Escape!

[offcntr]

We escaped Market this weekend, went down to Newport for the 26th Annual Newport Paper & Book Arts Festival. Since I've given up Ceramic Showcase, April is a lot more relaxed, so I can take a weekend off without being critically behind on my pottery. Last year, Denise and I took classes together. This year, since her knee surgery, she's a bit more mobile, but still needed the car to get to her venues. Fortunately, my classes were both at the Performing Arts Center, an easy 10-minute walk from our motel. (Her Saturday workshop was fifteen miles away, in Toledo.)

She's been staying at the Rodeway Inn since her first NBPAF in 2006. It's clean, the rooms are generously sized, and it's not too spendy--I think we paid about $70 a night. They've replaced the beds since last year, and the memory-foam mattresses seem about six inches higher (which was a challenge for her) but other than that, no complaints.

I took a two-day workshop in Animated Pop-Ups with Shawn Sheehy, a paper engineer from Chicago, and had a wonderful time. He brought 15 project patterns along; we managed to get through twelve by the end of the second day, and I've got some ideas for adapting a couple of them for future card purposes. I'm also about 90% sure I could teach this pop-up turtle to our local book arts group at a meeting sometime this summer. I've left him my email, so he should be sending me a link to printable pdfs of his patterns to work from, with permission to adapt the structures and use in any non-paid capacity.

The third day, I reunited with Iris, our Indigo and Paste Papers teacher from 2022 for a class in Plant Ink Alchemy. Iris ran us through the chemistry of plant lakes, making red madder ink; insoluble pigments, with blue indigo; concentrating tannins, with a tan Sitka Spruce ink; and perhaps one of the oldest inks we have records of, an iron sulfate/oak gall concoction that makes an extremely permanent black, used for everything from medieval manuscripts to the Declaration of Independence.

Weather was surprisingly pleasant, sunny though cool and breezy. (Of course now that I'm home in Eugene, it's raining again.) Ate supper Wednesday night at Local Ocean, a fairly fancy new seafood restaurant in old town, where we enjoyed crab cakes and crab po' boys and watched sea lion, cormorant and kingfisher fishing the harbor. Thursday we went wandering through the Nye Beach area and discovered Sorella, a nice little Italian restaurant with very good pasta and not-too-bad prices. Friday, we went to an old reliable, Mazatlan, and by Saturday, we were so tired and stuffed that we drove home and had ramen with sliced Easter egg and fell into bed.