Sunday
Day of sleeping in, rest and reflection
Michelle Rowley
Last night we returned from our camping trip tired, dirty and very happy to have survived the wilds of Utah and to have had the opportunity to experience such an incredible environment. The camping in tents bit, which initially worried everyone for all sorts of reasons, was absolutely fine. No scorpions, no snakes, no bears – what we did see were chukkas, chipmunks, hares, deer, antelope, lizards (assorted sizes), crickets, beetles, massive crows, a water snake, and we caught trout at the waterfall and saw elk on the mountain road home. No casualties and no bites! I carried the EV8 forms all the way up the canyon, in the 85 degree heat, for nothing!
For the first time this Sunday morning we all slept past the 5 am internal alarm clock that has been waking us up all this week. This morning has been a time of reflection and planning for all of us in Amy and Tali’s house. We started by compiling all our individual text elements into a composed piece, which we will show the BYU students on Monday morning when we next all meet up.
The text piece originally came about as an idea to accompany the group litho that we began on Saturday night after our hike at Calf Creek, and we intended to use the letterpress facility at BYU to produce it. This has now changed after a suggestion from Meredith at BYU who is now going to help Louise edit the text with Illustrator and then expose on to a litho plate for speed and economy. Tomorrow we will collect the rest of the text from the BYU group to complete the piece, which we intend will be an impressionistic text portrait of the landscapes we have visited.
After an outing this afternoon to Salt Lake City and a really lovely meal at Joe’s sister-in-laws home, we all returned to ‘our place’ to share our book ideas. We discussed our various approaches and made paper models to try to make tangible some of the practicalities involved in working in an unfamiliar print department.
We think most of us are set to begin tomorrow, I think I am going to find my own ability to work alongside everyone else quite a challenge as I am leading the project and advising everyone, so it will be interesting how much time I can keep for myself.
Keeping the blog updated with posts from a range of participants is also proving to be a full time job, but we have computer access at ‘home’ to help us. With the time difference, we are 6 hours behind the UK, some of our posts stretch into the next day UK time, so if things seem out of sync this is probably why.
