Swept away

I was completely run over by class prep, teaching, field trips for my students, and trying to stay on top of the rest of my workload. My newest duck is coming VERY slowly but I need to speed up the pace, based on the newest set of frighteningly close deadlines for art delivery. Here is the show they will be in, in NYC.

Even though I knew it would be not good enough for 100% cattail sheets, I had my students take a go at it with hand beating.

And that's the chiri leftover from the white bark they scraped on the first day. The pulp is already exhausted.

Cattail mixed with kozo.

This year for the first time, my students are very taken by transfers and are drawing a lot with water soluble crayons. I've had this tin of crayons for ten years, but may have to replace it after this class!

These are the random flowers I found in the freezer that I cooked up for my students for their Cleveland field trip.

It amazes me how much fun you can have with just three dyes.

Sumi, flowers, kaki.

As their final it's Friday and everyone's tired activity, they did some joomchi.

After driving back to Cleveland for the second time (I really need to schedule this better for myself, a little too much back and forth in winter!), I wrangled their milkweed fluff in three beaterloads and cattail in another three. Strained it down into under 10 handfuls, balled tight. Charity beat the abaca and cotton for this week's western papermaking unit, and we got a tray of pulp paints ready to go. All the pulp is now in my car, which means it will be frozen tomorrow morning because temps went from springlike yesterday to a blizzard today. I was horrified to drive past a big wreck just a few miles from campus on my way in.

I've had sadly very little time to myself but did manage to re-read a great Jeff Peachey article on Vietnamese papermaking. His endnotes are fantastic. I had forgotten some of these tidbits. Hoping to stay afloat this week as we return to polar vortex weather—lots of gratitude for an overheated paper studio in the winter!