November was started by Louise Bourchier and Sex: Pleasure Physiology. Louise taught us all about female and male anatomy with the visual help of a velvet and silk vulva puppet! We learned safe but fun sex practices, masturbation, erotic zones, sex toys… Learning and lots of fun on a Monday night.
To start our involvement with the Good Food Month we welcomed back the wonderful Sarah Cowell, fresh back from her trip to China, to tell us all about Tea. We learnt about 1000 year old tea trees in the south of China and that there are over 3000 types of green tea in China alone! And you can’t have a tea class without a good brew can you?
Peter piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, but we made a jar of pickled beans instead. Anne Shea showed us how there’s More to Jars Than Jam and how easy it is to pickle things (although that’s no reason to be complacent about food safety). Take jar, add dill, garlic, chili and peppercorns, add beans, seal with lid and wait for 2 weeks. Yum!
The political debate about Carbon Emissions and climate change can often be vitriolic so it’s sometimes easy to forget that we’re talking about science. Amandine Denis led us through the basics or the Greenhouse Effect, where most emissions are coming from. And the surpise of the night, we can achieve a 15% reduction in greenhouse emissions without significant lifestyle changes!
If you didn’t already know it, Yes You Can Draw! As with most things in life, it’s just about giving it a go. Amandine Thomas had prepared a few fun activities, from drawing with you eyes closed, to drawing without lifting your pen off the paper, and even drawing with someone elses hand. The result was a table full of portraits.
We got regal in ‘Game of Thrones’ Braiding as Theresa Winters showed us some inspirational braided locks from the tv show before teaching us how to do them ourselves. We started off with some of Sansa’s simpler (and arguably prettier) looks before moving on to try Cersei’s beautiful twists and ended up with a full-on Daenerys ‘do to wow everyone as we walked out through King’s Landing. I mean Melbourne.
In the second Braiding class of the night, Theresa went back to the basics and taught us easy braided hairdos that anyone can whip up. We all got to practice on each other and on ourselves from the basic French and Dutch braids to more complicated styles such as the waterfall or the upside down braid. We all left the class looking very fancy!
If you’ve never been good with kids, then you should have come to Balloon Animals. Lauren Seigman showed us some basic constructions including the dog, the parrot and the flower. And for the whole class we bent, twisted and manipulated ticking timebombs of pressurised air… you never know when it’s going to pop!