A Trip to North Carolina!

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to attend a class at the John C. Campbell Folk School in North Carolina!  A HUGE thank you to my friend Christy and her sister who gifted me the class!  All I had to do was get myself there!  I flew into Atlanta and rented a car and made my way to the school on a perfect spring day!  My home for the weekend was Orchard House, which sits atop a grassy knoll overlooking a lovely little valley.  How grateful I was to have time to explore a little bit before class began!  

Of course, a house called Orchard House must have an orchard!  It certainly did and underneath the trees were clumps of daffodils blooming!  All that spring beauty gladdened my heart enormously!  

While yellow is  

While yellow usually isn't my favorite color, it's growing on me, especially when it comes to daffodils!  Love their cheerful countenance in the spring! 

And then there were the bluebirds!  Perfect happiness!  

In the valley below, a little pond.  The closer I got to it, the louder the sound of spring peepers or pond frogs!  It's a sound I hadn't heard since I lived in Iowa for two years during nursing school!  

Everywhere I looked, there were beautiful violets in bloom!  One of my favorite flowers!  Just delightful! 

Such a lovely walk around the pond!  Orchard House sits just out of view at the top of the grassy hill!  

As I walked to class the first night, the daffodils were glowing in the late evening sunlight!  So beautiful!  

 

And at the building where our class was held, there were many clumps of hellebores!  I'd love to be able to grow these, but haven't had success yet!  What a treat to get to see these lovely specimens! 

After orientation and dinner, we got right to work!  The class I was in was on doing marbled papers.  I wasn't too sure I was going to produce anything worthwhile after this first night, but it sure was fun!  

The next morning, we got started immediately after breakfast.  Our instructor, Pat Thomas, was fabulous and made it easy (and fun!) to learn!  

My first true success was this paper!  In my favorite colors of course!  After a while, she told me she was going to take the green away from me!  

So I played with some other colors too!  In all, I created well over 20 sheets of paper throughout the weekend!  I'll hopefully add photos of a few others once I get home and can get them photographed.  Needless to say, I had so much fun and was so pleased with what I was able to accomplish!  

These are a few of the tools of the marbler's trade.  And a wooden skewer!   

The weather turned cold and our papers were freezing rather than drying, so we had to bring them inside to dry overnight.  This is the work of most of the class members.  We had several of these racks going!  

Though we started the weekend in spring, we backtracked to winter on Sunday!  It was chilly, but not miserable, at least to my Colorado blood!  

Sure was pretty while it lasted!  

Just a bit of fairytale world for a few hours Sunday morning!  By noon, it had all melted off and the trees were dripping wet clumps of icy water!  

To finish up the weekend, we had closing ceremonies, in which every class at the school (there were lots, ranging from Morris Dancing, to wood turning, to drawing, spinning, and making bird houses!) displayed their work.  This is the Marbling classes table.  I definitely think we had the most fun, and were certainly the most colorful!   Although I think the Italian Liquors class also had quite a good time!  

I'd definitely go again.  I'd highly recommend looking into it.  There were many couples there, groups of friends, and people attending on their own.  As I overheard one person say, "It's like camp for adults!"  It was every bit as much fun, in a truly gorgeous setting, and there are so many things being taught, that there simply isn't enough space to list them all here.  Truly, it was a magical weekend!