Barbara Schutzgruber – Storyteller & Weaver

Day 4 – Thursday

With fresh eyes I continued working on the new hexagon project. As was true earlier in the week, this was not smooth sailing and definitely gave my braincells a workout! I spent a LOT of time putting in rows… then taking them out as I could not yet get the sequence right. The hard part is keeping track of each of the 6 sides when adding a cord to each after a 4 row sequence. Even Julie struggled a bit trying to decipher where I would go wrong. After much muttering and gnashing of teeth, I decided to undo everything and go back to the starting row.

And yes…it was in the first set of rows I had reversed something = ARGH! The good news is at long last the sequence was making sense and now I could continue on with the pattern!

After taking a break for dinner and a walk through the Silent Auction, I headed back to the classroom to completed my 5″ diameter ‘sunflower’!

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Day 5 – Friday

For the last full day of class I chose to learn how to make roses for a bracelet. Again…slow going throughout the morning but by lunch break I had finished a dozen roses!

And by the end of the afternoon I was very glad that I have a small wrist as 3 dozen roses would complete the bracelet.

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The Trade Fair doors opened late afternoon with fewer venders choosing to come than in the past due to Covid. Here I saw neat gadgets and found a small bead in the shape of sheep for the latch on my bracelet!

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In the evening it was back to the classroom to twisted cords for Saturday morning and to bring home. One of them was quite interesting as the twist was not consistent due to uneven tension on the cord as I was plying! I made a sample card for the the yarns I used during the week to reference and bought a Kipu cord winder so I can continue experimenting with Ply Split Braiding at home.

Day 6 – Saturday

With our last 1/2 day of instruction I made some smaller roses, started a tubular rose, tried 4ply split darning.

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The afternoon was the End of Summer School Walk-About to view the Tutor’s Exhibition, the Certificate of Achievement Exhibition, and see what the other 14 courses have been doing during the week.

The final event of summer school is the Gala Dinner featuring words from Jennie Parry (Association President) and Christina Chisholm (Summer School Convenor who lead a fabulous team working tirelessly to organize this year’s summer school during one of most challenging times ever), the awarding of the Certificates of Achievement, a good natured quiz to see how well we all read The Journal (the Association’s quarterly magazine), and I had the honor of closing the evening with one last set of stories on the eve of the full moon.

The 2021 AGWSD Summer School
was one of my most memorable fiber adventures!
After 17 months of only Zoom gatherings this was a much needed trip to refuel.
Here I feasted at the banquet table of creativity and learning
and I drank deeply from the well of camaraderie and friendship.