Another January in Oberlin: Paper, books, snow

Since 2014, I've been teaching this class for Oberlin College's Winter Term. Each Jan, students devote themselves to one project for the entire month, which falls between fall and spring semesters. Three full credits of Winter Term are required to graduate. It means that commencement falls late in May, but I think WT is a rare and perfect time to focus on one thing, and if on campus, experience a quiet and chill environment that is much more subdued than the rest of the school year. Unless you are in my class, which requires industriousness all day every day. Day one: scrape outer layers away from paper mulberry bark.

In the afternoon, fiber processing is more difficult and provides a much smaller yield, but uses native and abundant plants: separating bast fiber from milkweed inner cores. These are dry stems I harvested in Michigan the previous fall.

We had a new project this year, a great way to keep more students occupied because the concurrent task of rinsing cooked fiber cannot really accomodate all eight students in the shower space. We sewed new screens for our modified tools for Asian-style papermaking. This went much faster than me making them myself over the summer.

After rinsing the cooked fiber, students had to clean both the paper mulberry fiber they scraped (from Florida, courtesy of Amy), and the fiber from Thailand.

Then, usually everyone's not favorite step: beating fiber to a pulp. I was surprised with how together this group wanted to be. I've never before seen six students fit onto these tables (usually it's half the amount). I bet the others would have squeezed in if they could have.

Asian-style sheet formation. I had them make more plain sheets this year to get good practice, but may change this next year.

The new hydraulic jack last year shifted around too much in the press, so I took a leaky glove and cut off the fingers to place under the jack to keep it in place.

My dream was for a new laminate wall to be installed in time for boarding, but timing was off by a week. It's okay! The marble shower walls work great for this process. I wish I had monitored students more closely on this step because they had the most wrinkled sheets I've seen; it's so hard to impart the importance of how precise every single step must be.

I didn't give as much time for embedding this year, which I will also change for next year, reverting to pacing from past years for the Asian section.

When we moved into European-style papermaking, I included milkweed coma processing (from pods I harvested in the fall and froze). I had closed and exploded pods, expecting them to get through them all but they refused to touch the open pods and took a long time with the fairly modest number of closed pods. Working pace is different for every group!

They also prepared rags before we loaded the beater.

Early loads included printmaking paper scraps, lots provided by Justin (R) left from his printmaking class and a few more from Mattias (L), who said that the print professor always encourages students to save scraps in case they take papermaking. Wise, given the high-quality cotton content of decent printmaking paper.

This was the first year I had students work solely with cotton (half stuff and rag) to pull with moulds and deckles, deleting abaca because I didn't want to overwhelm them with long beating times since we don't have a dedicated sound-proofed space for the beater. The milkweed coma was finished pretty quickly and made gorgeous sheets as always.

Even with occasional student absences, the drybox filled easily each day. Almost everyone arrived to work all day on our snow day, which was optional.

It's always hard to pull students away from the studio, but in the first week I took them to the museum to see the paper show that I'm in, and in the second week they viewed artists' books in the art library, which also is running a show of my books. This one is always a fave, by Julie Chen.

We always end our wet studio time with paper decoration. Here: suminagashi.

Ed is always extremely generous with prepping and teaching the marbling section, which makes my life so much easier since we have three concurrent techniques going on at once.

Paste papers

We carry everything over from the paper studio that we'll need in the main library special collections classroom, various tools and all of the paper they've made, so that they can make books! I don't know why it took me this long to consider this, but I finally asked if we could move the tables to keep everyone closer to me. Otherwise, those at the end of the tables are too far away to see what I'm doing, even given the document camera. I only wish I figured this out sooner.

The workstation of a chemistry major at the end of the day, impeccable. Makes my heart sing!

Justin, that chem major, was also the first student ever in the history of this class to voluntarily rise his station. I've suggested this, as there is a hand crank for the tables, but no one has taken me up on it, likely because humans are so sedentary now. Lab work doesn't allow for sitting so he is conditioned to a different way of working. To be fair, some students have to share stations, so it's hard to raise the table if you have someone of a different height/seating preference next to you. I'm grateful to my students who shared space without complaint and with a lot of grace.

A second snow day derailed our schedule so we had to move to a different floor to do our regular viewing of books in special collections, but were still able to get a peek before getting back to bookbinding.

On the way back upstairs, we stopped at the letterpress studio so that Ed could give us a tour/history, and see examples of what past classes have printed. Our classes run concurrently and both fulfill the practicum requirement for a Book Studies minor. We definitely have students who do both, which complement each other well.

These are Eliza's books and paper, only a slice of what she produced over the month. She's only the second Conservatory student I've had, and I was worried that she would not be able to do everything she needs as a viola student while in my class. Instead, she impressed me by being fully present daily, practicing after our 6-hour days ended. As one of my history professor colleagues said, she loves Conservatory students because of their intense discipline. I have seven more batches of images of as many pieces from each student! We used to exhibit everything at the end but that stopped a few years back, not by choice. I may push to revive this tradition.

The last task I assign is to make, write, and sign thank you notes to everyone who make this class possible as it's truly a village every year. It's an important good practice, and at least two who received them responded right away, saying, "This made my day!" I was happy to have another wonderful group of students, and to shepherd them through an enormous amount of material during one of our most challenging winters. More images here! Also, Loie, my only senior but the most enthusiastic of the bunch, was kind enough to do a video interview; enjoy her reel here.