Returning to the known

We had a little shoot outside for fun while the morning was still quiet. This reminds me again that I need a new camera. Which also means a new computer. Which explains why I'm avoiding all of it (because I also need dental work! But can't seem to find anyone so far in this town. I keep hearing, "I have a dentist, but I can't recommend him/her." Yikes).

After some tedious admin that goes hand in hand with the Eastern Paper Studio, I finally got to pick some Ohio mulberry but had to stop myself from doing the whole batch or I knew I'd never get around to papermaking. I only had a cupful of clean bark but it makes lovely, lovely paper. It's quite white, which surprised me. But then I remembered that our kozo is quite yellow/green.

This is the hydrated mulberry (not paper mulberry! Just the stuff growing wild in the back that Tom has us harvest. I remember trimming these trees with Juan in November, and it yielded us just about a half of a dry pound)—clearly, the unpicked batch. But still lovely. I beat the picked batch more than this one and of course got spatters all over my coat.

A new volunteer spent at least five to six hours separating dried black bark from green bark and I dumped all of that hard work (black bark) in the garden today. I pulled a few more deckle box sheets and ... OH NO!! I just realized now that I blotted them with the mulberry paper, loaded the latter into the drybox, but totally forgot to un-blot the rest! Sigh. This is what happens when I try to do too many things at once.

Dinner was at Felice with a lovely local couple. I completely splurged with food and drink and dessert and though I love living close enough to walk, it was eerie to be walking as the only person in the street on the way there. I've been stressed out lately, mostly about things completely out of my control, so it was vital that I pulled sheets today. I know that it's good for me, yet I don't do it enough. Everything gets solved when I'm really working, or at least the trash gets taken out in my head (apparently, the brain literally takes out its trash while sleeping, so I need more of that, too). Looking forward to more of that as we go into serious production. My goal: 50 sheets/day, 3 days/week, for 7 weeks. That gives us just over a thousand sheets, half of which will not be good enough for sale—this is optimistic. But that leaves 500 as we proposed, by the end of May.