A fantastic private landscape class!

I am going to jump ahead in my posts. I started a post about my week in Wiawaka with Polly Stirling and Sylvia Watt but I want to wait until I finish one of the pieces I started there....it will be finished soon though. While it is still fresh in my mind I want write about the best class I have taught to date. Back in February I received an email from Teresa, a woman in Indiana, who was interested in taking a landscape workshop with me. She and her friend Cathy, who lives in Florida, sometimes travel together to take workshops. (It still is hard for me to believe that people are interested enough to learn from me that they will go through the trouble and expense to come from far away). Since I am really bad about scheduling classes that I could teach here I told her that if we came up with a date I would announce it to my mailing list of people interested in taking classes to see if we get enough people to hold the class. The other option was for them to take a private lesson. They opted to do a private lesson and I am so glad they did. What fun it was to teach to women who have been friends for so long! And the funny thing was that I felt like I had known them for a long time as well. I tend to be a teaser, joking with those I feel will understand that I am kidding. Usually I can find someone in a class who understands that kind of humor. I think some of that kidding comes from having siblings who picked on each other but all in fun. Well, BOTH these women were the same way and the jibes went round and round each of us taking and giving as good as we got. It was so much fun. That is not to say that the two days was just spent joking around. I gave my regular lesson about how to render a landscape, but we also talked about art in general, and many other felting techniques as well.
The other thing that made the class so enjoyable was that these women, who quilt more than felt, had already had lessons in rendering realistic images with fabrics. In larger classes there is more variation in the amount of experience with the process of felting and art education, and artistic tastes. I want to guide my students toward creating their own vision not what I think the image should look like, so teaching is really easy when we all share the same aesthetics.

Here are some photos of the pieces as they were being laid out.

 

Once the pieces were laid out we wet felted them. Here is what they looked like at the end of day one.

On day two we added detail and more texture with a felting needle. Here is what the pieces looked like at the end of class.

And here is a photo of my two new friends, both quite happy with their work, as they should be.

And an extra bit of happiness for me came when Teresa purchased one of my small nuno felted landscapes.

Thank you Teresa, especially for making this class happen!