Thursday-8:45am

The OAS (Oriental Art Supply) order finally arrived yesterday!! I may have problems with Karma and the felt (that you put under your paper while you paint to absorb the excess ink). She was immediately pawing at it...and while I was snapping pictures...

...she was trying to bite and tear at it! For some reason she is intrigued by the texture of it, I guess. Karma is not used to getting swatted and yelled at--she stayed away from the table all the rest of the day--chuckle! She may be pretty spoiled, but she knows when I mean business.

Anyways--I got both the grey and the white felts (wanted to have a spare for when I share, of course). Got both kinds of practice rolls and the practice sheets--two kinds of student re-wettable liquid inks--color chips and the premixed yellow in the small jar--and brushes!!

Here's the two liquid inks outside of the boxes. It said the one with the black cap was supposed to have a little bit of a brown shade to the ink? The cup was a free gift, BTW, for ordering so much, I guess--hehe! So many smaller brushes--I was thrilled!

When I took the tissue wrapping off of the color chips--well, I can't read Chinese, so I wrote the colors on the top of each box and am storing them in the clear plastic container. The brushes were packed well and each one had a cap over the brush head so that they were protected--nice!

Last night I wrote the names of each brush on the handle with a black fine sharpie marker (blue didn't show as well). Then I soaked them for an hour (the whole brush) and cleaned the paper off of them, too, the best I could. (A few spots are just going to be sticky for a while--tough to get off--but most all of it came off pretty easily.) I'm sure some people would be dead set against taking the tags off the brushes, but they bug me, I guess. Just personal preference. I just need to know the names of the brushes in English--hehe!

On the dark handled brushes--the sharpie marker came off! I was surprised. I just laid them out on a towel to dry during the night. This morning I made sure each brush had the name on the handle and then cleaned each one with the cake soap/conditioner and got the last of the sizing out of them. Here they are--along with my very special wolf hair brush from Haiying and a little detail brush I already had that I like. As you can see, some of them do not have the loops on them to hang them so I picked one of Leah's pottery cups for those. Oh--and cleaning all of those brushes I had less loose hair in the soap than with just one of the Giant Panda brushes from Jerry's Artarama! I didn't see any dye to speak of in the soap, either. And they "feel" so nice!! No comparison at all!! Ahhhh!!!!

I just keep going over and looking at them! *big grin*

The hardest, hardest part for me is -- I can't play with them yet!! Bummer! I have to be good and wait. Leah is coming over tonight to make paper so (1) I have to clear the table off and (2) I have already done quite enough with my arm with the cleaning brushes, etc, and don't want to put it out for a week like I did last time--hehe! I had been wanting to get some paper made here pretty soon anyways--so, as long as everything will be out already, I plan to work on making paper over the weekend. After all the papermaking is done and the table is free again--then I can finally play with all my new brushes and paper! Oh well--gives me something to look forward to, right?

I hope to get some pictures of the handmade papermaking process for you tonight--(even if Leah doesn't like her picture taken any more than I do--hehe!) Later....I have to go look at my new brushes....