Return to Kuopio

We returned to Kuopio a week ago, already missing the first week of term.  We attended our first class of 'Material and Structure' on Wednesday.  We thought we had been put into the Jewellery and Precious Metals course, but quickly realised after a pretty heavy metal work demo that this wasn't the course for us!  Turns out we'd been put into the Industrial Design class!! 

So, after about 40 minutes we went to see Pirjo, who was very helpful and understood our problem.  She went through all the other courses available to us this term and we considered going back to Textile Design.  However, once again we found out that course just is not what we want to be doing with our time here, as it is an academic semester and a lot of Finnish lectures and written modules are involved. 

Between us, Helen and I came to the conclusion that what we REALLY want to do this term is a personal project, that combines textiles with glass and ceramics.  The next part was to convince someone to let us do it.  Initially, we approached our projects from a textiles point of view, but after talking to Kaisa we realised we weren't going to get our own way.  So today we spoke to Merja, taking it now from a ceramics approach, which in hindsight is actually a much more relevant angle for it to be marked from.  She agreed that if we both created our own project and handed in a technical file of sampling (clays, engobes and glazes etc) and presented a final peice, she could mark it and give us our ECT credits accordingly.  I am SO happy Merja was so understanding, and seemed quite keen on the idea of letting us get on and do our own thing.  It also works out well as she told us she does not have an classes to give this semester, so she will be around to give us as much guidance as we will need, which is amazing!!

In other news, we went to an 80's theme night, that started out really great, but turned into a complete shambles...