Two steps forward, one step back

I've been trimming paper for days. This is for senior #2's book. I finally chose a paper (Nepal Light). I chose it because it's fairly lightweight, and it's neutral in color and I know I can gocco print on it pretty well. Lightweight is necessary because the folding required to make the pages look like envelopes creates a fairly thick page, so I want to start with a really light paper.

The disadvantage is that the paper is handmade and has very irregular edges and most are not even really rectangular. The advantage is that I know the person who's the importer and so I was able to buy 100 sheets wholesale! And 100 sheets was just about exactly what I need (with enough extras to cover for mistakes).

Of course, the paper being very irregular and very thin mean that I can not stack them up and cut several sheets at once. So I've been spending days trimming 100 sheets of 30"x20" Nepal Light down to 200 sheets of 10"x17 and 200 sheets of 6"x7". The corners have to be squared, and there's just no shortcut for this step. And I'm still not done.

Consulted with the cabinet maker who's making the folding screens. I wanted to make some changes, and he said no problem. Yay!

That was the 2 steps forward part.

The one step back — my 3rd senior has decided to not participate in the project. She says she's not sure she wants to have her images be in books that go into library collections. Valid enough, but I'm hugely disappointed. Especially since her prints have come out so beautifully. Which is another thing — she said she's been showing her prints around...and then her sentence kind of trailed off there, leading me to think that she's not getting very encouraging feedback from her peers or family? I can't imagine why, because all the people that work there who have seen the prints just think they're super.

So now I'm down in the dumps.