By contrast, I’m fairly certain my boobs are quite nice. This is as great a comfort to me in my maelstrom of subjective doubt as the cogito was to Descartes. They are small enough not to be cumbersome or distracting, shapely enough to boost morale and cooperative enough to be strategically deployed when occasion demands. They are The Team, and I have a great affection for them.

Apart from the fact that alginate and plaster are just plain fun, I had several reasons for attempting a torso cast. Since I resolved to accept no compromises in the man department, I’ve had to come to terms with the possibility that my breasts might not find another audience before succumbing to the ravages of time. More seriously, breast cancer runs in my family, and there’s a significant chance that someday I might have to take the cast in to a doctor and say, “Make them look like that again.” And finally, if I must age, I intend to become the kind of old lady who horrifies her children by showing their children what a rack Grandma had back in the day.

My poppets, your parents are the most frightful squares.

The Bloke volunteered with remarkable alacrity to help with this project. The plan was to cover me in a layer of alginate for a detailed impression, reinforce the alginate with plaster strips to give the mold rigidity and then cast a positive in liquid plaster. The Bloke mixed up a test batch of alginate to get the consistency right — not too thick to spread, but not so runny it would all slide off.

Of course, once he’d mixed it, he couldn’t resist taking an impromptu dental impression.

Because alginate sets within a couple of minutes and plaster strips won’t adhere to dry alginate, everything had to happen really fast. I got into position, baring my bosom artistically from an unbuttoned shirt, while the Bloke pre-dipped the plaster strips in water, set them aside and whipped up the alginate. Then he slathered handfuls of cold, slimy, mint-scented alginate all over my front, a mildly horrible but thankfully brief process. Then he covered that with crisscrossing layers of wet plaster strips. Within 5 minutes I was encased in a heavy alginate-plaster breastplate. When the Bloke works under pressure, stuff tends to fly around, in this case turning the dining room floor into a Jackson Pollock executed in alginate, plaster and gin. It made a god-awful mess. Of course, my housemate, who is also technically my landlord, chose this moment to come home.

I wore Chanel lipstick so you’d know it’s Art.

After about 10 minutes or so, the plaster was set enough for us to attempt to pry me loose from it. This was not an unmixed success. Alginate unpeels relatively easily from clothing, but we’d forgotten about buttons.

We tore the alginate in several places getting me loose, and didn’t capture a complete impression of the hands, so the finished mold was problematic. But it was still of sufficient quality, especially around what might be termed the key points of interest, to make us both go “ooooh!”

This is the closest you will get to seeing my actual boobs. Sorry.

Then the Bloke mixed up the liquid plaster and I went to work laying down the first coat with a paintbrush, to prevent air bubbles.

Then I just globbed the stuff into the mold with a soup ladle and my hands and left it to cure while we watched Superman 2.

The finished cast looks so cool I kind of want to show it to everyone I know, but you’ll have to take my word for it. I’m rather shy.

A good soundtrack is essential to Crafty Caturday. The Felice Brothers make a particularly appropriate and inspiring accompaniment if you’re struggling against perfectionism: they go at a song with guns blazing, and they don’t worry about sounding messy or just plain sucking. As a result, their albums are as full of misses as they are of hits (almost half the songs on Tonight at the Arizona cry out for the Skip button), but the hits are totally worth it: sloppy, spirited and eminently singalongable.

“Take This Hammer” makes me really excited to see the Felice Brothers live. It’s a good song for jumping up and down and bellowing along to. Especially when you’ve just come to the inevitable point in the project where you realize you’ve sewn something inside out or upside down and are going to have to unpick the whole seam and do it again. I love the anarchic hoots and hollers in the background, the obnoxious accordion, the filthy vocals and the tremendous energy. I love the American “goddamn”, which I don’t hear a lot these days. I also love the way Ian Felice doesn’t quite pronounce his Rs, so it sounds a little like Homestar‘s singing.

• The Felice Brothers, “Take This Hammer”

We’d decided to make a cast of my hand, as a trial run for a bigger project I have in mind. I knew the Bloke would be up for helping me, as he always loves getting involved in any project with a science-fair aspect (indigo dyeing, making moisturizers with lecithin), and this project involved dental alginate, one of the coolest substances available to the civilian with a few pounds and an internet connection. Dental alginate, the goo dentists use to take impressions of your teeth, comes as a powder you mix with cold water to form a viscous liquid the color and consistency of blueberry yogurt. I put my hand into a mold the Bloke had made from a shoebox, and he poured over the alginate.

Alginate sets quickly, changing color as it does. Within 3 minutes it had gone from magenta to pale pink to white, and had hardened to something resembling tofu, only firmer. I wriggled my hand free while the Bloke whipped up the plaster.

It’s good to read the instructions!

He poured the plaster into the space my hand had left in the alginate and we waited about a half-hour while it set. Then the Bloke peeled away the cardboard and set to work unmolding the cast bit by bit from the alginate.

This looked like so much fun I wrested it away from him and did it myself, while the Bloke hopped around behind me saying, “Okay, it’s blatantly my turn now,” and “Careful! Why don’t you let me use the knife?” But watching the incredibly familiar contours of my own hand emerge as I tore away chunk after chunk of alginate was just too cool.

I should have listened to the Bloke. I managed to break the cast in not one but four places. It’s pretty weird holding your own severed fingers.

Let alone sticking them back on with super glue.

I love super glue. It’s one of those rare technologies you can put your whole faith in. I managed to reattach all my fingers. Here’s the finished cast.

It’s pretty strange to feel and handle a part of your own body as a pure object. It gives you a sense, finally, of how other people experience it. Wow, all those people who said my hands were tiny weren’t kidding!

I was unprepared for the fineness of the detail captured by the alginate. It really does preserve every line, wrinkle and pore. This can be a little off-putting, especially in white plaster, which I associate with the smooth, flawless human forms of classical sculpture. I think I had expected to come up with the fair hand of a madonna. Looking at my seamed, imperfect skin mercilessly depicted in plaster made me feel a little bit old and used. The “warts” created by air bubbles in the alginate didn’t help either.

Here’s a more graceful shot of the finished cast.

Chris shows it off to my bemused housemate.

I don’t know how much more successful a Crafty Caturday you could ask for. Let’s hope my luck holds: my next project, a rather trickier one, is a torso cast. And no, I will not show you it. Unless you ask really nicely. Or your last name is Felice.

The ball itself was a bit disappointing. The whole absinthe-and-burlesque aesthetic was tired three years ago, possibly because underneath its pretensions to decadence, it tends to be curiously prudish and joyless. Also, the featured act was a band of ghastly boy-men strutting around in hairy paunches and ironic headwear, sneering openly at the audience. Two of the things that repulse me most in a man are 1) preoccupation with own personal appearance and 2) negligence about hygiene. He-hipsters, being both vain and dirty, unite these two polar opposites in one horrible, insanitary hybrid.

However, the mask now hangs proudly on my wall.

This Caturday I also managed to finish a cross-stitch piece I’ve been persevering with for weeks, even though it has been apparent for most of that time that it was going to end up looking basically like an MS Paint drawing on aida cloth. It’s a thank-you gift for a coworker of mine who took me under her wing when I started in my job — a wry, jaded veteran reporter who smokes like a chimney, swears like a trucker and has a heart of gold. I’m pretty sure she won’t mind that what I’ve given her is basically hideous tat:

Cross-stitch is fun. The very prissiness and homogeneity of it as an artistic medium spark creativity. And there’s something about curling up with a G&T, an unabridged audiobook of To Kill a Mockingbird and an embroidery stand and patiently picking out the word “fuck” in Anchor stranded cotton that soothes my soul.

I realize with a shock that I’ve come to the end of my craft backlog for the moment. I’ve finished a project and don’t have another to start on right away? Panic! Head for the Crafty Caturday Treasure Chest!

I’d promised months ago to make the Bloke a replica of his favorite shirt — a dark-blue tunic made of gauzy cotton that he bought on a trip to Turkey — in lightweight linen we’d dyed during an experiment with indigo. The original shirt was falling apart, so I dismantled it with my trusty seam ripper into its component parts and used them as templates to draw up a pattern on kraft paper. So far, so good.

I don’t have a hell of a lot of experience in garment construction, so without detailed instructions I was a little bit at sea as to what should go where and in what order. Fortunately, the pattern turned out to be very simple, and with a little help from Sue and her invaluable step-by-step tutorials, I managed to clear most of the major hurdles, like sewing the placket and attaching the sleeves, with no trouble at all. The Bloke was suitably impressed with the result.

It does indeed look pretty good, as long as you don’t examine it too closely.

Nothing gives me quite the same pleasure as making clothes. Shopping in London so often leaves a sour taste in my mouth because everything seems so overpriced, badly designed, ill-fitting and cheaply made. A lot of the stuff sold in high street shops is disgracefully flimsy, particularly garments whose original function, now seemingly lost in the mists of time, was to keep people warm — plastic sweaters and cheap “wool” coats are particularly notorious offenders. It wasn’t till the Bloke spent his first ever snug and comfy winter in a J. Crew wool peacoat with Thinsulate that he realized he, like most people in Britain, had spent so much of his life shivering in inferior garments that he’d taken being cold for granted. But with the ability to sew, I face the possibility of a neverending wardrobe of clothes made to my exact size and specifications (tailored wool suits! Victorian drag! custom corsets!), and the deep satisfaction of spending lots of time in the Craft Zone.

That’s why, after finally obtaining the right to UK tuition rates after 3 years of residence, I’ve scrapped the idea of pursuing further education in the form of an MA in something intellectual and have decided to throw all my firepower at learning how to make amazing clothes. I have an endless appetite for learning more, there are plenty of people willing to teach me and with a bit of strategy I can afford it, so why not? It’s not as though making sensible professional development choices has ever paid off.