First Day

Its the end of my first day at Penland, and it's looking like its going to be a great 8 weeks. My new blog's name is a concatenation of the full name of the class I'm taking "Subversive Beadwork and Free Toy Surprise", with artist David Chatt.

The class was described in the catalog as "an unprecedented combination of beadwork, metalwork, flameworking, and bacon". It looks like we will indeed have some of each of the first three, with David bringing in a number of guest instructors for special topics, and some time in both the glass and metal studios here on campus. The bacon is apparently one of David's favorite offerings from the Penland kitchen. We had make your own BLT sandwiches today at lunch, just to prove David's point, I think. It was really good!

Class started leisurely this morning - there are 5 students in the class, and two are workstudy and had kitchen duty this morning. That was fine with me because I was moving a bit slowly due to the time change of 4 hours, between the time zones and daylight savings time! I had some time to finish organizing my space and to look at some of David's great samples before we got into things.

Our first official act of the morning as a class was to each find places around campus to scatter, place or draw with beads. They had to be outdoors, where they could "return to nature". But the real goal was to foster good will and have fun watching how other people reacted to the "found" beads. It was quite fun distributing the beads, and even more fun watching people's excitement at their discoveries.

Then we started into more direct work with some demos of right angle weave, and beading beads. I took a number of pictures throughout the day so that I could send them to Joe and post some here, but I made the mistake of downloading them on the Mac side of my machine, and deleting them from the camera. Unfortunately they are quite large, and photoshop is on the Windows side of my machine so I don't have a way to reduce them enough to post them. And I"m too tired right now to figure out a solution. But I do have pics!