Dealing with school to market and other less important classes.

Hi all - I am sitting in class right now and trying to type quietly. Oh my gosh, the fourth week of school is almost over!

Everything’s settling in. I have been to all of my classes now at least three times. Out of all my classes the only one I have not mentioned is my “School to Market” class. This is a new class (this is only the second time its being held) an interdisciplinary class, and on top of that it’s a upper level class, so all that adds up to hard. This class is luckily run by one of my favorite teachers and a second teacher I have never met before from the textiles department. I want to pause for a second and talk about the textiles department.

For one its not on the CCA campus, the whole department is located up the street behind a plain looking door, next to Blick. Blick is the local art store - its the closest we have to a kind of school store. Anyway, so you get to this plain kind of sketchy door and head up equally sketchy looking steps to an alarming door because on this door is a huge coded lock - you know the ones with a number plate for a code and then the handle. You put in the code and tightly grip the handle and turn it because the door is super heavy and there is no actual door handle. Once you’re actually in the building things are quite nice, lots of windows, large tables for unknown textile-ly things. I think if the jewelry department was to have a sister department in just sheer amount of similarities it would be the textiles department. Both are about the same size with the same amount of facilities and the feeling of the studio is quite similar. This is my first class there and since I have no real interest in textiles so this will probably be my only class in the space so I thought I would talk about it now. Ok, well anyway back on point...

The class has two main focuses; One is the application for the ACC SF craft fair - this is kind of a big deal craft fair, CCA has a big common booth that is run out of this class - it gets a bit complicated because the show takes place over the summer, so  I will be part of planning and (hopefully) have work in it but I won't actually be present at the show as I will be back home in Seattle. The whole first part of the class is just getting your proposal for the ACC show ready. The second focus that really happens after the ACC thing is all about how make a body of work and how to get that work sold, part of the class is making a website and pursuing a second way of sale. This most often takes the form of a working Etsy site. I’m quite happy to do both of these as I have meant to for ages. They also have a bunch of guest speakers coming in. I can see this class being a communication problem, the few things we have done in the class there seems to be a lack of communication about what they want and what we know to do. I have found this in all the classes that I only have once a week, I’m not sure why, but its always been the case.

My history teacher, he is proving to be quite dull. He repeated the same lecture we had the lesson before. It was still boring and still dull and still in some ways out of date and objectionable in a way I can't quite wrap my head around. He has acquiesced to let me use my tablet to take notes. We didn't really take about midterms but I guess we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

We have started our first real assignment in Jewelry 2B - this class  teaches three main techniques. The  first two are  chasing and repoussé, they go together and deserve a whole post (I'm working on it right now, should come out around the end of the month) its a complicated concept and takes a bit of explaining to wrap your head around. The second thing we learn is links,  we have a big project that  is called “the links project” (ok, so the names not very original) the goal is to learn as many ways as you can to join, link and combine things together. I'm really enjoying this class. Its different than my other jewelry classes - up until now my jewellery classes have been fairly unstructured, sometimes we would have demo’ s sometimes we had studio every now and then we would have a crit. 2B is a bit more structured with weekly assignments due, and samples made and checked off. The teacher was intimidating because of this at first but I think that i have gotten over that a bit. As most of you know I like structure, so no complaints there.

Well I think I really need to get on with taking some notes now and should probably go now. Thanks - Katie