Lafayette Karuta　ラファエット大学かるた

Lafayette Karuta, made in the spring of 2017.

As part of presenting this collection to my colleagues at the library at Lafayette College, I asked members of the 2016-17 school year staff to contribute an English haiku that could be used to demonstrate and play iroha karuta as a group. Each was assigned a letter of the alphabet with which to begin their poem, and asked to keep it within a theme related to the library of to Lafayette College.

Upon reciept, I mounted their three line poems on a karuta card, to create a yomifuda and then created an image which I mounted on a separate card that had the alphabet letter at the top.  This became our torifuda, or grabbing card set.  The full poem set is available here in .pdf format, and will also be included in the project documentation of the East Asia Image Collection at Lafayette College.