Welcome to the last installment of FINNale! Thanks for following my journey over the last few months- I couldn’t have kept blogging were it not for all y’all reading. Enjoy!

3:07 pm Montreal time; YUL airport (18?? hours sort of blogging)

Well here I am, back on Canadian soil. I had wanted to write during the 9ish-hour flight from Munich, but my battery was pretty low, and anyhow, I was squeezed into the verymost bowels of the plane and spent most of the time trying to find non-existant leg room before settling into a catatonic state in front of three movies in quick succession. Most of the flight was a blur, except for one incident in which a woman in the row in front/across of me had a bit of a nervous break down. The nice German ladies across the aisle from her tried to comfort her, but her husband said she was very tired and they were just moving the Canada (he was Canadian, she was European, and they had two small boys. Yeah, stressful!). She seemed alright after that, but the stress was palpable. It’s situations like these I’m always a bit paralyzed; I don’t want to be prodding into her or her husband’s business, but I also feel like I want to do something- I’m always a row too far back. Anyway, excuses, excuses. One day I won’t care and just do it.

The flight was interesting for another reason in that it was like a little capsule of Canada. I have not been surrounded by so many native English speakers, let alone Canadians, in however many months, that I was quickly yearning to retreat back to Finland where I could be surrounded by conversations I didn’t have to hear.

Arriving in Montreal, Canada wasted no time in grabbing me in a big bear hug of homecoming. The customs officer who checked me through smiled and said, “So, glad to be home?” and I tiredly smiled and shrugged and said “Yes and no”
“Ahh, made some friends huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Well you can always go back.”
“I think I will.”

Upon entering the main terminal in order to connect to my Vancouver gate (which doesn’t leave for another 4 and half hours, by the by) I came across some Air Canada attendants and inquired to make sure I was going the right direction. The four of them surrounded me like hens to feed, barraging me with questions instead of beaks. “OhAreYouFromVancouverWhyAreYouDressedSoWarm?” “OhYouWereStudyingWhatDidYouStudy?” “ILoveYourBroach” “HahYeahFinlandMustBeCold?No?” “OhCeramics?DoYouHaveEtsy?” “AreWeAskingTooManyQuestions?”
Though bordering on Overwhelming, their friendliness was like a warm hug, or a cold glass of water. I laughed to the last one and said, “No! I’ve been living with Finns for the last 5 months and it takes them a while to talk to you!”
Seeing my boarding pass and my long-but-not-long-enough-to-do-anything, one suggested I go outside for a bit to get some real air. Hey, that’s an idea! However, after a few gulps of the hot, muggy air that hit me as I stepped into the Eastern sun, I decided to get to my gate as soon as possible and crash there.

And here I am. Back in Canada, sipping overpriced smoothie fruit drinks and wondering how it is I’m still awake, and how I’m going to pass the next few hours. My bags, between the ceramics and the laptop, are getting heavier and heavier.

So I’ve been taking little naps. Naps are good.

6:35 pm, Montreal time, YUL (021 hours blogging)

I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve been awake for almost 48 hours on less than three hours’ sleep. It i a feeling akin to staying up all night writing an essay and then going straight to class (yes I’ve done that. And I got an A that paper, so I didn’t learn my lesson). There was a flight to Vancouver an hour ago and I’m not sure why I wasn’t on it, but it was very full. Mine boards in about 40 minutes. I’ve managed to pass the time by organizing/culling my Helsinki photos, which is very useful. It would be more depressing but I am a zombie at this point. This is the 1000th photo I took:

It is from the woodfiring I did two weeks ago. Pictured is Nina, the Glass Tech, “sewing” together her piece before we loaded it into the bottommost part of the kiln. The woodfiring was a fantastic experience. That was another sleep-deprived night- with four other students we took shifts until 4am watching the kiln and feeding it constantly so that the heat rose evenly (which it didn’t do, quite.) Then at 4 we were relieved by another group. Crashed until 9, had breakfast all together, and hung out by the kiln all day taking turns with stoking it. It took place out in Porvoo, which is the cutest town ever, made up entirely of Greenhauses.

Tomi and Nathalie, among others, were a bit disappointed, thinking it didn’t reduce all the way, but overall I think the results were really cool. I’ve given away many of the cups I made (and those people should send me pictures of them in use!) but here are the things I’ve lugged back with me from Finland:
(pics)
The best part of all of it is I really had no idea what I was doing, in terms of glazing. That was kind of a running theme this semester. I made a lot, a lot of glazes, samples for the woodfire as well as myself, and was pretty unconfident the whole time. For example, I followed a recipe from on of Emmanuel Cooper’s glaze books, and it was labeled as turning out “greyish matte blue/purple.” Following the recipe exactly in a small batch, it turned out like this:

Which wasn’t what I was looking for at all, but I decided it would be perfect for the letter cups, so I made a larger batch of it. They turned out like this:

As you can see, very, very different. I showed Hyerin, dismayed, and she bit her lip and said, “Well, purple is a really really hard colour to make!”
After getting a bit used to it, I see that the colour isn’t really that bad. What’s bad is I was really aiming for something else. In consulting with Tomi, we think I should have adjusted the amount of talc in the larger batch (please excuse the ceramic nerd moment! We continue with our regular programming.)

Which reminds me, I haven’t talked about my final projects at all, have I? They were finished completely on May 22nd and I “presented” Nathalie, Kazushi, and my fellow exchange student Katrin. First of all, it was interesting to present in the same session as Katrin, because she is a) working mostly in glass and b)very product-design oriented. Her object was really beautiful- a three-piece milk carafe- but the discussion from Nathalie and Kazushi focused on difficulties producing such a complex object en masse, as well as thinking of marketing it as an object to heighten “milk culture” (as in wine culture, not yogurt).

I was a little nervous when it came around to my turn because my objects were not  as product design centred. But they got that, so it wasn’t an issue. Even the botched purple glaze barely batted an eyelash. Kazushi got surprisingly excited about the letter cups’ forms (he didn’t realize they were letters until we pointed them out half-way through). He was all “These really appeal to me… I don’t know why?! What is it?! Is it a Pacific Ocean thing??” Which I thought was amusing. Nathalie, too, thought some of the forms were really interesting as new cup forms, evolving even further from my intention of the letters and slipcasting them (something too complicated to get to this semester). They didn’t comment on them much as a typeface, which of course I had spent the whole night before laying out:

(I want to develop this further into an actually usable typeface. Anyone know how I go about that? Illustrator?)

As for the handle-cups, well, they were very well received. They came along way from the original drawings, but the result is exactly what I was aiming for: unexpected, but natural.

Turns out they are very comfortable to hold when the handle slips horizontally between your fingers: