Friday was a long, but successful day at Curtin. For my Pattern & Meaning class, I copied my design onto 14 sheets of paper - the right way round! - and started trialling different layout options. I had a tutorial part way through the morning, which gave some expectations for our final piece of essay writing for Historical Issues. By early afternoon, I had set out the pattern accurately and taped 12 sections together, a bit like a jigsaw. I was really pleased with this. I carefully rolled up the pattern, and took myself off on the bus to Office Works to get it copied. The copy shop does all sorts of large bespoke copies, on paper, vinyl, photos etc, and I thought $3.70 was a good price for something that was about A0 size. The copy was carefully rolled inside the jigsaw copy original and I took it back to Curtin on the bus. My original plan was to take two buses home, but I was so laden (with rucksack, splitting plastic bag of print gear and the precious rolled patttern) that I decided to take the pattern to uni (one bus ride) and leave it there over the weekend rather than take it home on one bus, and back to class on another.
I took the pattern to Mark, our technician, to find a safe home for it, and spent a productive half hour chatting to him. He told me some details about an incident in another class where a new bucket of expensive emulsion had been spilt (possibly wilfully) wasting about $70 of materials. I checked with him when he would be around to supervise me emulsing a large screen. He said the remains of the spilt bucket might not be enough to emulse a large screen, and because he was not sure whether it had been contaminated, he would activate a new bucket of emulsion. Mark said he needed to add the sensitising chemical to the emulsion to activate it, and I asked if it could be done by Tuesday when I would be ready to go. I asked if I could take down the health & safety details of the emulsion, because I wanted to expand the full range of my knowledge as a printer. He was quite pleased with this and I think he may let me be involved in the mixing/preparation process. I suppose that, at the back of my mind, I'm wondering whether, when I return to Herts, I can work as a Student Proctor, to cover some of my education costs. The more print specific knowledge I can acquire, the more likely they are to employ me, and the more use I will be to them.
The plan for next week is to buy the fabric on Monday, emulse the screen Tuesday, expose it Wednesday, repeat print with it Thursday. I will be the first in class to print using the repeat screen, and it looks like everyone will be observing how to set up the repeat screen in the mechanical printer, using my screen as the example! Oh dear. I hope it goes well!
Today, Jim and I went to Potters, the fabric warehouse to see if I could get 2 x 6m of fabric for printing, they are only open Monday-Friday 10-4. Then we went for tea and buns. This was a mistake, because I had a lovely almond slice, made with whole almonds, and while crunching the nuts, broke a large filling. I think this is going to cost a fortune to fix because I think it's going to need a crown. So I've found a phone number for a recommended dentist, and will have to see how soon I can get an appointment. And next week I had great plans to get my printing done!
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