Practicum
A Day Set Aside to Learn a New Skill
About Practicum
Yesterday you played hooky. Sunday you drank mimosas to jazz and pretended you’d been born in a velvet chair. But today, you make something. Practicum is a day for learning an impractical, craft-adjacent skill you will never list on a résumé. Want to build a Mardi Gras float out of beads, foil, and pipe cleaners? Perfect. Weld cursed garden gnomes into a parade sculpture? Better. Carnival’s best moments come from its homegrown crafting culture. Think ‘tit Rex in New Orleans, where floats are the size of shoe boxes (worth looking up, I promise). Think DIY costumes that take ten hours to make and only seconds to unravel from the weight of too many sequins. Carnival is food, dance, and craft all at once, which we readily acknowledge can get a bit sloppy (particularly if your food includes hurricanes—the rum drink—for inspiration). At worst, you’ll come away with some scorched fabric and the unsought knowledge of what glitter tastes like. At best, you’ll need to make room in your closet for a helmet-to-greaves suit of armor made entirely of EVA foam, hot glue, and sweat.
Ways to observe
(A) Low effort
Watch a five-minute tutorial for something weird on YouTube. Try it. Fail joyfully.
(B) Recommended
Pick one skill you’ve always admired but never dared. Cake piping, zine-making, pyrography, shoe repair. Give yourself a single afternoon to get just good enough to brag.
(C) High effort
Host a Carnival Practicum Workshop. Each guest brings a skill they can teach in 10 minutes. Set up stations. Provide glue guns. Share results over snacks and unqualified praise.
Inspiration
If you ever get the chance, visit Mardi Gras World in New Orleans. It’s where parade dreams are born from absolutely unglamorous beginnings: enormous slabs of Styrofoam glued together, carved, and painted until they resemble Art Deco swans, neon sea monsters, or something so raunchy you’ll have to distract the children as it rolls by. Watching the artists work is inspiring, and dangerously misleading. You’ll leave convinced you could do the same thing at home, forgetting that carving Styrofoam into anything recognizable is roughly as easy as sculpting fog. Still, that’s the point of Carnival craft. Fantasy derived from humble stock, whimsy lashed to hand-shaped wire. So give yourself permission to learn today, even if the skill in question will never earn you a dime. Take a cue from St. Scholastica, who famously prayed for more time to talk instead of doing chores—proof that some things are worth lingering over. Make something ridiculous, and let it gleam for as long as it lasts. And for everyone’s sake, build it out of something you can toss in the recycling bin.
Adornments
Watch
Be Kind Rewind (2008)
A scrappy comedy by Michel Gondry in which two video store clerks must remake classic movies with zero budget after the originals are erased.
The Science of Sleep (2006)
A surreal indie film (dir. Michel Gondry) that blurs dreams and reality in a tapestry of handcrafted whimsy. Gael García Bernal plays Stéphane, a shy artist whose vivid dream-life overflows into real life through DIY inventions and stop-motion fantasies.
Wallace & Gromit: A Grand Day Out (1989)
This beloved British stop-motion short (23 min) features cheese-loving inventor Wallace and his dog Gromit building a homemade rocket to see if the moon is really made of cheese.
Listen
Experiment by Cole Porter
A witty Broadway tune that advises: “Make it your motto day and night – experiment!” Written for the 1933 London musical Nymph Errant, it affirms today’s central message: foolishness in the name of discovery is worth the risk.
Read
The Toaster Project by Thomas Thwaites
A short personal chronicle of an absurdly ambitious DIY experiment. Thomas Thwaites, a young British designer, became curious about the hidden complexity of everyday objects, so he decided to build a humble toaster entirely from raw materials, mining and refining everything himself.
Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work by Matthew Crawford
Crawford, a motorcycle mechanic with a PhD in political philosophy, interweaves personal stories with cultural critique to argue that working with one’s hands can be deeply meaningful.