Did anyone else’s parents or grandparents accuse them of making ‘mud pies?’ My grandad always referred to whatever I was doing in the garden as ‘making mud pies.’ In fairness to him, I did have a penchant for mixing acorns and soil in a plastic saucepan and ‘serving’ this to my brothers as ‘dinner’ in the climbing-frame that we owned. I loved that climbing frame; you could move the two main shelves around into all kinds of configurations. Playing with it always involved a lot of negotiation; I always wanted it to be a house where I could serve up Acorn Surprise whereas my brothers always wanted it to be a castle. They were very indulgent of me. I once placed a cardboard box inside the ‘house’ and told my brothers to ‘watch the tv.’ They did indeed obediently sit and watch the cardboard box while I made mud pies for them. I marvel at this now. When my Dad covered the detachable slide with sheet aluminium and polished it until it shone, we connected the whole apparatus to our paddling pool and all house and castle dreams were abandoned. We poured water down the slide with my mud-pie saucepan thus creating a waterslide which each of us descended with great glee and much splashing. This worked out just great until the wooden frame of the slide rotted from our enthusiastic waterings, at which point we went back to making mud pies and watching cardboard box tv.

I loved making mud pies. I still do…

This is bentonite clay, fullers earth and water bubbling together for 1. a recording I wanted to make and 2. a facemask recipe I am working on.

I need some kind of stick blender to correct the lumpy texture, but to the boiled mud I will add essential oils and honey, then I will store the facemask in my fridge and use it when I am feeling the need to refresh my face/make some semblance of effort with my appearance.

Not only is this idea exciting because it involves mud, but it also has a nice link to wool. Fuller’s earth was once used in the finishing process to purge woollen cloths of grease, lanolin and other impurities. Now I can use it on my face! Imagine!

The only thing I need is a nice cloth to scrub the mud off with afterwards. I am planning on developing a Mud Pi washcloth, in the wake of my Mothers’ Day Pi washcloth, and the Olive Pi and Cherry Pi washcloths that I made respectively for Kate and Mel.

I love making Pis.

Mel’s Olive Pi.

Kate’s Cherry Pi.

I love that what I have made is a recipe from a recipe; a thing derived from Elizabeth Zimmerman’s original pi-shawl recipe, adapted and changed around and altered (just like any good Pie recipe) with the maths intact but the ‘ingredients’ all changed.

The Pi washcloth recipe will be published in The Knitting Forecast, in the meantime, my Mud Pi and all the other Pis I have been enjoying making so much are ravelled here.