Great Weekend!

This is where I spent my long weekend. 2.5 glorious days of playing with wool with Deb Menz.  This all started at SOAR last fall.  I had the 3 hour Plying for Color workshop with Deb and 3 hours just barely scratched the surface.

I would have just left it at that. Wishful thinking for things that can’t be. Or can they?

Over the course of the weekend, Amy talked about setting up an extended workshop with Deb for herself, Carolyn and John. My ears perked up. Then I put on the longest puppy dog face I could muster and invited myself along for the weekend. It was pitiful, really. But it worked.

It was a great weekend. Deb was wonderful: a great teacher and a great hostess.  We laughed the entire weekend. Saturday night, we laughed so hard, I cried, then my stomach muscles hurt.

Oh, you want to know about the class? It was an extension of plying for color. I arrived with 4 bobbins of singles from different colorways. I only got around to playing with 3 of them: pairing them with different colors/colorways to see how I was able to make that handpaint sing.  Or, in my case, some handpaints just aren’t meant to be the diva, but make great chorus.

(Sorry, no photos. Deb is shipping my spun samples back along with some books I purchased.)

We did a little dyeing to see how we can create our own handpaints to pair with a specific handpainted roving. (John and Carolyn went from “no, we don’t want to do dyeing” to “we want another weekend!”) We did a little carding to see the impact to the colors based on the number of times we put the fiber through the carder and how to pull rovings off of the carder. (John fell in love with carding.)

So, yeah, there’s another weekend in Wisconsin in my future. That is, if Amy invites me to join their little group again.

And if you are curious, taking a class with Deb at her studio is a wonderful experience. She has all of the supplies and samples right at her fingertips. If you have a problem grasping a concept, she’s got a sample that demonstrates it. No kidding. Want to see the samples from her books, she’s got them. Want to try a color that you don’t have in your spinning stash? She’ll dig in her stash. Not in her stash? She’ll fire up the dye pots or the drum carder. The small group (4:1) makes it possible to have lots of 1:1 time to answer all of your questions.

If you have the option, it is infinitely better than taking a class with her at one of the conferences.

This is not to say that the conference workshops aren’t good.  But it is like comparing a Snickers bar to a handmade turtle.

P.S. Amy is the greatest fiber travel agent. I think she has a new calling. And, yes, I’m brown nosing. I really, really want to be invited back.