Not an Arts and Crafts Project

As I am currently in the freestyle sector of employment I find myself blessed with much additional time for helping the Jabberwocky achieve its potential. So far this has encompassed hours of outstanding applications, paperwork and even an attempt at taming the finances; a mysterious and elusive beast with no corporeal form which vanishes if looked at directly. Having ploughed through this work I was then able to turn my attentions to the blog. I gave it a little sprucing up and wrote a few new pieces that are currently still in the wings waiting for their chance to sweep onto the internet for all marvel at.

Now I may, at times, be prone to a little over exaggeration. At any rate, during an especially seasoned rant about the way the Jabberwocky will change the world and start a food revolution I remembered that the van has a flag pole. A good flag is the rallying point of all the best revolutions and I found my mind wandering off into a world where the big brands rule supreme, evilly imposing their will on the helpless consumer with only one ray of hope in the form of a familiar VW Van… . Suffice to say a half hour of daydreaming later and I had decided we needed a flag. I indulged in a little research, then set off towards what ever google recommend on the front page.

Most of them wanted me to send off for a quote, or create an account, or in some other way commit myself to the process before disclosing any sort of pricing structure. Annoyed by this stifling bureaucracy and still rather caught up in the romantic ideals of the recent reverie I turned to Ebay and found myself a white flag so that I could labour to create the emblem with my own bear hands.

Obviously by the time the flag arrived a few days later I was no longer referring to people as “comrade” and was not quite so eager to bother with the flag, but I decided to give it a go anyway. The process was rather illuminating and so, in case you ever decide to recreate this noble feet, it is described below.

You will need:
1 white flag
some green dye
a computer
some wax and a paintbrush
a table
a printer and 30 odd sheets of printer paper
scissors and tape
a camera (if you are planning on making an explanatory blog post after)

1. Take an electronic copy of your Jabberwocky logo, invert the colours then convert to an outline. If inexperienced with picture manipulation please allow 2-3 hours for this apparently simple exercise. There is nothing simple about it.
2. Resize your picture to the size of your flag. A standard flag is 5’x3′, so 60”x36”. The flag industry does not do metric.
3. In a picture programme that has no concept of shrinking the image to fit the page, print out your glorious Jabberwocky.
4. Assemble your Jabberwocky and tape it together, marvelling at how you always used to hate Paint for not shrinking images to fit the page. There had to be a use for it, now we have finally found one.
5. Iron your flag, and place on top of giant paper counterpart.
6. With a permanent marker, trace the Jabberwocky onto the flag, thus negating any need for drawing ability.
7. Melt some wax in a pan, then brush it onto your Jabberwocky, inside the lines, creating a waterproof Beast in the centre of your flag. Take a few moments to marvel at your own creativity as the wax dries.
8. Following the instructions on the dye, submerge the flag, noting that although you thought you were very clever for buying green nylon dye for your nylon flag, you had neglected to note that the dye has to boil. This may impact the final results, what with you being unable to boil it, because wax dissolves in even moderately warm water. Proceed bravely, hoping that end result will miraculously still work out fine.
9. Remove flag and watch in dismay as you rinse all the dye straight out again.
10. Pen a variety of unpleasant letters to various people uninvolved in the process assigning disproportionate amounts of blame, whilst gradually accepting that you are possibly just not cut out for arts and crafts.