The fan I made in class after my bicycle accident. I love working with
gold leaf! I want to work with it again as much as possible. The teacher
for the class has a gallery close to my house, so maybe I will go there
one day!
Today would
have been a pretty normal day, if not for the fact that on my way home
from school, a car ran over my bicycle, and almost me!
I was heading home around 12:30, even
though I had another class at 3:00 on campus, because I wanted to do
some homework and take Vaaska for a walk, but unfortunately, as I was
crossing a parking lot on the sidewalk, a driver was pulling out and not
looking both ways.
At the first contact, I thought
everything would be okay, so I simply moved further into the road,
unconsciously pulling my leg over the bike to dismount at the same time.
Nothing else would have happened, except when the woman tried to brake,
or perhaps she simply didn’t hear the nose of her car connecting with
my bike, she hit the accelerator, and in a matter of seconds, my bike
was pulled under her car’s bumper.
While I stood in the road, trying to
come to terms with the fact that I no longer had a working bike, the
woman got out of her car, crying and trembling, to make sure I was okay.
In all honesty, I was either very much in shock or very very relaxed
about it, as in the end it was me calming her down. She gave me a ride
home, which was nice, since there was a sudden and very random thunder
storm that rolled in. She also gave me the money to replace my bike.
Even though my leg hurt a bit, I still
needed to go back to school to attend my afternoon class, as today was
the class I’d been waiting for all semester: sensu making. A sensu is a
folding fan. There was a guest artist who came in to show us how to
paint leaves with ink and use them as stamps, as well as how to handle
gold leaf, which I have always been curious to use as a medium.
Making
the actual fan was brief- it took very little time, roughly ten minutes
or so, but I had a lot of fun. Gold leaf is really, really cool, and an
intriguing medium. I want to be able to work with it again in the
future. Other than that, nothing else really happened today!