Chad Alice Hagen is a hoot. Wildly creative, funny, and highly organized. But the class was too large for the amount of new material we needed to learn, but Chad had a great assistant in Edwina. On Monday we made felt and had aching arms because Chad’s method is to throw the felt hard on the table, 50-100 times. And that’s not easy. But she was using fine merino wool pre-felts from Australia. Expensive I thought but the results were thin fine felt, perfect for book covers.

On Monday we dyed, with Chad acting as the “dye-master” since no one else wanted the job. Among the resists we used were: hair clips of several sizes, wood blocks, pins, cookie cutter shapes, clothespins, elastics, metal rounds and squares and meshes of all kinds. The results were staggeringly gorgeous. Each clamped piece of felt went through three dye baths 45 minutes each, and for each we clamped differently. You cannot try for a particular shape or design. The process is fascinatingly random and unrepeatable. When we all saw the results we took Chad up on her offer to sell us two more pre-felts and she’d do three more dye pots, two Tuesday evening and one Wednesday afternoon. I’m so glad I did though I do wish I had not cut my felt pieces so small.

On Tuesday, with aching biceps from throwing felt for hours on Monday, we beaded and stitched our small book front and back covers. We glued the long quick wrap book cover to leather and put that under weights. In the future, I’d certainly bead that before gluing to the leather. She had beads and threads available. We always had the items we needed to create a beautiful finished roduct. Finishing the wrap book was fairly smooth. On Friday morning, very short since our class went from 9-11 AM, we learned five creative closures. Sure enough I cut my wrap book cover incorrectly but not badly enough to ruin it. I must have the model right in front of my eyes in order to do it correctly and not ruin a beautiful piece. I hope I can remedy that weakness as it occasionally costs me exquisite fabric/felt.

Thursday afternoon we walked through a four-needle Coptic binding with her and it came out exquisitely. I am thrilled and hope to practice again this weekend. We also learned or tried to a lovely fan stitch all around the edges of the small book. I’ll practice that this weekend as well. For the bookbinding we were each issued a small zippered pouch with clear plastic front. In it were rudimentary tools for book binding: small ruler, pencil, black sharpie, silver gel pen (very nice), cutting mat, cheap-o cutter, triangle, small squares of bead cloth, glue brush, awl. Nice little package. I’d need a larger pouch but that’s a great idea. We always had the correct tool at hand.