Most of our classes do a great job of accommodating different skill levels- accessible enough for beginners, but also able to meet the needs of more experienced students. But each year, a few weeks in January are set aside specifically for advanced students. These classes give students the opportunity to intensively work with top instructors and maybe explore a different aspect of their craft.

It’s a treat to see (and hear and taste!) the work that’s produced during Advanced Weeks. Some of the classes included Bowie Knives with Jim Batson and Chuck Patrick, Artisan Bread Baking with Patryk Battle, Three-dimensional Copper Enameling with Sean Alton, Woodworking: Four-drawer Dresser with Gary Pichon, Advanced Hammered Dulcimer with Ken Kolodner, and Spinning Lavish Luxury Yarns with Patsy Zawistoski.

View more photos of Things We Make on Flickr.

Internediate to Advanced Chip Carving with Wayne Barton

Seamless, Nuno-felted Jacket with Linda Veilleux

We rock and ROLLED all week in Linda Veilleux’s Seamless, Nuno-felted Jacket class. Laying out wool for an entire long sleeved seamless coat that includes 45% shrinkage is no simple task, even for a short person like me. But thanks to our talented and patient teacher, we all are going home with finished coats – that FIT. She made the calculations easy with her computer program for the math impaired, and failed to notice our figure faults when taking our measurements. We shingled out pounds of wool onto multiple yards of silk then applied the magic ingredients, hot water, soap and elbow grease, lots of elbow grease.

Learn for yourself how much fun Nuno-felting is! Geri Forkner will be teaching What’s New with Nuno: New Directions in Felting, April 29- May 5.

Enjoy photos of the process of this week’s class in Nuno-felting:

Laying out the full sized pattern

Laying out silk fabric

Rolling!

Fulling

Modeling the finished jacket

This gives you an idea of the shrinkage!

Well, as many of you know, there is always something new in the works here at the School.  This past week, I visited the Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta to help install a Folk School exhibit featuring work from our resident artists, instructors and students.  This is a great honor for the School and a wonderful opportunity to promote our unique philosophies in noncompetitive learning and the work of our talented artists. The installation will run the entire month of January and will culminate with our first off-site auction, the Atlanta Fine Craft and Art Auction.  This auction is free to the public and will be held at the Woodruff Arts Center on Saturday, February 4, 2012 from 5:00 – 8:00 p.m.

The Coca-Cola exhibit is not open for public viewing but you can see several installation shots here.  I hope that you will be able to join us for the auction on the 4^th. Click here to see a full listing and photos of all the items that will be available at the auction.  I can’t think of anything more fun than getting a dose of the Folk School in the big city.  Someone could write a fable…

Last week we ended 2011 with the celebration of music and dance in Winter Dance Week. Participants learned a variety of dances like Scandinavian, English Country, Morris, Rapper Sword, contra and square dances- with breaks for group singing and jamming. The week culminated in the annual New Year’s Eve bash, where some of the classes got to perform what they’ve learned in just a week.

The Rapper Sword class practices impossible looking figures in their sets.

We look forward to students returning this weekend for the first classes of 2012! Students will jump right in for a weekend immersion in painting, felting, dyeing, blacksmithing, fiddle playing, woodcarving, and more. Our new catalog, which covers all of 2012, will be mailing mid-January. Registration for these additional classes will  be open January 17. Come be creative with us in 2012!

Our 2012 catalog will reach your mailbox by mid-January. The cover features work by photography instructor, Don McGowan, "Sunrise Over the Meadow- Orchard House."

]]> http://blog.folkschool.org/2012/01/03/have-a-happy-and-creative-2012/feed/ 1 http://blog.folkschool.org/2011/12/15/celebrating-our-elders/ http://blog.folkschool.org/2011/12/15/celebrating-our-elders/#comments Thu, 15 Dec 2011 21:57:34 +0000 Anna Shearouse, Marketing Assistant http://blog.folkschool.org/?p=4820

This afternoon, many of our older citizens gathered in the Olive Dame Campbell Dining Hall for the annual Old Folks Party. They celebrated the holidays, visited with each other, shared stories and memories, and enjoyed music, games, and a delicious meal. For many of them, their parents or grandparents were responsible in part for the Folk School being located in Brasstown. When the school started in 1925, hundreds of local residents pledged their support through physical labor, teams of mules, money, and even land donations. Many of the skills we teach at the Folk School today were passed down through these generations, often grandparents teaching children weaving, wood carving, or chair making.

The Old Folks Party is a tradition that goes back to the beginning of the Folk School. While our old folks this afternoon reminisced about folk dancing they did in Keith House as kids, party attendees in 1926 might have shared childhood memories of the Civil War in this area.

Old Folks Party, 1926, Log Museum at the Folk School

Enjoying a feast at the Old Folks Party, 1926

Playing bingo and sharing a meal at the Old Folks Party, 2011

The Community Room at Dedication Day, September 3, 1927.

Red sourwood trees framing the native stone fireplace and handmade, split-bottomed chairs witnessed Dedication Day for our Community Room of Keith House in 1927. This simple yet beautiful room became the cornerstone of the Folk School, and still proves to be the beating heart of our community. Dances, morningsong, concerts, readings, auctions, parties… something is going on in this room every day, and has been for 85 years.

Do you have a special memory or story about the Community Room?

Bob Dalsemer calling a dance during a New Year's Eve celebration

Over 600 instructors come to the Folk School each year to share invaluable gifts of knowledge, specific skills, and techniques with students. We are very fortunate to have Bob Dalsemer on our staff, who is being awarded the 2011 Lifetime Contribution Award from Country Dance and Song Society. Bob has been our Music & Dance Coordinator at the Folk School for 20 years and is an indispensable source of knowledge for music and dance students.

A dance caller and musician for over 40 years, Bob’s distinguished contributions to the world of folk dance and music include co-founding the Baltimore Folk Music Society, serving as Country Dance and Song Society president from 1990-1996, authoring West Virginia Square Dances, and calling and teaching dances nationally and internationally. Dalsemer is a well-known caller of traditional American contra, square, and circle dances and has composed many original dances. Also a talented musician, Dalsemer deftly plays accordion, fiddle, guitar, and mandolin. He is part of the band for the Folk School Morris and Garland Dancers, and a member of the Dog Branch Cats band.

A dance and awards ceremony will be held December 10 at 7:30 PM at the Keith House.

The cast of color has changed greatly from earlier this month, from the hillsides around us which showed mostly the deeper russet reds and burnt oranges.  A few individual trees around the Folk School campus still glowed with vibrant oranges and yellows.  In this glorious fall, those who were here to study and play were surrounded by landscape colors changing and twirling to the ground every day. Work-study students prepared the garden for wintering over. November brought the mists again when the rains came. Patches of sunlight on the mountainsides revealed soft grays topped with pale burnished golds polished by the sun.

Sunflowers hang their heads in the garden in late fall. Photo by Emily Buehler.

Then by mid-November during “Recycle It” Week, the garden had a full selection of fall greens – turnips, Chinese, and mustard, for the finest in seasonal fare.  This of course was how our ancestors ate before the advent of grocery store chains and transfer trucks! A traditional part of Appalachian culture has been the trait of resourcefulness. Working not only with what nature provided, but also with the materials close by and at hand.  Mountain people were always living this way – long before anybody had invented the word “recycle”.

It was in this spirit that the blacksmiths in Lyle Wheeler’s Bring Out Your Inner Ironmonger class searched for cast off metal items from other studios and the Maintenance Department.  The nearby flea market also provided some useful broken gadgets and tools as well. Don’t even think about going to the hardware store, because in this class you make some of your own tools, too! So with more than enough metal and ideas for a week, the students began with the number one blacksmithing basic:  how to build and maintain a forge fire.

The Blacksmithing Shop is fully equipped, even with un-everyday things like an Electrode Stabilizing Oven and three different kinds of welders.  Depending on your fancy, of welding steel-to-steel or cast metal to steel. The fascinating thing I never understood before is that metal, under certain conditions, can actually move like potter’s clay. Lyle demonstrates the basics of hammering out a simple leaf shape with a stem. Flattening and moving the shape with heat and various tools, an iron hammered leaf appears!  Once again, we see that it’s all about knowing how to use the tools you’ve got!  And that is how a lawnmower blade turns into a yard turkey and a fly press turns marks into a key holder or candlestick.
When you suspend your disbelief and let your creativity overflow ordinary boundaries, like children do, you too will see iron move like clay and broken objects reappear as Art!

If you’ve been to the Folk School, you probably understand what people are talking about when they describe their time here as a transformative, life altering, maybe even a magical experience. For some folks, it has to do with delving deeper into their creativity (or discovering it!) For others, the sense of community is just what they needed for personal and spiritual growth.

Instead of trying to tell your friends and family what you love about the Folk School, why not let them discover their own reasons! Gift certificates are available (year round!) at our Craft Shop and online. They can be purchased in any amount, and can be applied toward class tuition, lodging, meals, or Craft Shop goodies.

Rainbow over the Blacksmith Shop, November 23

With the holiday season comes the message of “giving,” so from now through December, we’ll be blogging about the idea of Simple Gifts. Many classes we teach are rooted in a simpler time, when skills like weaving, blacksmithing, planting your garden, and bringing it to the table were part of daily life. The community that is felt here is based on people learning, making, and doing things together, sharing stories, and walking to Morningsong, coffee mugs in hand.

With Thanksgiving upon us, we’d like to give thanks for gifts big and small, and for people in the past, present, and future who help make this Folk School the grand place that it is. Thanks to all our students, instructors, donors, Board of Directors, staff, volunteers, and community friends!