Accounting

Jean is a constant source of inspiration and it seems like she was doing one thing with mushrooms outdoors while I was inside busy on my second set of them (the first is in Oberlin for my show).

I saw shiny red pomegranates at the market last week or so and had to save skins for future dyeing. Now that I suspect that former brittleness of paper that I dyed with these skins years ago is probably due to the industrial soy milk that I used, I want to test them again with only alum.

After wanting to make honeycomb paper with my paper for YEARS, I finally sat down last night to do it. Part of the delay was not remembering where I had stored my glue bottle for several weeks. I still do this a lot, today being the search for my hammer. The other week I had left the gas on my stove for a while after heating up soup. Even while cleaning it and standing right over it, I didn't see the tiny flames because the sun was streaming in at just the right force and angle to disguise it. I can't tell the future, but I'm fairly certain that this is how I'll die.

This morning I experimented with the glassine scrap honeycombs. Then I got distracted searching for my hammer to drive pins and needles into wood to put my mushrooms somewhere else to hang out.

This week has been full of spreadsheets and online orders and talking with different vendors and comparing prices and imagining the future. It's always wonderful and terrible when equipping a new paper studio. This is a space I've worked in for years, but with rented equipment. Soon, another college will have a sweet papermaking outfit in an old gym shower. When I get tired of crunching numbers, I get back to paper in my hands.