John C Campbell Folk School Revisited

I'm finally getting back into a routine, always so much to catch up on when you're gone for a week and quite frankly sometimes just hard to enter reality again There's no one to cook your meals, no being able to "play" all day. Here's a recap of the wonderful week we had at JC Campbell and some of the fun things we did - fabric painting was first on the list. Using a textile paint, we did many samples using creases, plastic, salt and other technques. The painted fabric provided a nice backdrop for some of the techniques to come later on.
Happy accidents can make the best treasures. Debbie accidentally dropped a thread with paint in the middle of her fabric. It started to wick and we all loved the results, so what do you do? Add more "thread worms"!

Carving a block on Master Carve is a lot of fun because the material is soft but doesn't crumble. You can get great results and really fine detail. I love the block that Jeann created.

Carolyn did a wonderful block print which she turned into a book cover for her journal.

Debbie did a wonderful fish and I love the brush strokes in her print.

We were in the Davidson building AKA the wet room. It's a new building and also houses the cooking and music workshops. We lucked out during our week as both were going on. We had the wonderful aromas from next door and beautiful mandolin music up above - a heavenly combination. We dropped enough hints to the cooking class and were treated every day to one of their culinary masterpieces. This particular day was a curried chicken served on a very unique bread, and the dessert - roasted banana icecream!

At night there's always activities going on to entertain - contra dancing, readings from the writing workshop, a slide tour of Ireland from Jon Riley who was teaching photography and so on, or you could just go back to the studio and work.

Our display at the week end closing ceremonies was wonderful. My ladies worked very hard and did a beautiful job at showing the wide variety of things they did. Marlenes painted piece (lower left) was wonderful and spontaneous using leaves and twigs from outside.

Everyone made a lot of scarves to use as presents and to practice some of the techniques they learned. The eggs on the piece (far left) were done by Karen who became the master of the paintstik; the eggs look like the real thing - we were all so amazed to realize how many different and beautiful eggs there are.

We also did sun printing, monoprinting, printing using a gelatin plate, vegetable printing, rusting fabric, working with Shiva oil paintstiks, fabric crayons, foiling and Angelina fibers. In the photo below, you can see the beautiful journal cover that Carolyn made using her block print.

Carolyn made a beautiful scarf (below) which started out one way, didn't work and salvaged it to be even better! Another happy accident and it matched her jacket perfectly!

Such a great week with so many fun things to bring home and think about!

Thanks to all my ladies who made it such a joy to be there!