Mary Hark is one of my papermaking heroes.
she prepared the paper studio for us by hanging beautiful Ghanaian indigo textiles
and her sample table was festooned with gorgeous papers and other treasures.
i didn't take a before photo,
but below is how it looked after three days,
when much paper had gone home with other people.
love this turtle motif
and after we had paper air drying on screens
you can see these wise cloths presiding.
we made dimensional and thick flax paper in Mary's class
Mary read from this book, which i found online and is a treasure for sure
the screen mends around Ox Bow made me happy
so did the closest lavatory to the paper studio
located in the glass studio
Mary presenting the flowering indigo vat to us.
the right hand indigo dyeing is my shifu.
it got three indigo and one black walnut immersions,
shown here oxidizing after the first indigo
there is an OxBow bathroom fairy who left us flowers
Untying shibori
Giselle's dots/holes
Mary continued spinning kami-ito after taking my class
our two classes did seem to complement each other
Mary was generous with ideas about color and texture in and on our
paper.
and we responded with enthusiasm,
despite continual rain and cool weather,
so that drying was a true challenge.
Andrea of course was helping orchestrate the paper magic.
Many of us in Mary's class made a little edition of "quilt squares"
which were dyed in the indigo vat
and tied corner to corner
to make our class auction piece
(PBI auctions support scholarship students,
of which I was once one before blogging and this inter world)
it's a long piece
and John DeMerritt's class built a home for it
a lovely presentation box.
I heard it raised more than $1000 in the auction!
GO US!!!
this!
Erin Fletcher embroidered the title on the box
Did I mention they made this box in ONE day?
a piece Mary wrote for an edition for Minnesota Center for Book Arts
that I loved.
the second class presentation show and tell night
Beatrice Cordon's class cut up a lot of stuff and made stories
they had a fantastic time, much laughter was heard from their classroom.
our table
Chela Metzger's class
of course there was printed work, which i seem to have not photographed.
from my class, and completed in John's, a shifu portfolio!
and later that night we visited the studios of OxBow staff,
all of whom appear to be crazy artists, too.
and back home I found I had energy again.
i've spent lots of time in the yard and garden tidying and hauling and making beautiful
and at Home we had a tiny adventure.
we came upon a child of god he was...
he was...
a garter snake eating a leopard frog.
i was so excited I barely got a photo.
snake was only about 24 inches long, and this frog was going to fill up an empty gut for sure.
