Needle Felting with Stephanie Metz

Needle felted sample pieces using additive techniques. 

I was able to take a week long needle felting course with Stephanie Metz last month.  The course was at Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts.  The school was amazing!  There were lectures every night, there were opportunities to view the art happening in other classes, and the library was wonderful!  I didn't like the location of the school--it's in downtown Gatlinburg, TN.  Gatlinburg was a weird sort of blend of Las Vegas Strip and Frankemouth, MI touristy town.  It was awfully strange to me!

While at school, I finally caught the cold my family has passed around this summer.  (It probably didn't help my perspective on Gatlinburg any!)  I lost my voice on Wed. and spent Thursday and Friday going between classroom and the back seat of my van where I could rest.  It was not ideal.

Stephanie was a wonderful, supportive instructor.  There were fifteen students in her class and the range of experience was huge.  Some of the students had backgrounds in art, others (like me) had no formal training.  We spent the first two days felting and observing Stephanie's demos.  She would come around and discuss our work with us multiple times during the day.  I loved listening to some of her questions.  She would ask things like (I'm paraphrasing here) "Does it look like what you envisioned for the piece?",  "Are you comfortable with the way it looks?"  She would also provide direction and correction.  The most common correction was to use fewer needles.  As a class we had the tendency to use more needles than the size of our pieces merited!  Then Stephanie got sick (a stomach flu that her kids had been fighting and she had hoped to miss!) and was mostly out for a day and a bit.  The last day we spent the morning doing critiques as a group and the rest of the day discussing photographing our work.

I came home and was out for a solid week with this cold, and am still fighting the last little bit of it after yet another week  When I sit down to rest, I pull out my felting needles and work.  I've done some flat felting/adding dimension pieces, a few heads, and a "bowl" that looks a lot like an upsidedown tri-cornered hat.  I've been perusing web sites looking at photography set-ups and contemplating where I could set up a mini photo station here at home.