e-day and a month on into winter
spinning lokta kami-ito on a swedish bobbin winder
i’m in as much muddle as many, maybe most of you are. no covid to have to deal with (yet, hopefully not ever) but plenty of upheaval, uncertainty, discombobulation, and teensy bits of chaos. yesterday i completed the biggest portion of the final editing and choosing some photos for the chapter i’m writing for Papermaker’s Tears, volume two. this will be published by The Legacy Press, Cathy Baker’s amazing labor of love of and for the book arts. it’s felt wonderful to get to this point, though there is a bit of work left. it’s mostly pulled together thanks to the patience and guidance of papermaker/editor Tatiana Ginsberg. i have almost no understanding of microsoft word and how one uses all the functions and assists, so it’s like me being that elephant who’s trying desperately not to smash the china in the shop. and i have old and new technology (all mac) that isn’t working together making my life messed up.
like our leaders. did you vote yet? i did at the beginning of october, it felt good to get it done safely and, i checked, the county board of elections has my ballot, landed and logged. the worker i spoke with a couple weeks ago was happy to hear from me! imagine!
magic lilies, shifu book, poem, drawing, silk, dyed vellum, stationers’ binding. the second shifu book
when you’re looking desperately for meaning and goodness and rightmindedness (the opposite of fallacious fucking fake news) on a day like today while waiting for the election to grind along, it’s challenging to look for hope, for good, for (dare i write that word?) love. and yet i believe we can change things, and my hope is in our children and the youngers now, the Gretas of the world.
i’m not too sure about anything in these strange days, but i do know that making work, paper earlier this year and then boco prints, saved my life. now i’m completing two tasks, the article and my contribution to the next Hanji Edition that need to be finished soon. and the move, which may happen if the bureaucracy of small town lawyers can get done with the very last (they assure me) step. the closing was scheduled almost a month ago…
goose foot and hide vessel by Igah Hainnu
can you see the tiny stitches holding together this amazing vessel? can you imagine the thrift involved in using the small feet of geese to fabricate a functional object? (after, of course, eating the flesh, and using the rest of the bird) perhaps you remember last summer i made fish skin parchment. the next shifu book, the one on my work table amidst stacks of boxes, is waiting to be clothed in norwegian haddock hide, another shifu book about, maybe, the miracle of color. we’ll see, that’s the way it’s heading now. anyway, i needed to reach out to those of you who stop over, i will try not to make it such a long time till i get the photos onto the computer (something that seems to take miracles now) and can write about them.
take care—