In my month home, I was able to work on some new bricks. These have lots of milkweed seeds and coma mixed into the beater with the abaca and cotton, leftover from a teaching gig. I am realizing more and more that I am mostly interested in working with what I have, what's left over, making do. Being frugal and being able to transform and reuse material seems like a much more important skill to have than imagining something and then working with only exactly the perfect materials that I order fresh.
I brought some molds and pressed paper home so that I could cycle through a couple rounds of bricks without having to go back and forth to the studio, since by the end of my month, there was too much to take care of at home.
This is something I wanted to do right after my Cali trip but didn't get a chance to do that until just a few nights ago.
Before sewing (all the papers made in my new studio with my new mould!), and
after sewing.
I also got very intense about cooking at home and trying new things, like a Spanish tortilla! I can't believe I managed to flip this one without major disaster. It didn't last long and was my packed lunch for after a physical when I was ravenous after fasting for bloodwork. Later that week I got an MRI, so I really packed in the medical stuff while I could.
But the major thing that kept me from my work was what this garden supply business calls Procrastiplanting! This is my first spring at home in a WHILE, and I felt my window to take care of spring yardwork was really small and fleeting. So when a tree guy came out for an estimate and noted that I hadn't mulched in a while, I realized, I really had not! Not for years! How would I know these things?? After my first year of home ownership where I tried to get a few bags from a big box store and spread it myself, I decided to take the plunge and get yardage delivered.
Well, that was extremely stupid. Years ago I had paced out my border to calculate what I needed, and it was only about one cubic yard for an inch of mulch. But I couldn't find the paper where I had scrawled out my numbers and thought I wrote, "1.9" when actually, when I found it after the fact, it was "1.1". The minimum order was three cubic yards and the guy said it's "not a big pile" so I ordered 3 and 3, compost and bark mulch. This load of compost mulch arrived first, and immediately I thought, uhoh. Thankfully, when I called in a panic, he let me cancel the second order.
I know the pile looks THE SAME, but this was at the end of the day, working three hours with a local 7th grader, and then a bunch on my own. I had already started weeding beds a week prior, and the morning the mulch arrived, I woke up to a bad twinge in my left hip flexor. By lunch, I knew I had already shredded all of my soft tissue but had to keep working. For over a week, I worked daily so that it was gone by the next week when rain was forecast. But I could barely walk, stand up from the toilet, climb the stairs, sit, lay down, etc. Two PTs and a massage therapist didn't address the core issue even though I told them I was in excruciating pain, and where. Go figure.
Because I had planted in such disorganized ways over the years, I have a really crowded area here and then empty spots. But it's a miracle that I even got to see the columbine get to nearly flowering as well as the other plants, because normally the critters eat everything but the milkweed and anise hyssop down to the ground. I may not get to see the purple flowers because today I flew to Dallas.
On a brief walk behind the hotel I saw lots of fancy homes and pristine lawns. I was so upset at the Cleveland airport, on the plane, and landing in Dallas, because almost no one is wearing masks. It completely dumbfounded me, that THIS MANY people think that it's a good idea not to look out for each other by doing this very simple thing that is proven effective. I also was upset about the recent racist Dallas shootings of Korean women in Koreatown, so I felt like either Covid will get me or a rabid gunman will. What a country to live in.
Judah is right next to my classroom for the workshop/conference that starts tomorrow. Fortunately, it's two days instead of a million, and my hosts are extremely organized and on top of things and really know how to handle hospitality.
This is a famous press and I forgot the name already. But what caught my eye was the two-on mould that I saw in a corner and then pulled out. Jesse let me put it on the table to take a better look.
No one is using it and the ribs and facing on at least one edge have pulled away from the outer frame but it was fun to see.
This is the conservation lab where Jesse works and it is very nice.
I love the color coding that requires no words!
And of course, my eye fell to the top of the room this time to a mould that had a new weird deckle on it. We removed that and I was amazed by the watermark work on this. I can't even read it but the details were so fine that I could barely understand what was going on with it.
This is what's crazy: the darker mesh is much finer, and sewn carefully into a HOLE in the regular facing!
Here is the backside of it. I'm assuming the rounder wire lines are helping to support the squiggles that are sunken down to create darker areas in the paper because more pulp will lay in there. I wish I knew where this mould came from and who worked on this facing. Time to lay down as the next few days will be full with the conference and then another scary flight home.
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