Hermit in Grad School

There's no time like the present and I only have 6 months to make this entire blanket. After arriving home from the residency on Friday, I waited until Monday and started working on my project. The first steps in making a cyanotype encoded blanket are lots and lots of planning. First I had to buy yarn, of course. Then I had to make swatches in order to obtain the gauge. The gauge for each of my swatches $210 of yarn...and counting  I did some cyanotype testing, which involved adjusting a photo with the right curves adjustment that took us the good part of a year to pin down. I printed the negative and tried it out on some sample paper. It looked perfect after the test, so that was easy peasy. What could possibly get in the way now? I chose to use a spray bottle in order to get an even spread on the knitting. I think any kind of painting on knitting would be almost impossible to achieve an even coat. What happened? It was ominous that when I sprayed the stuff onto the

I have been waking up later and later. Today I woke up and slipped on my sandals and immediately went down to breakfast because there was only a few minutes left. I made it, so no worries. I took my breakfast back to my room so I could pump in time for the next event of the day. Such a drag. I did most of my packing last night, just a few more things to do. I met with my faculty advisor about books he recommended for me to read this semester. I fortunately, I found two out of three of them right there in the library. There are a lot of others, but they have the online version, so why load up my suitcase when I can just see it online. The ground-floor of the library is mostly tables and cozy lounge areas, a really cool computer lab with macs and two large-format printers, paper cutters and other various tools. To get the books you have to go deep into the basement—The Stacks. It's a bit creepy down there. There's an entire room full of all the graduates' thesis papers goin