My friend, Jenny, is taking a bit of time off from her career to regroup and think about what comes next for her. She is an educator, but also an artist and explorer of visual horizons. I invited her to come to a retreat at our house and to choose a workshop for playing together. She chose card-making and I dragged out materials that had lain around the shanty for years, unused though beloved. We both had the idea that we would make a birthday card edition to use over the next year.
We worked over the span of three days, one of them rainy when we didn't even set foot outside. Jenny was at one end of the table and I was at the other, with all the materials piled between us. There were nature samples (pressed flowers, leaves and ferns), rubber stamps and stamp pads in a few colors, hand-painted fabric swatches, paint samples from Home Depot. Mixing and matching, gluing and stamping, we worked happily while conversing about life.
In the end, we were astonished that we BOTH had exactly 21 cards!
In 1968 I attended
Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. In the weaving studio, I heard a woman say that crafts were just the background for her, while she accomplished her main goal of getting to know other women. That revelation has proved true for me to this day, these 43 years later.
We worked over the span of three days, one of them rainy when we didn't even set foot outside. Jenny was at one end of the table and I was at the other, with all the materials piled between us. There were nature samples (pressed flowers, leaves and ferns), rubber stamps and stamp pads in a few colors, hand-painted fabric swatches, paint samples from Home Depot. Mixing and matching, gluing and stamping, we worked happily while conversing about life.
In the end, we were astonished that we BOTH had exactly 21 cards! 
In 1968 I attended Haystack Mountain School of Crafts. In the weaving studio, I heard a woman say that crafts were just the background for her, while she accomplished her main goal of getting to know other women. That revelation has proved true for me to this day, these 43 years later.
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