some people think it's posh to have a room with a skylight. not me. they get all clogged with dead bugs and frankly can be rather ghetto. our skylight gets dirty, and in the summer, it makes the den very uncomfortable to be in during the afternoon, even with the UV blocker on it. i have never been a fan of bright light - even since i was little, i liked cool, dark rooms.
at some point in recent weeks (around the time the temperature in philadelphia went from a steady sixty-five to a steady ninety-five over the course of a day) ben asked me what we might do that would maybe make summer a little less... punishing. for me. (and thereby him.) i said, something about that skylight HAS to change. afternoons are my ebb; i don't write then or even function very well with cutlery. if i had my way, i'd sleep between noon and seven pm every day - they are utterly pointless hours. night, and morning, is what i like. but since i HAVE to be awake, afternoons are a very good time for me to knit, with a movie on the television. everybody knows how uncozy it is to watch television in a bright room -- it's ridiculous!
we decided to make a paper pojagi-style cover for the skylight.
when we set out, i warned ben that i would be making some unquestionable aesthetic decisions as we went along. he assured me that he was there to climb the ladder and cut paper, nothing else. but halfway through the project, i left him to his own devices. he was obviously enjoying piecing the thing together.
this photo does not let you see, in the areas where the most light is coming through, that there are muliple pieces of "seamed" organdie there - blue and green, like the rest. they are actually my favorite part of the piece and i will have to try to get a photo at another time of day.
it's definitely going to help me through those few hours of every midday where i'm just a zombie. i will be much happier to recharge my battery for dinner-preparation and an evening stretch of printing or errands, if i am comfortable in the den. we figured out how to make that happen, and it took just under two years!
if you are interested in pojagi, i have recently been working on an interview/feature piece with chunghie lee. i first posted about chunghie's work last august, and recently read the interview with her in selvedge, and decided to write about her for korean quarterly. i spent about a half an hour on the phone with chunghie a few weeks ago, have been exchanging e-mails, and this feature should appear in KQ's autumn issue. (if you wish perhaps to subscribe, you can still catch the summer ish, at press now, for which i have contributed book and film reviews, a feature on how to make a cake that looks like a bowl of dolsot bibimbap (this is a writing-photographic-handmodel collaboration with pals kathy and louis), and an interview feature on korean-american punk rock photographer jim jocoy.) check it out! check it all out.