A couple weeks ago, I was excited to teach my first dye workshop in a couple years. Since I opened the studio in 2008, I had held a few dye workshops in our space, but as we got busier with more and more production dyeing, it just wasn’t feasible to have students in the very crowded studio. So I’m thrilled that I get to teach at Place des Arts (PdA) now, a place that is beloved to me and where I learned so much as a fledgling fibre arts enthusiast.
The dye workshop at PdA sold out pretty quickly and there was a wait list, so I was worried that we would have trouble squeezing into the small fibre arts studio. In the end, it was perfectly cozy. I had the class organize themselves into three groups to work on the different dye techniques we covered: immersion dyeing, overdyeing, hot pour dyeing, and finally handpainting skeins.
What I love seeing is when students aren’t scared to try something … they go ahead and try something that’s a little scary and then go back and analyze the results. “Why did it turn out this way?” and “What would I do differently next time?”
This little teaching teaser has been fun for me… and I’ll be teaching dyeing again in a couple weeks at the Knit Social Summer Retreat Yarn Camp and then again at Place des Arts in the fall, as part of the ongoing Spinning & Dyeing class. I was sort of busy running around the workshop, cleaning dye off the counters with Vim and checking on the steamer, so I didn’t get many good photos (there are a handful here on Flickr). You’ll have to check out Jane Richmond’s gorgeous blog post about the dye class for more.
