arguably the most important draw for any art retreat is the roster of teachers and workshops, which change from year to year. surely you have artists, designers or bloggers that you follow and admire, and if you learn that they are teaching at one of these creative getaways, i’m willing to bet you won’t regret going!
last year when i taught at the Makerie it was a special incarnation of the usual retreat, called the Makerie Sewing. the teachers were a dream team of the sewing world: Liesl Gibson, Amy Butler, Jenny Hart, Heather Jones, Kaari Meng, Tamar Mogendorff, and lil’ old me. yeah, i was pretty excited to be there!
one of the very few (maybe the ONLY?) downsides to teaching at awesome retreats is that usually we teachers can’t actually TAKE any of the amazing classes! however, a fun feature of the Makerie is that every teacher gets one free morning or afternoon so that they can (if they wish) take one, which also means that you might have one of us in class with you! last year i was extra-lucky and got to take TWO. first was an indigo shibori-dyeing workshop with the lovely Kaari Meng of French General (her shop in LA sells incredible textiles, and she organizes dreamy “Chateau Getaways” in the south of France!) SO FUN! i took about a thousand more pics than i’m including here, so if you want to see more pop over to my photo album.
we did lots of different resist techniques, some super-easy and some quite labor-intensive, to create different shapes on the cloth when it’s immersed in the dye…
the second was with genius soft-sculptress Tamar Mogendorff (watch the video on her site and you’ll fall in love too; she also teaches on Creativebug and is teaching next month at the Sweet Paul Makerie in NYC). we hand-stitched birds and cages and i just adore mine! it now hangs in my living room.
who would be the teachers at the crafty retreat of your dreams?
