Winter weather in the Pacific Northwest is tempestuous. From mild and sunny in January to a complete shut down of the Seattle metropolitan area due repeat snow storms in February, we have had the extremes and everything in between. This winter, we welcomed Veloria Zhu and Xun Cao as our newest Slip Rabbit interns, who have joined Erica, Kayla and Timea in the studio. Veloria takes over communications and outreach and Xun will work on hardware development with Timea. We are also excited to have the talented graduate student in mathematics, Eli Johnson, joining Sara Billey, Catherine Babecki and James Pedersen in our WXML group as a new graduate research assistant. Former Slip Rabbit intern, Daria Micovic, has also been working with Timea this winter, all the way from her new home in the Big Apple, on writing code in Python for a new project that plays with data lists.

Timea will be speaking about her work at Reed College in late February, will be representing the USA at the inaugural Intercontinental Ceramics Project in Valencia, Spain in mid-March, and will be an invited presenter at the FabLab at the 2019 NCECA in Minneapolis in late March.

Our research on mathematical sandpile models is ramping up and taking us into really interesting directions for exploring the mathematical logic these patterns and applying this logic to coding. The patterns themselves that we have been developing are becoming more and more complex and ornamental. At the same time, they bear a resemblance to various fiber arts based patterning traditions that have developed over the centuries through human ingenuity and as a result of interactions among craftspeople from diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds.