Rachel's in Germany!: The end is in sight . . .

The majority of the projects are done now. Hopefully it's all downhill from here!

Started the morning talking to Indra in the kitchen while having breakfast. Dripped cherry jam down the front of my shirt while I was making a PB&J to take for lunch, but I immediately activated the old-school Grandma method--run hot water on it--and that actually worked pretty well. There's only a teeny spot visible now. (For the record, it's an old shirt that is kind of on its last leg anyway, so it didn't much matter.)

Last Saturday class for mezzotint! It was a tiring day--cranked out fifteen prints, each of which took about fifteen minutes total and involved one to two minutes of spinning the big heavy wheel on the press--but PRAISE THE LORD I got my whole edition of twelve done for the portfolio, plus three prints for the exhibition. This was the first day I finally got the hang of how to wipe the ink on the plate so the print came out right, and I'm fairly certain that was God intervening on my behalf. Every mezzotint print I've done up until now looked pretty awful, and I was super nervous today starting my first print for the portfolio. I had no idea how it would come out, and I was expecting it to look terrible again. To my utter relief, it actually looked pretty good! And, miraculously, I was able to repeat the process eleven more times and have it look decent every time. I say "miraculously" because I really do think it was God helping me execute them without any mistakes. After all my fumbles on Wednesday and Friday, I was totally expecting to have an epic-fail moment, but I never did. So I say again: Praise the Lord! He has the power to intervene in really major ways in critical situations, but He also has the goodness and kindness to intervene in seemingly insignificant ways too, like the success of a print series in mezzotint class. Technically I should probably sign the prints "Rachel, courtesy of a very gracious God" . . .

Hilarious moment of the day: Sometime during the afternoon I looked down at my boot and saw a dark, shiny blob of something that had dripped on it. "Oh, man!" I said to myself, "I got ink on my boot! How on earth did that happen? I didn't even think this ink was runny enough to drip. And these are my good boots too . . ." I told Louise that I had gotten ink on my shoe and asked if she thought turpentine would get it off. "You can try," she said, "and maybe it will work." I finished the print I was doing, then got a rag with some turpentine on it and sat down to wipe my boot. To my surprise, the rag stuck to it. The substance was sticky--not thick and pasty like ink, but sticky like sugar. I rubbed at it a little more, looked closer at it, and then started cracking up. It wasn't ink at all--it was cherry jam! Apparently when I had dripped it on my shirt this morning, some of it fell and landed on my boot without my noticing. I told Louise, and she laughed too. "I guess good old soap and water will do the trick then," I said, still laughing, and went back to my printing. (When I got home I used a wipe, and that took it right off.) It was just such a random thing, to have cherry jam on my shoe . . . I'm still laughing about it hours later!

Today was warm and humid. We had all the windows open in the workshop and we were rather sweaty from working in the sticky weather. The forecast had said we were due to have a thunderstorm. It got more and more sweaty as the day went on and I kept thinking, "Come on, just rain already!" Finally, around 4, I looked out the hallway window when I was taking a bathroom break and thought, "I bet those clouds over there are going to rain when they come over." Sure enough, right around 4:30 it suddenly got super dark and big gusts of wind started blowing the trees outside. Thunder rumbled for about fifteen minutes, and it got even darker. All the students were saying, "Oh, NEIN!" because class ended at 5 and they all wanted to leave. But then the rain came pouring down and the thunder got louder, and so they had to wait a couple of minutes before they were able to go out without the threat of being soaked. I was trying to finish my last couple of prints, and Louise had come on her bike and didn't want to leave at that point anyway, so she let me stay a little past 5 while she cleaned up and organized the workshop. I helped her clean up the last of the things. By the time we had everything put away it was around 5:15 and the storm had let up, so I was able to walk home. It was still humid, but not too hot, so it was a very pleasant walk.

Marni dropped by around 6:30 while I was picking worship songs for the service at City Light tomorrow (I'm going to play at the service this week). She stayed for the evening and brought some Lindt chili chocolate to share. Never would have thought I'd like chili chocolate, but Marni introduced me to it a while back and I have to say that Lindt makes a pretty good one--not too spicy, but it's got a nice zing mixed in with the chocolate. I heated up my leftover mushroom pizza for dinner, and then we listened to music and did art stuff. I finished my PDFs of my book-illustration project to email to my teacher. Now all I've got to do is take the book to get it printed at the print shop, so I have a hard copy! It won't be bound or anything--it's going to be accordion-folded and is sort of a dummy version--but it will be cool nonetheless! I can't wait to see everybody's work at the exhibition!!!

Photos from FINALS WEEK