I have been pretty slack about new blog posts lately. My primary excuses for this are that I have been working through buying a house, and I have been a vendor in four art festivals since Memorial Day weekend. I love art fests and I love talking to people about what I do. Hand made paper is not a common medium, especially since I make all the paper myself. I am often asked how I learned to make paper. Sometimes by the end of a festival I feel like I broken record. But at one festival I was asked a slightly different question, “how did you get started doing this?” Feeling like said broken record, I explained;
When I was in college at WVU studying geology (yes geology, no I have never taken an art course), I would spend four hours per day, five to six days per week working in a recreational ceramics studio in one of the dorms. One year they offered paper making for a few months. I wanted to make paper to make my own Christmas cards and things snowballed from there. It was a medium that would allow me to work at home and get started with out a large financial investment. It would also allow me the freedom of using every color I could imagine. 
But as I was reciting the much practiced monologue, I realized that I was answering the question “How did you learn to make paper?” not “How did you get started doing this?” There is a subtle but important difference between the two questions, and perhaps he was looking for the answer to the first question. It got me thinking, how did I get started doing this? Not just making paper, but - in a broader sense - creating all the things I make. The answer is: I don’t think I could not do this. I absolutely cannot imagine my life without making things. I have wanted to make pottery since my parents built their house and I found a clay seam in the back yard. I have wanted to do art fairs and gallery shows since the first time I met artists who made their living that way.
