I just finished up the weekend teaching Inspired by Nature: Stitching the Landscape at Peters Valley Craft Center in Layton, NJ in the Delaware Water Gap National Park. Here I am on the road up Thunder Mountain to go see the Fibers Surface Design studios. Had to stop and check out the swamp on the way. It's a 1.5 mile drive up a gravel road to get to the studios, and you really need a car to get around the area. For the most part, though, I stayed near the main campus down the hill where my cottage, the weaving studio, and the dining hall were located.
So in this post I'll just shared the Inspired by Nature aspect. I took lots of photos of the landscape there. The view above is the meadow behind the Structural Fibers studio-- I like the bands of color and texture in this shot.
There was a stump behind the building covered in fungi with salamanders, ants, grasshoppers, and myriad crickets. I'm impressed with my focus trick as my camera wanted to switch focus to the background instead of the foreground.
There's a giant yarn ball on the lawn of the studio, with a sign in the vestibule requesting people add to it. So for our parting activity I had the students bring a piece of thread out, which we knotted into one long strand to wind around the ball.
This is the view out the front of the studio, and several of us felt strongly about the image, and included it in our projects. It was a wonderful stand of pine trees moving up a hill at the edge of a very still, algae-covered pond. At the edge of the pond was a table and adirondack chair, perfect for sitting and drawing the view, or would have been if it hadn't been such a wet start to the weekend!
In my next post I'll share the artwork my students produced.
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