Landscape Class at Luckystone Studio in Glens Falls, NY

Teaching my class at Robin Blakney-Carlson's Luckystone Studio was just as wonderful as I thought it would be. I already knew many of the students, in fact 3 were repeating the class, and Robin is such an easy person to work with. I stayed at Robin's lovely home along with her sister Susan and friends Cher  and June. It is so much fun to relax after class with friends who are also felters. As Robin said wool, wine, and wonderful women made the weekend great. And Robin's studio was a great space to work in. There was plenty of wall space to hang my example pieces. This was the first time I have seen all these unfinished pieces hanging up together...I makes me want to finish some of them.

As usual I have lots of photos of the students work. I use my camera as a tool in class to help students to really 'see' the image in the felt. It helps by making the three dimensional object into one with only two dimensions and really aids in seeing values when I change it to black and white. In my classes I have two main goals. One is to get them to really SEE and the other is for them to have FUN! It is not a project class and most of the pieces are not finished when folks go home but I hope they have the knowledge to continue on their own. I also give them ideas of how I would proceed with the piece. I think one of the biggest challenges for an art teacher is to guide the students to achieving their own vision and imposing mine, especially when our aesthetics may be so different. I was lucky with this class in that I knew some of the students well enough to know their color sense. Here are the pieces, first as it looked at the end of the first day after the wet felting, and then as it looked at the end of the second day after needle felting. I hope that some of the students will send photos of the completed works later.

This is Cher's

Donna's

Diane's

 Stacy's...(I had planned on using the same photo as a reference but her piece came out so well I may not).

Robin's

June's

June got my vote for best use of yarns...I loved the look of this boucle...

and she twisted two yarns with roving to make the trees.

This is Susan's piece.

And last but not least Sonjia's

Now I am wanting to get in the studio and make a new one myself...although I really should finish at least one of the old ones first. Maybe.