Well, I’ve packed and repacked and the last of the supply and sample boxes have gone out to Tampa for Convergence. I will have one small box in my luggage – sort of as a place holder. For the return trip I’m hoping to be able to pack all the things that have to come home (lots of stuff I am sending will go home with the students) in that piece of luggage so I don’t have to do much, if any, return shipping. Maybe just the box of gut samples.
I kept getting sidetracked this past week. Every time I started to get the book class materials together, I wound up making a different book. Finally I had to stop myself, get stern, and just go with what I already had.
Now that Convergence is all packed up, I can turn my attention to two kid classes I have coming up this week. The first one is a mudcloth class for daycare kids. Had to clean some more black dirt today so there would be enough to work with.
The second class is a recycled papermaking one at the downtown main library. The librarians had the kids tear up a bunch of library flyers to save me some time and get them involved. Unfortunately they chose to toss all the colors together. I have a feeling the resulting pulp color will be a bit on the yucky side, but then, I’ve been wrong before.
One thing that I tried to do this week that has been a failure, is to dry some gut. It has rained and been so humid all week, that the gut just became ‘sort of dry’. When I took it off it’s rigid drying form thinking it would be okay, it just all curled up into little spots of membrane. Maybe if the humidity stays down like it is right now, I’ll be able to do another sample. I’m hoping to have viable samples of gut dyed with koolaid. What I saw while the pieces were stretched was nice. Now to get some to dry that way…