Paper cuts

It's amazing how long it takes to cut paper.

I went to the studio on Wednesday intending to finish printing my setting of Wislawa Szymborska's poem "First Love". Because the poem is a little longer than the assignment specified, I have to make a fairly large French fold*. This means that each piece of Zerkall paper will only give me two French folds, but they each end up being gigantic. In most cases Barry advocates using as much paper as possible but he agreed that the text would be completely dwarfed by the margins. As he put it, they would be "overly generous."

So instead of zippity quick cutting my paper, I had to enter into decision making mode. Decision making mode entails creating physical mock ups of all the options. Somehow it took an entire hour and a half to finish all the cuts I had to make, and I even was late to class. At least I'll be able to start printing right away the next time I go in.


*A French fold is the same thing you make when you print out a card from the computer and fold it twice.