hikaru dorodango

At the Electric Picnic, I managed to do two workshops in the Craft Village. One was needle-felting, and the other was the Japanese art of hikaru dorodango, or Dragon Balls.

Basically it is a ball of mud that slowly turns into a shiny ball resembling marble. The process is easy, slow yet extremely relaxing. Who would have thought rolling one ball of mud around and around could create something so beautiful!

With the chaos that ensued after the Picnic, I only found it the other day. Hidden among the fluffy Crocheted Coral. I was happily showing it off, and then thought, ooh, I can write about it in my blog. So I brought it upstairs, put it on the table, got the camera ready, and yes, you guessed it, my perfectly spherical shiny mud ball rolled off the table and cracked in two.


But thanks to modern technology, and photoshop, here's what my shiny mud ball would have looked like...



Its, apparently, now the latest craze in Japanese Kindengartens, but its an old tradition that was used to help children who were training to work in pottery or plaster, to get the feel of clay

Here's is an article about a Japanese Professor who brought back this technique to modern Japanese kindergarten.

Here's is a link to a website that explains it better than I do