Second breath comes near midnight

The sun finally came out after my first walk! And I made it to the wondrous Nature Lab. WOW. I am terribly glad that Chandler recommended that I visit.

A guy came in while I was in the lab to borrow a skeleton and got help rolling it over to the elevator. The student worker was cleaning one of the tanks that house live animals in the center of the room.

I was drawn to the milkweed immediately (first to the fluff contained in a box, and then this one, where each stalk is carefully labeled. ENTIRELY too much to take in all at once, but a wonderful thing to feast my eyes on before heading to work. I did stop at the student art fair in the street and I bought a beautiful ash rolling pin from a furniture major that I used right away in workshop for the joomchi demo!

This is the start of that demo, which I repeated because the students were working in waves, some at the vats and some doing joomchi. It was a great group of women, very engaged and on top of it. I was glad to be able to break out my real sugeta for the first time in this teaching season; always a treat to share that.

The class was billed as a papermaking + joomchi one, but of course I bring so many other props that tease the students. One really wanted to know how the jiseung cords were made, so I climbed up to do that demo (too lazy to take off the apron first). I was SHOCKED by how creaky I felt getting up there! But I've been working so many days straight that my body has aged prematurely. The class went really well despite my exhaustion (it was so bad that I introduced myself and then said that I was tired. How ridiculous of a teacher am I??), and the Watts folks even bought two of my books in advance, one to raffle off to a lucky student. How fun. Now, a bit of sleep before the drive home.

Update: Wessel & Lieberman in Seattle is carrying my book! Visit and enjoy.