Slow FASHION July 2021 with CAL PATCH, Jessica Marquez, & KRISTIN AXTMAN
Sunday afternoon, July 18th through Saturday late morning, July 24th
Medomak Retreat Center, Washington, Maine
$1,700
Please note this cost reflects the addition of a day (from previous years) to our retreat together.
A small group of just twenty-seven Makers will spend five full days in exploration of line, color, and stitch at a contemplative pace. Surrounded by the woods, on the edge of a lake, with the rustic beauty and charm of Maine as the backdrop. Small groups, individual pacing, natural inspiration-this will be a week for unwinding and exploring....
As an expansion from previous years, an additional day has been added to this year’s retreat. We’ll have even more time to unwind, connect, and stitch… We are also a smaller group in order to allow for social distancing and safety precautions. This year will have a slightly different form and shape due to the pandemic, but every effort will be made to continue the spirit of Slow Fashion while adhering to CDC safety protocols.
Would you like to slow down and spend some quality time with your stitching? Maine is a beautiful place to turn down the volume, shut off the email, leave the phone in your room, and spend some time with a needle and thread. This year three world class sewists and makers: Cal Patch; Jessica Marquez; and Kristin Axtman, will share their time, their stitches, their color, and their spirit with you for five days in Washington, Maine, come July.
Join Cal, Jessica, Kristin, Katherine, and I at the Medomak Retreat Center in Washington, ME where you can relax, unwind, and dive into your stitching practice. You will sleep in a modern yet rustic cabin, eat three meals a day with the community, and spend as much time as you like with color, needle, and thread. Each day will be spent with Cal, Jessica, or Kristin, learning their techniques and tips, and practicing new skills or sharpening old ones. The emphasis here is on settling into your Making practice and letting the rest of it float away....
~Cal is an integral part of our Slow Fashion retreats, having been a founding instructor. She joins us this year to reprieve her Boxy/Drapy top or tunic. “Sewing your own clothes is satisfying and practical. Drafting your own patterns goes one step further and puts the entire design process in your hands.” Cal will teach you how to draft a pattern for a simple woven top that can easily be customized in myriad ways. As a shorter, loose-fitting top, it’s a “Boxy Tee”, but make it longer, with a bit more ease, in a fabric with good drape like linen, and it’s a “Drapy Tunic”. This is a perfect intro to pattern-drafting if you’ve been wanting to dip your toe in the water, and the sewing couldn’t be simpler. This basic t-shirt shape makes a lovely “blank canvas” pattern to use as a foundation for all sorts of techniques: piecing, quilting, embroidering, dyeing, eco-printing… and of course you can combine and layer the treatments to create the most special garments.
~Jessica will share her prodigious skills in Visible Mending and Sashiko stitching. In her workshop you will learn artful and practical skills to mend, patch, repair, and embellish your clothing and textiles, inspired by time honored Japanese Sashiko techniques. You will learn about the history of Sashiko and see many inspiring examples of Sashiko patterns used for both embellishment and functional visible mending.
~Kristin joins us newly this year from her Brooklyn Haberdashery universe to show you how to hand stitch a garment. In her beginner-level class you will hand sew a shirt using a pattern from Emiko Takahashi. You will use hand stitches to sew and finish seams, attach bias binding, create darts, and add embellishments. These basic techniques will give you a foundation of skills that will easily transfer to sewing other garments by hand.
You will spend a day with each teacher, with plenty of time for inspirational wanderings. On the fourth day we MAY (!) have a small field trip to the coast (depending on virus safety protocols), and a fabulous local fabric store. Or if you prefer, you can go for a swim, take a hike, do some stitching, some reading, or whatever your heart desires. This year we are tacking on another day for play, rest, discovery, or whatever calls you...! We will have a clothing swap, so bring any and all wearable items that no longer sing to you, and watch them leave with another, while perhaps bringing something new and thoughtful into your closet. The swap nights are always tons of fun! We will also have an evening for Garment Stories. Bring a beloved item of clothing that has a story behind it. We will share our stories and our thoughts about the lives of our garments. This evening was so much fun last time Slow Fashion convened. So much emotion, so much history, culture, identity in our closets. Let’s share our stories.
The primary focus for the week will be on slowing down, taking time, connecting to your practice, the community, and your inner voice. Evenings will be open for more stitching, conversing, knitting, star gazing, cricket concerts, Loon appreciation, and anything else you might like to do in Maine in July.... And, likely, there will be a dance party, for any so inclined….
CAL PATCH
Cal has been a maker since she was a Girl Scout in the seventies. She sews, crochets, spins, embroiders, knits, prints, drafts patterns, dyes… hence the name of her label: Hodge Podge. Cal has been teaching textile arts for over 15 years, and loves showing people new skills. She designed clothes for several big names in the fashion industry before leaving to forge her own path as an independent artisan and create one-off handmade pieces. Cal owned a boutique in Manhattan and later opened one of the first indie craft schools in 2002. After seventeen years of designing clothes in New York City, she recently relocated to the Catskills, where she is becoming a crafty farmer. Her book on drafting sewing patterns, Design-It-Yourself Clothes, was published in 2009. Currently she teaches at various shops, studios and retreats around the country and sells her work at craft fairs and online in her Etsy shop. You can see what she's up to at calpatch.com.
Jessica Marquez
Jessica is a life long maker who found her way back to textiles while working on an MFA in Photography from Rochester Institute of Technology. After countless hours working digitally, retouching images and staring at a computer screen she longed for hands-on analog making. She taught herself embroidery and then never stopped stitching. In 2008 she started a creative handmade business, Miniature Rhino, named after a young cousin's imaginary friend, a dentist she called Dr. Rhino. Miniature Rhino became a symbol of creativity and imagination and seeks to inspire and teach hands-on skills through a line of embroidery kits, patterns, classes and books. She's taught through out the country, internationally and online through Craftsy classes in embroidery and photography. Her work has been featured in publications including, Grace Bonney's bestselling book, In the Company of Women, Real Simple, Bust, Country Living, and InStyle magazine. She's written two books Make and Mend (Ten Speed, 2018) and Stitched Gifts (Chronicle, 2012), and a regular contributor to online and print publications such as Mollie Makes and Design*Sponge.
KRISTIN AXTMAN
Kristin is the creative force behind Brooklyn Haberdashery, an online shop with tools and supplies for makers. She hails from a long line of do-it-yourselfers who inspired her with their sewing, mending, gardening, fixing, and general pioneer spirit. Kristin has continually made things--from the timber frame house she designed and built with her husband down to the annual handmade holiday cards.
For most of her professional life, she was an Organizational Development Consultant, using behavioral psychology to re-design organizations. Kristin’s zest for life experience has landed her working in positions varying from Head of School, to Deckhand, with a few stops in between as Sea Kayak Instructor, Book Editor, Prison Work Crew Supervisor, and Fresca Girl. She launched Brooklyn Haberdashery in 2016. When she is not playing with fabric, Kristin is eating her way through the world, combing flea markets, gardening, and renovating her brownstone with with her husband and teen in Brooklyn, New York.
If your time in Maine opens up even more pathways to creativity, our good friend, Katherine Ferrier will offer up her workshop, Making, Being, and Being Made, Contemplative Writing for Makers, again this year. Folks who are interested can sign up for this two hour workshop on site.
Katherine Ferrier is familiar to those who have spent any time at an AGOS event, but for those new to this forum, she is a poet, dancer, maker, teacher, curator, and community organizer. Her research grows out of a deep practice of paying poetic attention to the world, and lives in the intersecting communities of movers, makers, writers and activists. A self-taught quilter, she has improvisationally designed and constructed nearly 100 quilts, drawing on her studies, both formal and independent, of movement, poetics, painting, and architecture, among other forms. She is the Director of the Medomak Fiberarts Retreat in Washington, Maine, and has recently expanded her fluency as a maker by embracing felting, weaving, and natural dyeing. She regularly teaches and performs throughout the US and abroad, and believes in patchwork as a radical practice of being patient, saying yes, and making space for everyone at the table.
Registration includes lodging in a private cabin, all meals, and all instruction for six days. Due to pandemic restrictions and safety cautions everyone will have their own cabin. The cabins are rustic and spare, but modern and comfortable. Please do note that many of the cabins are in the woods, and require an uphill walk. If mobility is an issue for you, please contact me when you register. We can accommodate most dietary restrictions within reason, just alert us to your needs in advance.
A supply list will be sent out at least a month in advance of your arrival in Maine.
Otherwise, all you have to do is get yourself here, I'll take care of the rest. I will send out recommendations for what to wear and bring in advance. I send very detailed emails about how to get here, what to bring, how to prepare. Read them when they show up, most everything you could need will be in there…
The food at camp is fresh, simple, wholesome, and satisfying. Please notify me of food allergies, or if you are Vegetarian (specify if you do/do not eat dairy, eggs, fish, etc…) , but we suggest that unless you have a specific medical condition, you will find plenty to nourish you during your time at camp.
Medomak Retreat Center is in Washington, Maine, about 80 minutes from the Portland airport, 3 hours drive from Boston, 7 hours drive from NYC. Washington is only 30 minutes inland from Camden. The campus has 250 acres of blueberry fields and forest, with trails for hiking, tennis courts, and lakefront where canoes and kayaks are available. The cabins are clean and spare and perfectly comfortable. Medomak is going to great lengths to secure our safety as regards Covid. You can read here about all of their precautions. I suggest you familiarize yourself with their requirements before registering. You will be required to be fully vaccinated before coming to camp. No exceptions. We will require written proof of your vaccination before arriving.
In order to give you some time to check, and double check, your schedule, and confer with partners, bosses, children, parents, and pets, to make sure this will work for you, I delay the opening of registration. This year registration will open Monday May 3rd at 3:00pm EST. I will send an email to my newsletter group when registration opens. If you want to be notified when registration is open, you should sign up for the newsletter, spots have gone quickly in the past….. You will need to pay a non-refundable deposit to register, and then arrangements can be made for how to pay your balance.
[If a pandemic lockdown forces me to cancel the retreat, all deposits will be returned, otherwise the deposit will be non-refundable.]