What I Did on My Spring Break

I took Mar­jorie Langston’s glass bead­mak­ing classes at the John C. Camp­bell Folk School in west­ern North Car­olina. Yes, I could have stayed home all week and torched, but I would have had a mul­ti­tude of dis­trac­tions and no feed­back. This way I learned new tech­niques, played with new ideas, fed off of my class­mates’ work, and had a won­der­ful time (except for miss­ing DH ter­ri­bly, though we did talk twice a day). My class­mates were, for the most part, won­der­ful women and we really did spend the week feel­ing family-ish.
Mar­jorie was so con­cerned that I would be bored, but going back to the begin­ning and doing “baby exer­cises” was very good for me. I knew I had not mas­tered quite a lot of rather basic tech­nique, and this class gave me a chance to work on those. Tech­niques like dots — I had NO con­trol over dots, and no real idea of what to do with them, on Mon­day. By Thurs­day I was much more com­fort­able with them, and far more aware of how crit­i­cal a design ele­ment they are. I still need a lot of prac­tice with place­ment and size, but I know what to do now.

We started the week with basic round beads, grav­ity swirls, dots, dots, more dots, poked dots, raked dots, stacked dots, raised dots, melted-in dots, twisted dots, dots to form flowers,…you get the pic­ture. Then there was pulling stringer (which I was already pretty good at) and twisties (which I still suck at — need PPP!). Mar­jorie had said she didn’t like encas­ing, wasn’t good at it, and couldn’t really teach me about it, but she fibbed — she did demo it, and with a cou­ple of demos I at least was get­ting the idea. Even­tu­ally we got into bar­rel beads (I get it now!), squashed beads, and even­tu­ally the really cool stuff…organic beads! Foils and frits and reac­tions, oh my!

By Fri­day, though I didn’t want to admit it, I did need a lit­tle break. That after­noon we were offi­cially between classes and couldn’t con­tinue work­ing even if we were stay­ing for the week­end, so I hopped in my car and took advan­tage of the beau­ti­ful after­noon, dri­ving over the moun­tains to Otto, where I found Fire and Light Glass Stu­dio. Lenzy, the stained glass teacher, had told us that the owner had just moved up from Duluth and car­ried glass rods as well as stained glass sheets. The thought of being able to get my hands on some Bulls­eye rods to try out was too tempt­ing to pass up. As it turned out, they were an absolute steal, so I brought back two pounds to share with Mar­jorie and my class­mate Candy.

Fri­day night and Sat­ur­day we really stretched our bead-making wings out, with large-hole beads, hol­low beads, and color reac­tions. After Mar­jorie warned us to not expect our first few hol­lows to work, I was tick­led to bits when mine poofed and rounded right out. TOO cool!

Ellen’s sis­ter Nina drove over Sat­ur­day after­noon from her home in Sylva to have din­ner and visit. As we were all sit­ting at the table for a few min­utes before return­ing to the stu­dio, it all of a sud­den hit me just who Nina was — Nina Bagley, yes, THE Nina Bagley, jew­eler and altered artist extra­or­di­naire! I knew the ear­rings she and Ellen were wear­ing looked famil­iar; I just hadn’t made the con­nec­tion until then. So for me, that was a lit­tle lag­i­nappe to top every­thing else off.

Though it was a lovely week, by Sun­day I was quite ready to leave. This may have been the first time I ever left the Folk School before I HAD to — I didn’t even stay around for lunch. I was ready to get back home, to my hus­band, my cats, and my own space.