Woodshop.

Hallo. Heute stand ich in einem sonnigen Holz, das Geschäft. Es war herrlich. 

Hello. Today I stood in a sunlit wood working shop. It was glorious.

Crisp cold of morning whipping over bare hands on Alba's carefully wrapped bartape. It feels so good to zoom down the hill into the downtown hustle like a fish in traffic. Salmoning upstream to school--trying not to be a jackass on a bicycle--to my parking spot beside the Engineering/ Visual Arts building. I had Fibre art this morning and was completely unprepared but made do. Thankfully it was a studio work period and there was plenty of time and space to relax into a work rhythm. We are working on Block Printing this week so I whipped up a drawing of a horse in motion on linoleum and managed to finish the carving in time for the Supervised studio. After class I went down one floor to the woodshop for some help in creating a wooden base for my horse stamp.

Block printing is essentially motif stamping. I am not really a traditional motif kind of woman in the sense of sprawling patterns of paisley or floral or whatever. A horse can be a motif, right? Unfortunately, my POSITIVE brain could not compute with what was being asked and instead of carving away the negative space (in order for the positive surface to lie higher as a flat ink bed), I carved the lines of the drawing itself (which is backwards). Oh well. Instead of starting over I cut around my image and left a slim border. A visual would be helpful here, but alas I have none. Tomorrow I am set to apply ink with a brayer on the horse, so we will see how it turns out. Check back for a scan tomorrow if interested. Color mixing in the dye lab is incredibly precise (read: garish colors), and I appreciate the freedom I had at one time to mix color at will at Martha Street Studio now more than ever. Technique, technique! Learn it, Madge.

The woodshop was the best part of my day. Bob the carpenter helped me with a certain kindness and calmness that I appreciate in a teacher. 


- Can you handle this?
- Definitely.
- Good.

I could see myself working there, the afternoon sun pouring in across rolling wood carts topped with heavy butcher blocks and machinery. Heady wood smell, smelled like QB, smelled like my dad, smelled like home. In other news, I received a new pair of hoops in the mail from Alex, a talented Winnipeg jeweller after losing my original pair. Hallelujah. I feel like a new woman.

Must study now. Good day.


Margot