Second day at Penland--Tuesday, August 17

Second day... and it feels almost like the second week! How can so much be packed into each day? This is what it feels like to be in an intense 24-7 class situation. I both love it and find it very challenging. I continue to think of the "before lunch" time as a different day than the "after lunch time" and now, already, the "after-dinner evening event" time is seeming to be a THIRD day. So I guess my sense of time here seems to be telling me that each day spent in this situation contains at least enough creative experience to fill THREE "normal" days in the real world.

Here are a few photos from this seeming "several day-day" here at Penland in my class... and at the end are links to the instructors who showed amazing slides tonight... and I'm sorry not to be able to have links right now to their studio assistants whose work was also amazing.

These photos are not in any chronological order except that they were done today.

Andrea works after the slide show.

Audrey's piece at the end of the day.

Barbara's weaving tonight. She showed me a few of her earlier tapestries today--amazing pieces!

Joan is working on curves with a circle to end the sampling. She sewed a cartoon traced on mylar onto the back of her warp threads today and began the trip up this ribbon-like shape.

Joan's cartoon, yarn snippets as samples, her scissors at the yarn table and a few balls of yarn I brought from which most students are selecting colors. The yarns I use in my own work is what I have here... Vevgarn from Norsk Fjord Fiber and a 20/2 worsted wool from Fine Fiber Press (Kathe Todd-Hooker's business). Both wools are from Norway. Students also had the option of bringing and using their own yarns or buying from the Penland supply in the weaving studio.

Karen's piece underway. She has never woven in anyway before but is quite creative.

Class hours are flexible here; all studios are open 24 hours during the sessions (except for hot glass, I think). Normally, everyone works together as a team made up of instructor/studio assistant/students between 9-ish and 5-ish (lunch time for an hour in between), and then have evening hours depending upon evening events that have campus-wide invitations (like the instructor/studio assistant slide shows almost ever evening).

For instance, this afternoon there was an opening of this session's instructors' exhibit in the Penland Gallery at 4:30 p.m. Here Meredith and I are standing in front of my tapestry in that exhibit--

Following that exhibit opening, there was an open house at Cynthia Bringle's studio just down the hill from Horner Hall where the gallery is located. Here's Edwina Bringle (Cynthia's sister) and Barbara, one of the students from my class whose also studied with Edwina.

First thing this morning was a demo of the cutting off of a finished piece when Meredith Dahle, my studio assistant, cut off. She'd woven it to have a shaped effect and so was describing how she'd planned that before she cut off.

After cutting the piece off the loom she pulled the warps to make the piece shaped. That's what's happening here.

Her shaped piece after pulling the warps looks like this before the complete finishing.

Everybody's working hard all day long and into the evenings! Great group of students.