In Between

I am writing to you from Haliburton, Ontario, where I am spending my weekend resting up from teaching a week-long workshop at the Haliburton School of Art + Design, and preparing for another workshop this coming week.

Getting my car packed for this trip was a HUGE challenge. Because one of the classes I would be teaching was a dyeing class, I had a lot of stuff to bring! In addition, I needed to bring bedding, towels, personal items, and food to stay in a cottage for two weeks. I just barely got everything in my car with a little room for me to sit.

No I don't want a larger vehicle. It will only mean that I will bring more stuff that I have to physically move. I'm trying to make things easier, not harder.

Naturally I'm loving being in the midst of nature. As in previous years, I've experienced many deer sightings

The woods emits light from the sun just as they always have. This is the view from my cottage window.

I arrived in Haliburton on the Friday before my classes began so that I would have a chance to take a one-day class on Encaustics and Photo Transfer. This is something completely new to me!

As you probably know, encaustics involves the use of melted wax and wax based pigments

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Unfortunately I brought photos for the photo transfer part of the class that were printed on an InkJet printer. Photo transfer requires that the photos be printed on a laser printer. I was only able to get black and white laser prints at class. I ended up not liking this piece very much so at the end of the class I just decided to play with the wax and colour. Moving them around with a heat gun is quite facinating and I would like to try this again.

This was probably the most successful transfer. It is from a photo I took of doors in Italy. However, I held the heat gun too long and burned out an area that is nearly white now.

This piece uses a photo transfer of shoes and sandals hanging on a fence at the beach. It is a photo I took on the coast of Massachusetts several years ago. I fiddled a lot with the photo transfer and lost parts of it. I'd like to try encaustics again, but without the photo transfer.

Last Sunday it took three hours to transport three carts of my teaching materials into the college 

and set up my classroom. 

The class was full with 14 students. I didn't think it would be possible to take more than that. There is so much going on in a dyeing class, and it is all so new to many students, that it is important I not spread myself too thin with a group too large. The next many photos are eye candy from the week. I will let the photos and colour speak for themselves. We covered low-water immersion dyeing, immersion dyeing, colourwheels, value runs, two-colour runs, parfaits, scrunching, shibori (folded, pleated, pole wrapped, bound, clamped, etc.), flour paste resist, soy wax batik, and painting with thickened dyes. But please scroll to the end of this post because I also have shared some wonderful landscape photos I took yesterday.

Saturday was an absolutely glorious summer day. I decided to drive to Fenelon Falls to check out an antique and collectibles store I like (called GR8 Finds). I continued on to Lindsay after that. On my way back, I came upon this wondrous site on Highway 35! It seems so idyllic and peaceful to me, and reminds me so much of the clouds, wheat fields, and plane trees that Vincent Van Gogh painted in Provence. I am glad I took my Canon DSLR camera with me because I've been lazy for the last year, taking too many of my photos on my cell phone because it is lighter to carry. Those photos are fine for blogging and Facebook, and in fact it is easier to just post straight from the cell phone camera to Facebook than it is to transfer a photo from the DSLR to my computer. This sight, and the photos of it make me very very happy ;-)

Look at the wonderful lines running through this field, and the amazing texture.

I'm signing off now and will post again after this week's workshop.