Great idea for workshops

As "education chair" of my local fiber and textile art group, I get to organize workshops and as a side benefit, show up to give out nametags, collect money and say hello.  Sometimes I hang around for a while to see what's going on.  Earlier this week I dropped in at a book-making workshop led by Debbie Shannon.

She wasn't sure exactly what people wanted to get from the workshop.  With a room full of intermediate-to-advanced artists, she knew that having everybody do the same project wasn't going to go over well; some people would want to finish one book, while others would want to make samples of two or three different kinds to have as references for future work.  Some might want to know where you buy this or that or how you work with a particular kind of paper; others might think it a waste of time to talk about that.

So Debbie did an approach that I'd never seen before -- but plan to steal and use in the future.

She gave each person a half dozen tiny post-it notes and told them to put their names or initials on each one.  Then she had a sheet on the wall with a half dozen possible subjects for discussion.  Each person was asked to put a post-it note above any subject she wanted to cover in the workshop.

The finished grid showed what the group wanted to do, and what they didn't particularly care about.  this way Debbie could make sure to cover the important subjects -- learning to make three different book structures -- and leave those less interesting to the end, or not at all.  So much more efficient than asking for show of hands, or proceeding with a set lesson plan only to learn that many of the people in the class were bored or frustrated.

Found poetry 54

Last week on Art With a Needle

After my post about a workshop I led for SAQA/Indiana, a commenter wrote:  "This experience of yours reminds me of the value of taking a hands-on class over an on-line one....  I found these kinds of group evaluations always turned up unexpected ideas.  A pooling of knowledge energizes the whole experience.  Something similar CAN happen with on-line classes, but something is lost by not being in the same room with each other."

I have to agree that being in the same room with other people is usually the best part of attending a workshop.  Even when the teacher is fabulous, it's better to be there when others are learning and doing alongside you.  If the teacher is less than fabulous, it's really better to have comrades in learning; often you can come up with a group DIY response that compensates for whatever holes the teacher has left unfilled.

From the teacher's standpoint, it's also helpful to have several people in the room.  If one doesn't understand your point, another often asks the right question; if one is being obdurate or crabby or goes off on a tangent, the others can often exert peer pressure to bring her back in line.

I have had good experiences with on-line classes -- the Photoshop classes from The Pixeladies were wonderful and I recommend them to any quilter who wants to up her tech skills -- but I have also had lukewarm ones.  The better ones, as I recall, were those in which there was group conversation as well as individual back-and-forth with the teacher.  Which is exactly the point!!

I had my second cataract removed on Wednesday and am thrilled with my wonderful new distance vision.  For the first time since I was six years old, I can see out the window without lenses, and the trees are in focus!  The tradeoff, of course, is that my wonderful new distance eyes are useless up close.  I'm experimenting with my husband's drugstore reading glasses and they let me read, but I get vertigo if I try to look or walk across the room with them on.  Another trip to the drugstore seems in order to find a better prescription.  But this should last only a month until the eyes are both fully healed and I get new glasses.

Meanwhile I'm doing my daily calligraphy and my daily miniatures even though I can't really see what I'm doing.  It will be interesting to look at these pieces later and see how bad they are!  Here's my favorite miniature of the week, front and back:

Hand-stitching -- the workshop 2

I wrote last week about the workshop I led on hand stitching onto a finished quilt.  After practicing stitching onto sample sandwiches in the morning, people pulled out their own quilts and decided what to do.

Whenever you teach a workshop the first time, you are surprised at how it turns out.  I had anticipated that people would be productively stitching away within minutes.  But instead, we spent the entire afternoon on evaluation and auditions.

We put the quilts up on a design wall and talked about what they needed next.  Usually the maker already had an idea of what she wanted to do next, but sometimes after we kicked the tires, it turned out she needed to do something else.  Some people knew there was a problem with the quilt but weren't sure what it was, so we talked about design, composition, color palette.

Eventually each quilt got to the color-choice stage, where we draped floss in various colors over the quilts, stood back twenty feet, and contemplated which ones worked (and which ones were even visible!).

We did the first couple of evaluations with everybody listening, and from then on people could bring their work for "private" consults -- but many of the participants decided they would rather listen in on a lot of consults than do much stitching on their own.  That was good, because many times the comments from the onlookers were more helpful than the comments from the teacher.

So the workshop changed course in midstream.  Instead of a lot of practice in hand stitching, it turned into a lot of practice in evaluation and auditioning.  In the long run, practicing those skills is probably going to be way more valuable than practicing how to make french knots on a thick, densely stitched quilt (hint: use pliers to pull the needle through).

Last week on Art With a Needle

Readers had some great suggestions about how I could free up my calligraphy, such as writing left-handed, holding the pen way up at the tip so it is not well controlled, or wrapping the pen so it would be harder to get a firm grip.  All excellent ideas, which I promise to try soon.

Several comments about the yearbook flap in which the governor of Virginia appeared in blackface in the mid-1980s and is now catching hell.  Leigh posted a thoughtful comment: "Making fun of a group of people as a young adult with no sense, in that time period, was really tasteless and stupid, but not illegal.  While it undoubtedly caused a general harm in encouraging idiotic attitudes, it didn't cause lasting (and illegal) harm to a specific person.  I would however like to see what has changed.  Has he actually done anything to stop institutional racism or is he just status quo?"

I don't live in Virginia and I don't know much about the governor, but I did some research and found that in the year he has been governor, he has vetoed 20 bills, including those that would suppress wider voter participation, enable unfair redistricting, encourage inferior health care and prohibit cities from raising the minimum wage.  As a state senator he voted in favor of reproductive rights and expanding Medicaid coverage.  To me that sounds like he has actually done something good.

Here's my favorite miniature of the week, made from a 1/4 ounce lead weight (heaven knows where that came from...):

 

Hand-stitching -- the workshop 1

I just got home from a gig with the SAQA Indiana region.  The organizers thought it would be more convenient if participants didn't have to shlep sewing machines across the state, so the workshop focused on hand-stitching onto finished quilts.  I am not a world-renowned expert on this subject, having used the technique on only a few quilts, but I was excited about getting to lead this session, figured that I would learn as much as anybody else in the room.

My interest in hand stitching as the last step came with this small quilt that I made a couple of years ago for a group show with the prompt "green."  After I finished it and posted the image to our group blog, it sat on my design wall for a while before it actually had to be shipped.

The longer I looked at it, the less I liked it, and finally decided it needed some extra pizzazz.  So I got out my embroidery floss and stitched more little rectangles to echo the pieced ones.  Here's the final version, so much better than the original:

Kathleen Loomis, Sargasso 2 (detail below)

So, echoing my own experience, I asked the SAQA ladies to bring an already-quilted small quilt that seemed to need something extra.

I'll tell  you more about what happened in a new post.