FUN WITH SOME STRINGS ATTACHED
Cherol Filbee tears up lengths of damp toilet paper and shoves them into the bowl of her Kenwood cake mixer. She adds measures of plaster, PVA glue, cornflour, and mineral oil, then turns it on and stands back.
The former cake baker is wisely wearing her apron. The splattered remains of other papier mâché mixes cover that as well as the mixer and its surrounds. It is a messy business, far messier than the cake making she used to get up to in the Kenwood. Thankfully, Cherol now has a shed and can make as much mess as she likes.
Looking for new fun
Having been a professional cake maker and decorator for many years, Cherol looked to change the recipe for new fun about seven years ago. She turned to the Learning Connexion, Wellington’s art-training establishment, to do a course in painting, which is what she thought her main interest was. But she soon realised that it was making things directly with her hands that piqued her imagination, especially while doing a class with a German marionette maker.
Ever since Cherol found that mice had run up the legs of one of her puppets and were eating his hips, an electronic mouse-scaring device has been plugged in each night
“I started off with the birds, then went on to people, and I’m working through my family members,” says Cherol of her puppets that hang by their strings in her shed. They are hanging to make it harder for mice to get to them, now that her elderly shed-cat Rocky has died.
