I'm preparing some gelatin right now in order to do a small mend on the parchment of a medieval manuscript. I don't talk much about my Day Job on this blog, but it's an interesting one, and one I'm going to miss. Pretend this looks cool and not like a ghetto double boiler with beakers on a "Buffet Range."

We use gelatin rather than paste because the idea is that you use the material that is closest to / interacts best with the item you're working on. In this case, it's a piece of vellum or parchment, therefore it makes the most sense to use an animal-based adhesive rather than a vegetable-based one.

I suppose that, because I am a paper conservation technician who has decidedly ultimately NOT to pursue this field further, for a variety of reasons, I kind of gave up talking much about it. Here's the bit of the manuscript that needs mending, "before" shot .. that little "island" in the middle there, is literally just hanging on by a fiber.

I think I stopped talking about it because I am not a conservation PROFESSIONAL. But let's face it: my job is cool. I get to work with stuff most people never see, let alone touch, in their lives. We could go on about this, of course -- how many people actually care, can see any REASON, to want to preserve and to study medieval manuscripts? It's not particularly relevant-seeming. But it is fun. I love it a lot, and I'm going to miss it terribly.

After. TA-DA

Although I'll miss my job a lot, and the change is kind of messing with my head (I've been doing this for a while now), all of this inspiration/preparation is exciting, too. I feel really stoked about this career/life change, about the possibilities for reaching greater amounts of people, about being able to better understand the world around me and being able to manipulate systems toward the greater good. I suppose in short: I wanna learn everything, and then teach it to everyone. Since that's not actually possible, I'll try to find a happy medium by learning a few things and teaching those to people around me.

Also, and not totally unrelated, I've been thinking a lot (a LOT) lately about my interactions with others, particularly/usually men, and getting increasingly frustrated when I find I am not being treated in a way that feels respectful. I was going to write about this, but then I read this blog post by Willow and it kind of sums it rather more neatly that I could have. I guess this relates in the sense that I need to consider"exactly WHAT is it that I want to teach people," "do I want to have the teaching-hat on all of the time," and "how does it differ when it's a skill that you care about vs. the (seemingly obvious) notion that you ought to be treated as an equal?" All questions worthy of answering, thought perhaps not precisely now.

At any rate, it is nice - maybe "affirming" is more like it - to know that you are not the only one that notices or is bothered by these things, and equally nice to know that others are speaking up, being angry, too.

mini midwest tour: Chicago, Columbus

I've quite a couple of weeks. First my boyfriend and I traveled to Chicago where I finally got to sample a delicious (veggie) burger at Kuma's Corner, hung out with some dear friends and heard one of them, the talented Meghan Lamb, read at Ear Eater #6, and last but certainly not least went to see Ga'an at the Empty Bottle which, if you have the chance to go see them -- do. It was indescribably good.

Anyway, after a hard 2-day work week it was off to Columbus, OH for the Midwest Craft Caucus. It was a weekend conference for sharing information and making contacts in the world of handmade business, basically. Unfortunately, due to the uh, perils of running one's own business, I wasn't able to make it for the whole thing! But I did sit on 2 panels on Saturday, and went to a few workshops, all of which were very informative and useful.

And perhaps best of all, I got to meet SCADS of awesome people, many of whom I knew "on the internet" but had never met in real life. Among the lovelies were:

Martha Latta of Sunday Afternoon Housewife -- who, to be fair, I actually probably have met before since she did participate in the Bloomington Handmade Market in the past, but I am typically too frazzled at those things to be very social. She's making a documentary called The Culture of Craft, all about our little world and its goings-ons, and it promises to be pretty fantastic.

Becky Johnson of the Sweetie Pie Press -- whose blog is quite easy to get lost in, and with whom I have been apparently crossing paths for years. It's a small world, the world of art and zines. Anyway, besides having fantastic fashion sense, there is a sampling of her creations at her etsy shop.

Al Hoff, Autumn Wiggins and Cinnamon Cooper, who are linked to their projects and who are inspirational, artistic ladies sharing a similar mental illness to my own -- the need to organize crafty events.

Now I'm back to the daily grind, which for me entails creating storage for medieval manuscripts, so things could certainly be worse.

I'm also in the middle of reading Patti Smiths' Just Kids, which is so far completely impossible to put down.