Day 3

Plan:

Morning: Grind new paper pulp, with a very small proportion of methi. try it on moulds.

review the previous days moulded products

Afternoon:

add P.O.P to the morning's ground pulp and try moulding.

look at drying patterns.

We started the day with grinding the new paper we had soaked, this paper had been in water for two days and was much easier to grind. This time i made sure that i was around when we put the methi, and we put two large tspn in about 8 handfuls of pulp.

it seemed to be much better consistency.

the things we had kept to dry, just hadnt dried. One of then had a slightly, and so i removed it while it was slightly wet. and gave it the shape we had brain stormed. setting it while it was half dry half wet worked quite well.

The plates i realized were too wet, and so we decided to take them away or they would never dry at this rate.

with our hands itself we made a root type thing, which the women were very good at after their daily practice of making jollad rotis!

lets see how they work out!

the afternoon plan didn't really work out as the plaster of paris hadnt arrived- still!

i decided that i would just go to the market in Gangavati tommorow, an hour away and get the stuff. We also needed a nice plastic or steel container of our packaging size so that we could make a mould using it for our containers. anusuyamma had taken me all over Anegundi and even into peoples homes, but we didn't find anything that would be ideal for us, and nothing that we could make do with either.

If i didn't find anything at gangavati either i thought that we could get some clay from a potter and make it ourselves.

So the afternoon was spent doing our own things, they got back to making banana fibre, and i got to making my pencil case and belt.

At this point i really realized the blessing of a well equipped workshop and Mr. David- both i didn't have here. No drilling machine, no sandpaper, no good saw. A bit of a pain but i managed to make quite a nice buckle for my belt.

i also spent some time at the tailoring unit getting my pencil case stitched. As i had mentioned i knew the outsourcing part would be difficult. Trying to get the finish i wanted without being to imposing was so incredibly hard. the end product wasn't to the finish a wanted, but it was a doable prototype. However Basheer, the tailor and i did have a little conversation on how we could next time work a little bit on the finishing, and how the customers eyes always looking out for it.

We ended the day by cutting some rice grass and soaking it to make some pulp for paper.