Sunday, October 13, 2013

Renewing schedules

There's nothing I can guarantee myself anymore in my weeks as I wander from place to place! I know that my intuition is usually leading me, but how I'm headed where by what I'm doing now seems to just barely be hanging together. Not that I'm unaccustomed to walking tightropes, there are just so very many these days and they all intersect! Here is some milkweed, gone to seed, on the George Jones Farm out in Oberlin.
Liora stopped by with her sister, visiting colleges, to help some kids make paper! No one has a smile brighter than hers.
Claudio set the whole thing up, and I don't know where he gets the energy to cart the whole circus around: tables, beater, hydraulic press, vats, buckets, moulds and deckles, felts, pellons, a burner! 
I told him to abandon the tomato vines for cattail. There's nothing like conversation while buried amidst cattail, harvesting for paper. I harvested two batches: one to cook at the farm during their fundraiser, and one to bring back to the city for Morgan papermaking.
The last time I got to do cattail was in Wyoming, after having missed doing it in Mexico. So I am curious to see how it goes in a proper beater (rather than a kitchen blender).
On another tightrope walk is this paper that Asao used to wrap and ship shifu. I saved it, removed the stickers from the postal service, and got it ready to spin.
I'm always amazed by his paper; it's so much more refined and the pineapple fiber so strong and layered. I'm knitting now with it, after remembering that I have a show that needs work in February. I also have a solo show that will open that month, too, so suddenly a new rope appears. But these are all good routes to navigate. Today's question: quiet work at home, or drive back to the studio to cook cattail and battle mosquitoes?

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