**ALL WORKSHOPS FULL**  but keep your eyes out for more workshops hosted in my studio, due to the overwhelming demand!  Join my mailing list or Facebook page

This January 28th and 29th a new festival pops up in Seattle’s Ballard Industrial district, ONN/OF -A Light Festival, created by writer/walker Jim Demetre, post-medium artist Susan Robb and curator Sierra Stinson.  Each of these folks, in their own generative practices delve into and illuminate what it means to bring people to place to art to community.  As a triumvirate, they are boldly challenging the deep gray of Seattle’s somewhat depressing winters, and boosting morale through art, food, music, artist-made goods and workshops, all wrapped into one weekend “of illumination, warmth, and gloom-banishing engagement.”

Most exciting for me is these lovely people have asked me to create  workshops for the festival!  Inspired by history of the site for the festival and the people who once worked there — an 11,000 sq. foot warehouse that was once a family-owned Knitting factory Jim Demetre grew up in —  I wanted to create a project that could at once engage people in the pleasure of making with their hands but also probe some of the issues of production/labor/waste/over-consumption/debt we all need to grapple with in contemporary life.

So I’ll be facilitating a project called “Gleaning, Redeeming, Surviving and Thriving: “ and be leading 14 people through the process of taking discarded cheap materials, investing them with one’s time and creating an amazing wearable piece.

Each workshop, one on Saturday 28th from 4-7pm and one on Sunday 29th from 1-4pm, can only take 7 people each, since we’ll be working on handmade lap looms.

So register now to make sure you have a spot!  The cost is only $18 per person, with 3 hours with me and use of the studio during the whole day of the festival!  You’ll be gathering your own materials, engaging with a site of contemporary gleaning: the bins at the Goodwill Outlet.

Register with me through Paypal, and ***please include in the “message to the merchant” your name, email and phone number AND which day you are registering for, either Sat. from 4-7pm or Sun. 1-4pm.***

Now read my Magna Carta below about the WHY and HOW we’ll be doing with  “Gleaning, Redeeming, Surviving and Thriving”!

**FULL** on Sat. 28th,  4-7pm…

**FULL**  on Sun 29th, 1-4pm…

The making of a ‘highly prized’ fashionable object out of the discards of the fashion machine of psychological obsolescence.

Before we became “wasteful, debt-ridden, permanently discontented individuals”, as cultural critic Vance Packard warned us, ‘esteem’ from clothing came not from being able to buy the ever-shifting newest thing, but from the pride one felt in making the elaborate hand-made and individuated garments defined now as ‘folk-costume’.
Our cultural critics today tell us we have moved from being people who can produce to people who only consume.  During the course of this project, step back and examine this, examine the art of ‘gleaning’ and slowly making something from the leftovers of our over-buying and over-production. Participants are asked to spend an afternoon at “The Bins” before attending the workshop, picking through the mountains of discarded fabrics, choosing about 5-8 garments made of  ‘t-shirt’ knit material.

Using handmade looms that are adaptations of a childhood craft called spool knitting — rake looms from Germany date back to 1535 –  the project facilitator Mandy Greer will lead the participant through the gleaning process to creating yarn to creating a dramatic handmade wearable work,  a giant cowl scarf.  So fashionable ..so au currant…but Monks have been wearing them for centuries!

Will you get rid of something that took hours to make the same as you might  a $12 t-shirt from Old Navy?  Reinvest these discarded materials with ‘specialness’ through time, your time with the materials…by making choices as you make, your own choices..In this Era of economic recession, stress, depression, a climate in which we are constantly told we don’t have enough and don’t have enough to buy it, lets celebrate new ideas (that are actually old) of finding pride in making-do, re-investing in what we have, inventing and creating something that makes you feel good by being self-reliant.