Slow Stitching August 2021 with Denyse Schmidt, Kitty Wilkin & Kristin Arzt
Sunday afternoon, August 1st through Saturday late morning, August 7th
Medomak Retreat Center, Washington, Maine
Slow Stitching is now sold out. Thank you for all your eager enthusiastic interest! It does my heart so much good! I will start a waitlist for any interested parties. In the past there has been some movement in that area. Send me an email if you would like to be added to that list.
$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 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… Our numbers are smaller to allow for enough space to socially distance and keep everyone safe. 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 Stitching 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: Denyse Schmidt; Kitty Wilkin; and Kristin Arzt, will share their time, their stitches, their color, and their spirit with you for five full days in Washington, Maine, come August.
Join Denyse, Kitty, Kristin, Katherine, and I at the Medomak Retreat Center in Washington, Maine 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 Denyse, Kitty, and 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....
~Denyse will offer up a hands-on day of sewing and fun, as she shows you how to improvise her A Different Stripe quilt pattern. The motto for this class is “sew more, think less” – learn to trust your intuition, build your creative confidence, and streamline your patchwork process! You’ll easily produce enough blocks for a crib or throw-size quilt, and go home armed with momentum and inspiration to apply to all your patchwork projects.
~Kitty is joining us to share the joy of English Paper Piecing, or EPP. Her workshop is suitable for all skill levels, you will learn all about English Paper Piecing using Kitty’s Pollen Pillow pattern, a bite sized taste of her larger Pollinate Quilt. The class will cover everything you need to know to get you started on your Pollen Pillow, including the EPP basics for basting and stitching, as well as how to dive into fussy cutting to play with finding a variety of pattern repeats in one fabric. The Pollen Pillow uses an exploration of meticulous cutting (aka fussy cutting) to make the most of one primary fabric to create a cohesively graphic punch. Join Kitty as you explore this corner of the world of slow stitching, mindfully planning, cutting, and piecing the Pollen pillow.
~ Kristin will share how to make a rainbow with natural dyes! You will cover the fundamentals of natural fibers, mordanting (fabric pre-treatment), and dyeing in immersion dye baths. With Kristin you will work with red madder root, yellow weld, and natural indigo to create a full spectrum of color on cloth, while also touching on the chemistry of dyeing with plants. You will make beautiful patterns on cloth using itajime and kanoko shibori resist techniques.
You will spend a day with each teacher, with plenty of time for inspirational wanderings. On the fourth day we MAY (if safety precautions allow) have a small field trip to the coast, 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. And then there is one more day, this year, to do whatever floats your boat…! The fabric swap has proven both fun and useful in the past, so it’s returning. In the interests of both consuming less and moving fabric through the community, outside of the world of commerce. The primary focus will be on slowing down, taking time, connecting to your practice, the community, and your inner voice. Evenings will be open for more stitching, knitting, conversing, star gazing, cricket concerts, Loon appreciation, and anything else you might like to do in Maine in August.... Oh….and probably a dance party!
DENYSE SCHMIDT
Denyse Schmidt has been making quilts as a commercial venture since 1996.
A former graphic designer and graduate of Rhode Island School of Design, Denyse Schmidt has helped to change the way we think about quilts. Intrigued by the rich historical nature of quilts and inspired by beauty born of necessity, Denyse adds her distinctive aesthetic sensibility – clean, spare lines, rich color and bold graphics – to this rich art form. Though firmly rooted in the techniques of American quilt-making, Denyse Schmidt is renowned for her fresh, offbeat approach to design and color and has won acclaim from the worlds of art, design and craft. As author of Denyse Schmidt Quilts (Chronicle Books, 2005) and Modern Quilts, Traditional Inspiration (STC Craft, 2012), fabric designer for FreeSpirit , and teacher of a series of popular improvisational patchwork piecing workshops – Denyse continues to inspire with her witty take on tradition. Denyse’s studio is located in a historic factory building in Bridgeport, Connecticut.
Kitty Wilkin
Kitty is a stay at home mom of three littles, wife, sewist of quilts and other beautiful things, runner, gardener, photographer, and all in all lover of life. With three little kids, her only sewing time was after bedtime. Thus the Night Quilter was born. Between designing quilt patterns, sewing with gorgeous fabrics, capturing the wonder of the world in photographs, and running around with her three little kids, Kitty’s busy making the world a more beautiful place. Find her online at NightQuilter.com or @nightquilter
Kristin Arzt
Kristin Arzt is a natural dyer, educator, gardener and designer based in Western North Carolina. Kristin believes that by exploring the collision of textiles, plants and sustainability, she can help make the study of natural dyes accessible to everyone through education and enthusiasm. When not teaching in-person and online courses, Kristin grows her own seasonal dye plants in her home garden for closer experimentation; often sharing seeds and sprouts with students. After becoming enamored with the world of natural color, Kristin has taken years to expand her toolkit, traveling far and wide to learn directly with specialized teachers in the dye community. She has studied with Kathy Hattori, Catharine Ellis, Joy Boutrup, and many more amazing instructors. By day, she works at The Crucible, a non-profit organization dedicated to making arts education accessible to local youth and the surrounding community.
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. If you are interested you can sign-up for this 2 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. 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. If you are coming with a friend and would like to bunk together, just let me know when you register and I'll put you in the same cabin. (There will be pandemic requirements involved in sharing a cabin, please let me know if this is of interest to you and I will share the requirements.) Generally we will be in private cabins to minimize any potential virus contamination, but if you want to share with a friend we will make an exception. We can also 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…
It is unlikely we will have our massage therapist this year, unless I hear from enough of you that you want her to come back, and I can square it with the Medomak people…
The food at camp is 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 in advance of 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 I need to cancel the retreat due to the pandemic the deposit will be fully refundable. Otherwise it is non-refundable.]