Day Four: Some pictures of town and more of the same

this is my house! 

this is what the mountains looked like yesterday, when it just stopped snowing.  Now the trees look more green than white, because there have been two whole days without snow..

This is what it looked like when I left the studio this evening after being there for ALMOST 12 straight hours.  I'm wishing I'd stayed the extra 20 minutes to make it official, dang!

I guess this is kind of a dumb picture, since it's mostly dark, but anyway....this is what the main street looks like when I walk home at twilight-ish time, like tonight.

These are my favorite tools.  From left to right: trusty old bone folder, that I've had since my BYU bookbinding class; then fancy paper spatula, then elegant MICRO spatula which if I had to pick would be my very MOST favorite tool lately because I am CONSTANTLY using it in the repairing process; then classy tiny bird scissors which are very sharp and snippy, then  medical grade scalpel with #23 blade, which is slowly but surely edging out my old Xacto knife in my affections.  It's just so MEDICAL.  And SHARP.

These are some signatures after I finished what we call 'guarding,' which is what i talked about yesterday, with filling in old sewing holes and gluing strips of repair paper down the fold of the signature to strengthen it. PS, a signature is somewhere from 2-4 pages that are folded together, and a stack of those is what you sew together to make a book.  My book here has 3 folded sheets per signature, so it makes 12 pages front and back.  I keep meaning to count how many signatures there are all together...but it might be too depressing.  Anyway, you can kind of see in this picture that there is a lighter strip along the fold on each signature--that is the repair paper that I glued on. 

This is what my work station was looking like tonight after spending all day gluing tiny scraps and strips of paper down.  It gets pretty messy pretty quick.  The new thing we learned today is how to repair tears in paper.  It is pretty tedious and awful, mostly because I'm just not good at it yet.  With guarding it seemed more ok to not be too great at it and for the repairs to be visible, because it's all in the very fold of the paper so no one's going to really notice anyway, but with tears all up and down the pages it's rough because you have to be really careful to be as invisible as possible so it doesn't look stupid.  So, I'm working on that.  We'll see.  Tomorrow is the last day of Paper Treatment class, so we are all having individual meetings with Renate to talk it over and then she gives you a SCORE from 1-5!  I WAS NOT TOLD THERE WOULD BE GRADING.  Which is for the best probably or I would have been freaking out all up in here.  It feels so weird to be so unsure of myself--with most things I feel like I either know that I'm good or know that I'm  not good, so I know what kind of feedback to expect and I'm ready for it and whatever.  It's kind of crazy to be doing somethings so totally new and not know if she's going to say yes you are wonderful please accept me as your personal mentor, or oh hey um maybe you should not bother coming back for the advanced class in the fall.  I have NO IDEA.  So, I guess as with all things I just comes down to working hard and doing my best and all that and then seeing what happens.  Woo!