent, Millie Woodyatt, will continue in the role for another year.

Activities

What have you been doing during this ‘Lockdown’ period? If you have been doing anything Lewis Carroll associated let me know, preferably by email, and I’ll post it onto our web site.  You’ll find the relevant addresses on the back of the cover page. For example June Lornie has suddenly found that she now has a lot more time for her artistic endeavours.  She has been following some art challenges being posed on Facebook.  One day the challenge was to use the cardboard tube inside a toilet roll or kitchen towel to produce a work of art. June came up with Humpty Dumpty.

She has also been hard at work creating greetings cards and posting them to Etsy - An online ebay type of site for arts and crafts people. She has put up quite a number of cards, all based on her original works including some based on her Alice in Wonderland illustrations.   June tells me that she is planning to add more Alice cards and to make prints available. Follow this link: December Dragonfly to her Etsy shop.

Web Site

I have finally found the time to start updating the website and have started putting up Keith Wright’s Daresbury Chronicles  working backwards from 2014.  However this is providing quite a challenge as the Chronicles can be quite extensive.  The autumn 2012 edition is forty pages long so takes quite a bit of work.  They are well worth revisiting however as they contain a wonderful blend of local chat which can now be viewed as nostalgia and even of historical interest coupled with useful Carrollian articles. The benefit of putting them on the website, apart from obviously making them available to everyone, is that they can be searched and cross referenced.  For example the article in this magazine about the Beauty of Books references Tenniel and, on the Web Site, I’ve linked it to Keith’s article about Tenniel. Do let me know of any lockdown activities you have so I can post them to the website.

Humpty Dumpty Cake

 if you can get some cake mix, flour, eggs or in fact any of the ingredients in these difficult times, why not try this Humpty Dumpty Cake ?

Ingredients

Cake Sponge Cake Mix Chocolate Vienna Cream Empty Matchbox Cocoa Assorted sweets coconut Green Snakes Cake board

Humpty Dumpty

1 egg Scraps of coloured cardboard Scraps of Fabric Acrylic paint or felt tipped pens

Make the cake according to the directions on the packet. When the cake is cool trim the top of the cake so that it will sit flat.  Place upside down on a a board. Spread evenly with Vienna Cream.  The match box end is used to make the bricks on the wall by pressing it into the chocolate. Create the flowers using the green snakes for stems and the sweets for petals. Create the path with more sweets. Use green tinted coconut for the grass.

Making Humpty Dumpty

The recipe says “remove centre from the egg by piercing with a pin at either end then blowing contents out of the shell”.  (This seems messy and hard work to me why not just boil the egg, cut the top off carefully, EAT the inside and then use the empty shell upside down.) Make his clothing from from scraps, coloured card board or fabric making sure that the egg will fit! Paint the face on the egg shell  and then sit him on top of the cake.