After finishing Spring Break Camps and starting the planning sessions for spring term classes and summer camps (if you click the link back there you can see some behind the scenes details of my lesson plan method. I have my notebook and notations, my pages pinned with inspitarion, and the lessons I want to try teaching and the lessons I've taught before that I repeat, retweak and rebuild. I'm 2/3rds of hte way through my Shadbolt planning session and then it's on ot Summer camps. Summer camp planning also involves a massive art material purchase especially for weeks one and two when I'm teaching 50 minute printmaking lessons. Printmaking takes a lot of paper, a lot of tools, and materials and ink. I'm hoping to pick up a second press to help stream line the printing process. I'm also hoping to try out some kitchen lithography with the camps this summer. purchasing materials for these summer camps within my budget is daunting and sometimes frustrating; but not in the way you might think. I can put together a shopping list, calculate how much to spend on each item and then hit the store only to find that they don't have the item I put on my list but they do have something similar that is either a little less or a little more or sometimes even a lot less and I have to do maths in my head and on my phone's calculator and then I am often left with a surplus in my budget that I have to use up. Having bought all the tools you wanted to pick up for a class and then finding out you have $70 more to spend is a harrowing experience. Where do you splurge? what little extra do you go for? If you are a creative person, or a crafty person or someone with an exacting hobby with lots of components you know that part of the joy of the process is supply hunting. My co-parental unit, otherwise known as the spousal component to the family or husband is an electronics nerd. He builds guitar pedals as a hobby. His workspace has sprawled from one corner to more of an L shaped space that also fills some of our off site storage space. he has boxes, shelves and drawers and drawers of electronic bits and pieces, mother boards, wire, transisters.... he's got a lot of stuff. Artists and crafters have shelves, cupboards, bins, drawers boxes, files and closets filled with paints, brushes, papers, scraps, tools..... we all tend to collect a lot of stuff for the things we love to do. when you're buying not for yourself but for a class this process is done strategically. It's fun and nervwracking and coming from a recent penny pinching period stressfilled. My instinct is to cut costs and then I have to spend more. Like anything it's a process I'll get the hang of it, and will probably have a system in place by the time fall rolls around.
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