Southeast Fiber Forum

I spent the weekend in Gatlinburg at the Southeast Fiber Forum Conference. It's every 2 years and lately has been at Arrowmont. Arrowmont is a wonderful craft school in downtown Gatlinburg. Once you're on campus, you'd never know you were in a huge tourist area. It's quiet (except at 4am when the garbage truck comes to empty the dumpsters...) and you're surrounded by trees. The dorm I was supposed to be in was burned in the fire in November that devastated the area. Instead a bunch of us were in a older house that predates the dorms we usually stay in. You could see just how close the fires came to destroying the whole campus. 

I normally take a class that involves weaving. This year I decided to go way out of he box and signed up to take the intro to painting on silk class with Hellenne Vermillion from Atlanta. Wow!!! It was a blast!! None of my pieces are done yet. Several have to be washed and some haven't been steamed yet so I have a long list of supplies to buy. Yup. I'm hooked. It's like drugs I guess. I do so enjoy making things. There just aren't enough hours but I shall give it a try.

We started from total know nothing beginning and continued on to try landscapes and then using resists, we painted flowers before working on some scarves.

There were 7 of us and we all did different things on our fabrics. It's good to learn from each other.

The right and bottom are landscapes and on the left you can see the resist lines.

We pinned up our work once dry. That whole wall is pin friendly. 

None of these pieces are washed but they were steamed before we left. See how each scene is different and we all had the same colors in our trays....

On the right you can see the wisteria we did to practice using resists on silk. On the left are a few of the scarves we did.

Don't you just love all the colors and creativity? Some of them had done this before so their pieces were more creative than those of us just struggling to make a straight line with our resist.

We each made 2 scarves plus a bunch of small samples. Sensory overload for sure.

I'd had my van tuned up last week. It's got over 150,000 miles on it and they recommended about $1800. worth of work because, altho it was driving great, that could change with no warning as something could wear out. Since I drive over 4500 miles each summer going to visit family, we had them do that. So it drove great. Even the squeak on the brakes quit! Then, coming home yesterday, going the back way back to Knoxville to avoid Pigeom Forge, my engine light came on. I headed straight home and this morning took it in to have them check it. So I'm driving a rental car while they hopefully figure out that they forgot to tweak something. They told me that a lot of the taxi vans in town have 400,000 miles on them with this maintenance. I really like this van and want to keep it a lot longer. I also found out that if the engine light is on, you should go to the dealer to have it checked.if it's blinking, it will just stop on you any minute. That's when it probably has to be towed. Nice to know!

I just ran some errands and am heading home soon to weave the rest of my warp. 

However, I think I'll stop first at Walmart to see if they have a pasta pot to steam these silk pieces...and where can I get newsprint, rolls of it, and ice cubes trays, white, not colored, and stretcher bars and pvc pipes, connectors and a cutter.....you get the idea!

Til next week, keep weaving!

Carol