SAMHAIN, ANCESTORS AND HORSETAIL ON DARK MOUNTAIN

I've been making creative projects along the Wheel of the Year with Dark Mountain through their Eight Fires workshops.

For Samhain I sat by a fire that Kiddo and Dada created the day before. My mom was there and I snuggled Baby while Kiddo roasted marshmallows.

For the creative object for the Samhain workshop, masks and staffs conceptually featuring ancestry were the suggested framework.

Horsetail is an ancestral plant. It's one of the oldest plants, existing alongside dinosaurs and historic species of horsetail (and apparently some current, but not local species) grow tree-size.

Each of our ancestral lines goes back to microbes at some point so many of our ancestors would have lived on an earth with horsetail. I wanted to work with horsetail for this project.

A friend directed me to an amazing horsetail forest. It grew almost as tall as us and the paths through it were gorgeous, with tall straight sides.

I gathered a bunch of horsetail and played around with making a mask and weaving the horsetail. This material wants to be straight! I had some ideas I might put wire in it and curve it about but no-go.

I ended up making a "cape" of horse tail by sewing some long pieces to a strip of fabric that I got long ago from my Grandma. I made a crown by glueing plant material to a cardboard headband. I used horsetail, dried grass my son collected, roses, dried yarrow, oak leaves. I was able to attach the "cape" to the crown for a Samhain couture that honored ancestors in our recent line and our very distant line.